{"id":174,"date":"2007-09-28T14:24:55","date_gmt":"2007-09-28T18:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/09\/28\/new-lenses\/"},"modified":"2007-09-28T14:24:55","modified_gmt":"2007-09-28T18:24:55","slug":"new-lenses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/09\/28\/new-lenses\/","title":{"rendered":"New Lenses"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned, I bought a lot of two Canon digital SLRs off eBay. I got a great price. I succeeded the other night in selling one of the two for a fair price. (Which means that I ended up getting the 10D for under $300 after it was all said and done.)<\/p>\n

However, the lens was part of the deal, which left me with a great camera but no lens. I’d already been wanting to get something with a better range, so it gave me a great opportunity to justify buying another one.<\/p>\n

I ended up with a pair of lenses. While I’d have loved something fast like a 50mm f\/1.0 and a 200mm f\/1.8 lens, I didn’t have the $6,000 to spend. So I ended up with a pair of Sigma lenses: they actually come as a pack. There’s an 18-50mm lens (f\/3.5-5.6) and a 55-200mm lens (f\/4-5.6). This is a very small step up in lens speed, but a giant leap in range. With the 1.6x crop<\/a> on Canon digital SLRs, this is an effective 29-320mm lens. (And 29mm is much<\/em> wider than I’d have expected!)<\/p>\n

I took both lenses around campus. For outdoor stuff, I found the 55-200mm lens to be the more useful one: rare do I want to be a foot away from whatever I’m photographing. So I got a few of the banal shots: the library clocktower, the view from the top of the hill, and a few flowers. And as I stood outside the building waiting for a meeting, a butterfly flew by. I thought it’d make a great photo, but it’d be pretty tricky to get it in flight. But I lucked out. It landed on some flowers maybe 3 feet from where I was standing.<\/p>\n

And this is what I love so much about the SLR: you just shoot to your heart’s content. I probably averaged 2 or 3 photos a second. Ordinarily you take a picture, wait a few seconds for it to write to disk, and take another… And don’t forget trying to pre-focus and everything so that shutter lag is under a second. Here I just shot non-stop. Quite a few turned out no good. But a few were great.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem was that I was shooting “wide open” at f\/5.6. (But at 200mm or so.) This left me with a pretty narrow depth of field, but it was subtle enough that I didn’t notice reviewing on the screen. (Which is perhaps why Canon’s newest cameras are coming with gigantic screens, 2.5-3″!) So in some shots the butterfly’s antenna (I almost said antlers) would be in focus, but the wings wouldn’t be. I had plenty of light, though, so I could have closed the lens a bit, but I didn’t think to.<\/p>\n

This shot illustrates that problem pretty well:<\/p>\n

title=”Photo Sharing”>\"Butterfly\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

A bit better:<\/p>\n

title=”Photo Sharing”>\"Butterfly\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

An obligatory flower shot:\n

title=”Photo Sharing”>\"Banal<\/a><\/figure>\n

John Kerry’s speaking outside Faneuil Hall on Monday afternoon, which should give me some great portraiture opportunities, plus an excuse to spend the late morning \/ early afternoon wandering about Boston taking photos.<\/p>\n

Oh, and one of the best butterfly shots I got today:\n

title=”Photo Sharing”>\"Better<\/a><\/figure>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned, I bought a lot of two Canon digital SLRs off eBay. I got a great price. I succeeded the other night in selling one of the two for a fair price. (Which means that I ended up … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}