I posted the following on Facebook and Instagram last night:
“It’s time.
I set the groundwork for a new portrait photography business last December, and I’ve sat on it since then for a variety of reasons.
I’ve missed being out with my camera.
So, it’s time.
Sessions with me will be slow. I’m working in monochrome for now. I’ll be limiting the number of sessions I accept, and I promise you’ll love the results.
Just me, my camera, a single lens, lots of fun, and beautiful portraits as the result.
Custom sessions beginning at $50. Reach out today to schedule your session.
Hi World. This is Caroline Price Luxe.”
I’m looking forward to being out with clients again.
For Christmas, Jared gave me some spending money, with the only condition that I buy things that would bring me joy.
One of the thing I bought was the Schneider-Kreuznach Min/Mag pictured here. I bought it thinking it would adapt to either my Cinelux 85mm or my Cinelux 37.5mm, both ways, making it a useful tool.
And when it arrived, I was crestfallen to realize that the 85mm filter threads were dented.
But, not to be deterred, I ordered a Neewer lens vise. So when the lens vise arrived, I went at it, determined to be able to screw on the Min/Mag.
And, I got the lens filters successfully re-shaped, and went at screwing on the Min/Mag on the Mag side.
There were tears. I was soooooo upset. There were more tears. There was anger, because then I saw that Jared had the 85mm lens itself taken apart.
Turns out, the dented part was a lens hood for the 85mm, with the logo on it. a lens hood that is every bit the material of the rest of the structure of the lens barrel, meaning there is no cutting it off the Min/Mag.
And then, Christmas faded, and the Min/Mag with its problems, resigned, went into the dehumidifier cabinet.
And then comes this past week, with the job falling through, and I resorted to what I always want to do when these things happen: I started daydreaming about camera and lens gear.
But today, I had a renewed resolve. The Min/Mag went into the freezer for 30 minute with a dehumidifier pack, in two baggies.
No dice– that lens hood is not coming off.
But then, I remembered the screw. And I wondered: what would it look like if I used the glass from the Min side on the lenses?
The Min side has its own version of a lens hood, since the glass is on the lens side of the barrel.
The Super Cinelux 37.5mm is a no-go. Doesn’t work– has enough vignetting from the barrel that it isn’t worth the wide angle.
The 85mm though? I gasped when I saw what it could do:
The Min on the 85mm acts as a focal reducer and slight wide-angle teleconverter, giving me absolutely 99% of what the 85mm could do on the GFX 50sII. It gives me back the 60-70mm perspective that the 85mm had on the GFX.
Would I like the Min/Mag to be completely functional? Of course. I was convinced that it was the Mag side that I would want the most.
But I am thrilled to have stumbled on this serendipitous turn of gear events.
It feels like Christmas all over again today, and literally all it cost me was going out to the garage to get one of Jared’s electronics screwdrivers.
The setup looks ridiculous, admittedly, for a 60-70mm equivalent setup on the X-S20, but I care not. one. bit:
So super excited. I’d given up working with the Cinelux line since Christmas in the fallout of all this, along with the sale of the GFX itself, but now I am thrilled I can have 99% of the GFX look with not spending another single dime on gear.
Last week I got the M65 to FX adapter I needed to be able to adapt the Cinelux lenses to my Fujifilm X-S20. And the 37.5mm focuses like a dream now that I have the proper adapter.
And, I played around some more with my Minolta lenses.
And I got to thinking that I really missed that beautiful XF 50mm f1 lens I sold a little over 4 years ago to be able to afford the GFX 50S II camera to begin with.
And common sense began to really get the better of me in knowing that really it’s going to be quite some time before I can really afford to buy the XF 70-300mm lens that I really wanted to be able to do bird and other wildlife photography with the X-S20.
And since I could still make yummy portraits with the Cinelux lenses (that arguably have a better look), and since I could do 99% of the things I wanted with the X-S20, I started to question the wisdom of hanging onto the GFX camera knowing it had served faithfully for 4 years but was a heavy camera.
And, I did some heavy comparison shots with both the Cinelux and the Minolta lenses.
Turns out, if I up the denoise tool and the clarity and the sharpness and the shadows in Lightroom, there’s an awful lot of questions about which lens shot what with what camera.
