I've been doing a lot of street photography lately on 35mm film. It's mostly because I recently scored a lens at a the thrift store that I've been wanting for quite a while but have never found a copy at a price I'm willing to pay.

It's an old Minolta manual focus 58mm f/1.4 which I managed to snag for a whopping three dollars. Go me!! I mean really, even if the lens totally sucked I still spent less money than I usually throw down on coffee nearly every single day.

It's kind of an odd focal length, being slightly telephoto but more or less "normal". I'm sort of digging it more and more as I get through a few rolls of film. It allows for really tight compositions while still maintaining enough of a field of view to get a lot of information in the frame. Plus, being an f/1.4 I can isolate my subject pretty well with depth of field. It's sharp, but not too sharp, and the contrast is a bit on the high end, which I tend to like. So yeah, all-in-all, not a bad lens for three bucks and I think I'll be using it quite a bit in the future.

I'll have to test it out with color film but already I can tell it is really suited to the gritty black and white aesthetic. I find this to be true of a lot of lenses from the golden age of manual focus SLRs.

Anyway, I'll get back to your regularly scheduled nudes and portraits in a moment but I figured a bit of an interlude never hurt anyone.