About the gear:
My last Saturday didn't start very well as I broke my newly bought lens. Mind you, when I say "newly" I mean I bought it recently; the lens is old. It's a 100-300mm Cosina for Canon EF. I tried fixing it but to no avail. AF mechanism is dead. It was not very expensive; around €25. I will not miss it much, but it still hurts.
Why am I telling you this? Because I consider myself a "poor photographer". Yes, I'll take the "poor" pun. Go ahead.
Photography is far from being my major point of income and I invest in it probably slightly more than I should (ask my wife). My Canon 5d mk2 is worn second hand item and I'm afraid his days are counted. One item only from my gear took me back more than €100.
So on Saturday I had to resort to my trusty Pentacon 200mm with a 2x M42 converter of irrelevant brand. And I dare to say the result are good enough to say that the gear is only as good as you make it. Sure, the fringing is obvious and there are lenses that would make this job a lot easier but the thing is very simple: I cannot afford them.
So if the next time you want to complain about how you need a new better gear to take better pictures, think about a guy who shot this roe deer handheld with a manual lens from different era.
About the picture:
Roe deer has very bad sight due to astigmatism. Curiously this feature makes them very sensible to even slight movement. And that's why they were grazing four meters behind me in the woods today. I had to wait completely still a few minutes to turn around and take this picture as they were totally unaware of my presence until I pressed the shutter button. Probably because of no wind.
Bonus information: I'm astigmatic as well.
I'd appreciate a comment from the "Needs work" voters. :)