Introducing Ultra-Wide!

The Prima Donna of my lenses (all 2 of them)!

Again, that focal length issue. It's called 10-22mm (so this one does zoom) but due to the sensor size the effective length is 16-35mm. 16mm is TWICE as wide as a normal camera lens gives you (zoomed in is nearly same as a normal camera).


See?! this picture would've been impossible with any common lens.





Both these pictures were taken inside the National Cathedral, which is fairly dark even during daytime. So I used a tripod on the first one, and took a gamble with using the tripod folded up as a monopod with the second one and it turned out. But that's something I need to watch out for with this lens.. it needs a lot more light than the sigma lens. A LOT more light.



Luckily the OUTSIDE was brilliant all weekend. This picture was originally to just tease Vishaka because she kept having to back up from the monument to get it all in her viewfinder. I could practically walk right up to it and get it all in. So I took a couple steps right behind her and took a picture of the BOTH of them. (then it turned out to be a cute picture so I put it online.)

Seriously, with this lens zoomed all the way out I can get in almost 90 degrees of vision. That is, if a point directly in front of me is on the bottom edge of the field - say if I'm standing 10 feet away from the washington monument, it would be a point near the base at my height - the top of the monument would be well within the picture.

But that would make an awkward, kind of crappy sort of picture so I didn't take it. But still! I could've!

This lens was most of the reason I bought the new camera in the first place. Can you see why?

Let's meet my lenses... Starting with the Sigma lens

Meet Sigma Lens!

As you see in the list on the left the sigma lens has a focal length of 30mm, but because the detector in the camera body is smaller than the 35mm film the lens is built to expect, it has an effective focal length of 48mm (like a zoom of 1.6x of a normal, zoomed all-the-way-out film or digital camera). The Sigma lens is also a fixed lens (no zoom), which supposedly means it is way higher quality - and supposedly beginner photographers use zoom inappropriately where they should probably walk toward or away from subjects for the better picture.

So I have a lot to learn!

Not every post will be this boring, I promise. I'm just getting the technicalities out of the way because after all, it is all stuff I just learned and this IS my "camera's blog."

Sample pictures ahoy!:



See here there wasn't anything to take a picture of when I unpacked, except for other things that I unpacked...


This picture is significant because it was really dark in this room and my aperture was wide open, and this lens has a big aperture, so the picture turned out crisp.


Now I was just showing off.

My Camera's Very Own Website

This is my camera's own website. Or Blog. Or Journal.

Let's call it a Blog because it's on Blogger.

This is where I'll post pictures I took and try to explain what may be significant about them in terms of what I was going for, or what ended up happening.

Got it? Got it.

The link is to the left - yes there's only one - and it's to my Picasa gallery that will have all the pictures I refer to within this blog.. and more. There are also lots of old pictures on it, taken for the most part with little automatic digital cameras. I unpacked my new camera on the night of August 31, 2007, so anything taken before that is with one of these little guys, and afterward with Alphonso himself.

Yeah, his name is Alphonso, and fully anthropomorphized.

MOST IMPORTANT! Give advice! Comment! Question! ... Etc!

I'm learning as I go with this thing - so don't worry about offending me or anything, I'll take all the constructive criticism as I can get!