Find out enough about used lenses to be able to buy low and sell high via ebay and local. People email me all the time to ask how I make luxagraf. It's easier to talk about tools than methods, so while I can't really explain how I do this to you in any meaningful way -- beyond saying, I just write, take pictures and combine them into stories, which I recognize is not particularly helpful -- here's a look at the tools I use. Because, consumerism! Seriously, don't buy any of this stuff, you don't need it. I don't need it. I could get by with less. I should get by with less. ## Hardware ### Notebook My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I use whatever I happened to grab on my way out of the bus. I have quite a few (from moleskins to cheapo spirals). I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. But I could devote thousands and thousands of words to pens. For what seems like forever I was religiously devoted to the Uniball Roller Stick Pen in micro point, which I used to swipe from my dad's desk drawer back in high school. It's a lovely pen, but the last time I went to get a box they were out so I grabbed a couple of Uniball Vision pens, which also fill my two primary requirements in a pen: 1) it writes well 2) I can buy it almost anywhere for next to nothing. In a moment of non-frugality I did once buy a fancy pen from Japan that takes Parker ink refills which I can never find so it ends up spending more time shoved in a drawer than in my hand. ### laptop My laptop is a Lenovo x230, oops, x240. I bought it off eBay for $300. I upgraded the hard drives and put in an HD screen, which brought the total outlay to $550, which is really way too much to spend on a computer these days, but my excuse is that I make money using it. Why this particular laptop? It's small and the battery lasts quite a while (like 15 hrs when I'm writing, more 12 when editing photos). It also has a removable battery and can be upgraded by the user. I packed in almost 3TB of disk storage, which is nice. It does make a high pitch whining noise that drives me crazy whenever I'm in a quiet room with it, but since I mostly use it outdoors, sitting around our camps, this is rarely an issue. Still, like I said, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. ### Camera I have used many different cameras at different points in time on this site. I went around the world the first time with a Canon point and shoot of some sort. Then I got a Panasonic GF-1, which I loved. There's also quite a few pics taken with other micro four-thirds cameras I tested for Wired. But, since 2016 I've been shooting primarily with two cameras, one digital, one film. The digital is a Sony A7ii, a full frame mirrorless camera. I bought it specifically because it's the only full frame digital camera available that lets me use the old lens that I love. Without the old lenses I find the Sony's output to be a little digital for my tastes. The RAW files from the A7ii have wonderful dynamic range, which was the other selling point for me. All of my lenses are manual focus. After about 2016 there are no autofocus shots on this site. I grew up using all manual focus cameras. Autofocus was probably around by the time I picked up a camera, but I never had it. My father had (probably still has) a screw mount Pentax. I bought a Minolta with money from a high school job. Eventually I upgraded to a Nikon F3. While there are advantages to autofocus, none of them are significant for the type of photos I like to make. ####lenses One thing about shoot manual lenses is that there are a tone of cheap manual lenses out there. I have seen amazing photos produced with $10 lenses. Learn to manual focus a lens is like opening a door into a secret world. A secret world where lenses are cheap. The net result of my foray into this world is that I have a ridiculous collection of lenses. And we live in a bus, lord knows what I'd have if we had more space. That said, about 90% of the time I have a very fast, lightweight Voigtlander 40mm 1.4 attached to the A7. I love this lens. It gets a lot of hate on the internets. People don't like the bokeh I guess. I love it. I never felt right with 50mm lenses back in my film days. I played with 35mm, but it felt too wide to be normal, not wide enough to be wide. When I bought the GF1 I picked up a 40mm on Craig Mod's advice and fell in love with this length. This is how I see. I love this lens. Love it. At the wide end of the spectrum I have the Voigtlander 20mm. Between this and the previous I realize I've developed a weird obsession with Voigtlander. For macro and portraits I use the wonderful Tokina AT-X Macro 90mm. There's a great review of this lens over at [Phillip reeve's blog][https://phillipreeve.net/blog/tokina-x-macro-90mm-12-5-review/]. It blows my mind that you can buy a lens this good (complete with doubler) for less than $400. I also have a Rokinon 12mm f/2.8 fisheye because when your home is less than 26ft long and 8ft wide you need a fisheye. ###Film The other camera is 35mm film, a Nikon FE that I picked up off eBay (notice a running theme here? Buy used and you can afford to travel more) for $75. That price blows my mind since once upon a time as a teenager I worked for months to afford nearly the same camera. Anyway, I worry that all our digital photos will disappear one day so I wanted to leave behind some physical artifacts for my kids to dig through later in life. And printing digital photos is not the same. I typically process the color film at Costco when we're in the U.S. and send off of the black and white to a lab. But the b&w is really expensive so I mainly shoot color these days. A handful of the prints stay with us in the bus, the rest are shipped to relatives for relatively safe keeping. ### Phone/Tablet/drone/wrist tracking device thingy Don't have one. Yeah I know, I'm one of those people. I pay for everything in cash too. Terrible. My wife has a phone though. ## Software The laptop runs Linux because everything else sucks a lot more than Linux. Which isn't too say that I love Linux, it could use some work too. But it sucks a whole lot less than the rest. I run Arch Linux, which I have written about elsewhere. The main appeal of Arch for me is that once I set it up I never have to think about it again. Because I test software for a living I also have a partition that hosts a revolving door of other Linux distros that I use from time to time, but never when I want to get work done. When I want to get work done, I use Arch. I don't run a desktop GUI, just a window manager (Openbox) with a menubar (tint2). I launch apps and other stuff with dmenu. Almost everything I do is done inside a single terminal (urxvt) window running tmux, which gives me four tabs. I write in Vim. For email I use mutt. I read RSS feeds with newsbeuter and I listen to music via mpd. I also have a command line calculator and a locally-hosted dictionary that I use pretty regularly. I do use a few GUI apps: Tor for browsing the web, Darktable and GIMP for editing photos, Stellarium for learning more about the night sky, and LibreOffice Calc for speadsheets. That's about it.