Lensbaby Obsession and the What-a-SAW (168/365/2023)

by The Philosophical Fish

This is probably less than half of my collection…..it’s a bit of a problem….and when I went to Portland in December for a fish culture conference….I couldn’t get out of town with less than a few more since that’s their home base. They are just such interesting lenses to play with and the results are so out of the ordinary.

When you slip a lens baby on the camera, you are not going to get tack-sharp crisp photos. Instead you are going to get ethereal visions, blurry edges, soft focus on the edge or across everything, weird points of light….or any number of other effects.

And that’s what makes them so fun to use.

The bottom two photos ….. I’m still sick, but I think…maybe…hopefully…finally on the mend. Only a few should crushing fits of whooping-cough-equivalency today. So maybe seeing the other side. So, since I’m still not fit for public exposure, it was a day in the yard…doing some additional guerrilla gardening aka pruning. The yews are always taking over the side of the yard and, as much as I’d like to take them completely out, they do give us privacy. And no matter how brutal one is to them while pruning, unlike cedars, they fill right back in the next season with brightly coloured new growth.

I started with pruning shears, moved up to the big pruners, and eventually knew I needed a saw.

So, out comes the What-a-SAW.

What exactly is the “What-a-SAW” you ask? (or maybe you didn’t but I’m going to tell you anyway!)

The “What-a-SAW” is a tool that Dad picked up, somewhere, at some point in history and, per usual, bought three or four because they were either a great deal and/or they were a future gift for three or four people.

I vaguely recall receiving it and thinking “say wha????“…because at the time we lived in a condo…why exactly did we need a saw that had three different blades that could be switched?

Yet it came in handy once or twice there.

That was 30+ years ago.

I can’t even begin to explain how useful this folding three blade saw has been in the decades since.

Last year a tree fell on our neighbour’s roof. It lay across his driveway and out came the What-a-SAW and I made short work of the branches that were blocking his access to the front door. It really is a pretty amazing thing.

My brother was here the other year and we brought it out for some need…he looked at it and laughed…he also still has his and commented on how much he still liked it.

Dad bought a lot of things that made us cock our heads sideways….but he nailed it with this one.

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