Greater Urban Attack Trolley

Well now. This is interesting. I put my old Pentax 50 mm on my K-30 today, stopped down the aperture ring to f/11, and set the focus ring to about 5m, which indicated acceptable focus should be between about 3m and somewhere between 15 m and infinity. ;-) I paused while walking, and snapped this off without raising the camera, then walked off on my merry way to work.

So, first: why did I snap this off? This is clearly an aggressive, or possibly drunk, specimen of the greater urban shopping trolley, being somewhat antisocial in its posture scraping down the side of a car parked minding its own business on the side of the road.

Second: what's the interesting bit? The focus was not only a bit closer than I had anticipated (I'm a poor judge of distance), but the depth of field was vastly less than I had expected. That's very odd, thinks I. This afternoon I was rather struck by what happened when I took a shot of the sky: I stopped down to f/22; ISO was 100; camera (in aperture priority) set shutter speed at 1/6000" ... Result was really really bright. Weirdness, thinks I.

Playing around at home, looking down the lens on the camera, I saw nothing changing as I moved the aperture ring between f/2 and f/22; it remained wide open. Hmmmmmmm. That's a bit interesting. Set camera to manual; info screen then had an icon of aperture/shutter blades next to the icon for the 'green button' .... hmmmm ... press green button, hear shutter go, and see the set shutter speed change (so much for manual xP ) ... change aperture ring, press green button, shutter speed changes again. Very interesting .... Need to find out what's going on there; until I do, the 50mm is relegated to f/2 75 mm (equivalent) portrait duties. ;-)