And so, the GFX went to KEH yesterday, and I came home with the XF 50mm f1, the 70-300mm that I wanted, and a little extra grocery money for the month.
The cat in the photo above is not our cat. This is a cat that belongs to some random unknown neighbor, a cat that has claimed our yard as its own when our dogs are not out in the yard to terrorize it. It’s outside in our yard a lot when I go out there or when I’m backing the car out of the driveway. Today it got to be a test subject since I couldn’t quickly spot any birds before the rain started.
And, I won’t lie: I will miss the medium format camera. And I won’t lie even more because it’s true that I will miss the self-imposed “status” that came along with shooting medium format even if it was a status that only I recognized. APS-C just doesn’t have the same ring.
But when 99% of the look I love is achievable with the camera that is more fun to shoot with…..there’s an awful lot to be said about that. Especially when it is far easier to achieve focus, especially when the focus is faster on the autofocus lenses, especially when the whole setup is smaller and lighter, and especially since I can dictate the direction of whatever business I may or may not have.
And probably most importantly, especially when the itch to upgrade happens and it won’t cost another $4,000 or more to do so next time.
So, that’s been much of the labor of this week. Reining in is not easy, but sometimes it is necessary. I have been in a realism and a “buy it once” sort of mindset since Christmas, and it was time to realize that the tools I had in my photography arsenal were not exactly serving me as best they could.
Besides, that yummy jute purse I made and carry around is an awful lot lighter when it’s carrying around X Series gear than it was with the GFX stuff. And it’s a heavy purse to begin with.
So this post is going to have a tad bit of an indignant tone.
Tonight, I took these frames to get new progressive, Transitions lenses:
And you know what? I bought these frames from Zeelool on July 31, 2021.
At the time, I just thought they looked cool. These are Zeelool’s Menin frames and they have since been discontinued. I don’t know why they were discontinued, and I don’t know when.
What I do know is that when I bought them, my kids thought they looked crazy. At the time, I was bald by choice, which didn’t help the “crazy” look.
But I had no idea at the time that by late 2025 and early 2026, asymmetrical and geometric frames would be trendsetting.
In 2021, I just knew they looked cool.
Same thing with mirrorless cameras.
In 2011, I wanted an interchangeable lens camera to be able to take nice pictures for a blog. I wanted to be a “Mommy Blogger.” Jared told me if I’d wait till Christmas, he’d buy me a DSLR for Christmas.
I was in Best Buy by myself one night, and I saw this display with a new kind of camera, and it was a Sony Alpha NEX 5N— a new kind of camera they were calling “mirrorless….” I hardly even knew that mirrors at the time were an integral part of the build of a DSLR.
I came home with the Sony Alpha NEX 5N. That was November of 2011. I didn’t wait for Christmas.
And that first year with that camera: I remember camping with church and there was someone who was really into photography at the time on that camping trip in 2012. And I remember the sort of side-eye-rolls my little powerhouse got. Surely it couldn’t be a serious tool for serious work.
To her credit, the documentary photography instructor at Emory in summer 2012 was actually one of the first affirming folks that said I’d made a good choice: all she cared about was that I could control my camera manually, which she helped me figure out that indeed, I very well could.
By 2013, I was standing in the kitchen at Carrollton Presbyterian Church while my friend was getting Wednesday night dinner ready, and I vividly remember feeling sheepish and very meek about it, but I told her, “I’m pretty sure mirrorless cameras are the future,” and she looked at me like I was crazy.
And by 2013, I was regularly adapting vintage lenses to that Sony Alpha NEX 5N camera. I could sometimes find adapters, but they were not good. Often, they arrived with loose lens mounts. Good adapters were so hard to find that I more than once took apart a Miranda camera or a Minolta camera so that I could have a sturdier lens mount for a cheap adapter, taking apart the adapter, too.
Because by 2013 I knew that the yumminess that comes with vintage lenses was worth something.
In 2025, vintage filters are a ubiquitous part of cell phone culture.
