A few weekends ago I went on a mini-sufferfest up West Magnolia to Rollinsville Pass with Alex Vidal on my new mountain bike. Long story short, it was not my favorite ride. But I took a few shots of Alex blasting down a trail filled with loose rocks, one that happened to destroy his disc brake rotor. Good times.
 |
| Shot with the Canon 55-220 FD at 55mm, the only focal length that wasn't absurdly blurry |
 |
| Shot with Canon 50mm 1.8 FD at f/1.8 - for some reason the only aperture I could get to work despite the manual aperture ring. |
 |
| The damaged goods |
A couple mildly related notes:I didn't have my Sony A6000 for 4 months because Sony outsources their repairs to a terrible company called Precision Camera. Absolutely the worst. But I'm psyched to have my camera back, and I've been using it way more than my Canon's. I've struggled to find good lenses for this camera though. The kit 16-50 is unreliable and lacks sharpness at anything below f/8. I tried the 16mm f/2.8 and it was not any better. I bought the Rokinon 12mm f/2 E-Mount and absolutely love it. It's been my only usable lens since January.
Since I've gotten my camera back I ordered an adapter for my old Canon AE-1 film camera's FD lenses. I found out that those lenses are in terrible shape. I can barely get a sharp image out of any of the three. The 50mm f/1.8 won't change apertures (out of 1.8) despite having a manual ring. The zoom lenses are progressively worse. I finally caved and bought the Sony 18-105 F/4 but have yet to put it through its paces. Despite all of this lens hunting, I've been shooting with the A6000 a ton over the last several weeks and editing I've been blown away by the quality of this tiny APS-C camera. Most of the adventure shots as of late that I have posted are from this camera. I highly recommend it (just don't get it serviced by Precision Camera).
But seriously, the body only is only $450 right now. It's an incredible camera for that price. Right now I can't think of a better camera for adventures.
Second unrelated point:
I've been a user of Photoshop for 10 years and half heartedly jumped on the Lightroom bandwagon when it came out. I saw that it had its uses, but generally stuck with Bridge and Photoshop for most of my editing. I recognized that for really large jobs Lightroom was much better for managing the project, but I preferred my own organization structure. I generally felt that Lightroom could get most photos close to where I liked them but just couldn't finish the job and I would move them into Photoshop. I've recently discovered some free plug-ins that really boosted my Lightroom editing game and I'm exploring using it more as my primary editor. I'm sure Katrin Bell and Luis Carducci will find that entertaining as I insisted that all editing should be done in Photoshop when they were my interns.
No comments:
Post a Comment