Sap started flowing yesterday - so last night was the first try at 'brewing' maple syrup.
On the photography side - broke out my old Nikkor 1.4 50mm lens to grab some snap shots in the low light of our kitchen. This lens from Nikon is a wonderful classic and still in production today. Solid, all metal construction, this is the lens I first learned on. Loved the action of the sap boiling, but between the steam and being rusty at manually focusing - proved tricky to capture. The challenge - my original camera, a Nikon F3HP has a high eyepoint prism with a split prism. The new digital cameras are 'focused' on auto-focus with smaller view finders and no split prism - making manual focus much harder. Tried to use the range finder feature, but found this to be spotty at best.
On the maple syrup front - first, this bottle is what you get from 2 1/2 gallons of sap. Tried to brew this batch in the kitchen. Lots of steam! Moving further production out to the garage. Second, went just a couple degrees over on the brewing and this batch ended up too thick, but delicious.