Today is the first day of winter and is the Winter Solstice. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the Earth will be tilted as far away from the sun as it will be all year. It’s also the shortest day — and longest night — of the year.

After looking around, I changed direction and decided to get a camera I always wanted—the legendary Canon F-1. In my searches I found two kinds of F-1’s: cheap junk and expensive pristine models, especially the Lake Placid version that I always wanted since that was the closest I got to photographing the Winter Games. (It’s a long, sad story.) So I started looking for AE1’s and found one in Osaka, Japan.

Cameras with mechanical shutters use an electrical contact within the shutter, which closes the circuit at the appropriate moment in the opening process. Some people just call it “flash sync”and, as I unfortunately found out, it’s different for every camera

I consider myself lucky that I grew up in a time that there were no video games to keep my attention on indoor activities.—Karch Kiraly

my wife Mary is on Facebook and showed me a world jumble of apparently random letters with the concept being that the first three words you see are what a person can expect from 2025. And since this Magic Eight-Ball test was on Facebook, you know it has to be the truth, right?