And now, in 2026, I walked into Costco tonight with 2 French pins holding my hair, pins that arrived not from a glitzy Ulta display but in a plain box as they are sold in Europe and elsewhere, and I was literally the only person I saw with my hair up that way. I saw people with elastics and clips, but not a single other French pin in the store. Apparently they are reserved for special occasion up-do’s in the United States.
And I have zero idea why because they are so dang practical: They do not leave crimps in your hair when you take it back down again, and it literally takes the time it takes me to put my hair in an elastic messy bun to do the same with 2 French pins. And you don’t have to buy a million of them. The ones I bought will last the rest of my life probably.
And in being without a dedicated job for so long, I’m suddenly realized that I’ve developed my own sacred ritual over the years, in a million different ways that I don’t even think to write about because it’s so ordinary to me probably: Wearing hair hardware that would have been familiar to my great-grandmother in 1916 and yet getting ready to wear glasses that won’t be out of place in 2027, carrying around camera gear from the 1970s that performs fantastically on my 2023-model GFX and X Series Fujifilm cameras….. I’m finally figuring out that my brain just works in a way that the conventional workplace simply is not ready for.
In 2011, the serious photographers of their day were not ready to hear that that they would be changing out the entirety of their gear systems in a decade or less.
And I know that I wrote about “buy it once” culture a few days ago and I am very well aware that I found the website “buymeonce.com” probably over 3 years ago at least; it’s been a bookmark on my Safari home screen for that long anyway. And I am very well aware that it is a growing movement now that I am only jumping on the bandwagon for as people are growing weary of fast fashion.
And in early 2026 even, there are plenty of people who are still not ready to hear either that it is indeed possible to self-engineer ethical parameters for AI life coaching from readily available platforms. And yet, I’m doing it daily with Gemini.
And yet, here we are. I’ve been on SSDI since 2011 because my brain needs more to do than the conventional workplace can find me to do in retail or admin assistant type jobs.
Anybody want to find me a job in trends forecasting?
We planned to travel to go see family in Kansas City and Nebraska for the next ten days.
Yesterday, we made it as far as Oneonta, Alabama before we decided we should stop at an urgent care for Covid, flu, and strep for Porter because he had a sore throat and no one we were going to visit needed to be exposed to sickness.
Sure enough, Porter has strep. So, back home we went. Interesting 5 hour drive at least. And I’m glad we found out before we made it all the way to Memphis, which had been our original plan for seeking out an urgent care. The drive back from Alabama was much shorter than the original idea.
Still, Christmas plans being thwarted is rarely the end of the world.
Today we slept in and Jared and I went to Costco and Trader Joe’s for goodies. And boy, we did come home with goodies.
And then tonight, after a predictable meltdown, I returned to creative brainstorming. Because: the gear puzzles in my brain will not stop turning. My brain naturally turns to creative problem-solving when left to its own devices, and my photography gear has been a problem for the last six months.
When I sold off the second Fuji GFX 50sII and several lenses, and purchased the Fuji X-S20 and started contemplating moving more seriously back to the X series ecosystem, I hit a major creative wall when the first attempt to adapt the Cinelux 37.5mm lens to the X-S20 failed.
It’s a technicality: When I originally cobbled together the adapter, I could not find a M65 to X Series adapter. I had no idea there was actually a company making them.
So instead, I bought a M65 to M42 step down lens filter ring, and an M42 to FX adapter.
And, I proceeded to have a massive meltdown when the lens wouldn’t focus on the X-S20 because the focal point was closer to the sensor than my lens could get. And I gave up, assuming the 37.5mm would only work on the GFX forever.
However: there is a company making these adapters, and I have one on the way now.
Which means, my dream of making my GFX be an exclusively monochrome camera while the X-S20 is the color version, shooting Cinelux lenses simultaneously……well, that dream is alive again.
In my brainstorming, I have also realized exactly how stunted my creativity has been most of the late summer and Fall.
And I know why that is, and I take it as a very good sign that my creativity is returning. Even if it is only taking the form of creative problem solving thus far, it makes me extremely happy to realize that maybe I am making substantive progress to leaving the past in the past.
Even if the meltdowns have not completely stopped just yet. The meltdowns may never stop completely; it occurred to me that they may actually be a symptom of the PTSD. But today, I recovered enough to get excited about my art again and that is enough.
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