Taking the plunge

I’m selling my Sigma 10-20mm Wide Angle lens. It’s for Nikon’s DX format cameras, and it’s the last piece holding me back from going to a D700 (or it’s replacement, in the spring of 2011 – possibly March). I don’t do as much wide angle work as I need to in order to justify keeping it, and on a full frame camera body, it’s not going to be all that useful. That said, it’s a very good lens, nice for wide work as long as you keep it above f/8. Any faster than that and overall sharpness starts to slip away. Considering that I can handhold the lens at 1/30th of a second regardless, and I’ve got very unsteady hands, running at f/8 isn’t hard to do unless you’re shooting indoors at night.

So, I’m selling mine. I’m asking $400, and I’m going to include the $70 HOYA Pro1 UV[0] filter I have for it. This is a low-profile filter designed for wide-angle lenses, to avoid vignetting when shooting at 10mm.

I Am A Photographer

Over 5 years ago, I purchased my first DSLR and started posting a picture every weekday, in preparation for a trip to Barcelona, Spain. I soon expanded to every day, weekends included, and became more versatile in my shots. I purchased a 50mm macro lens, a medium zoom, a wide angle, a fast 50mm, and a 70-200 telephoto. I’ve sold off some of those lenses over the years, and upgraded my camera from a D70 to a D200. I think I’ve come a long way in the journey.

The important part to me, however, is that I am now a photographer. That’s part of who my friends know me as – someone who can pick up a chunk of precision machinery and produce something that (at times) is hard to tell from Real Art. I’ve always claimed “If I can do it, it’s not art.” That is less and less true these days. I’ve posted over 2000 pictures to my blog, most better than the ones that came before them.

It means I take less and less time for my writing (over the years), as does my work for Shufflegazine, but I’m ok with that.

I Am A Photographer.

Flickr Photos

I’ve really been trying to post more refined and editied sets to my Flickr account, and it seems to be helping out my photo set views a little. (Yeah, I log in to look at the stats from time to time.) It’s nothing fancy – usually just a few views per photo, but I don’t promote my feed that much, and until recently, I was doing a terrible job of quality control. I’d like to think that’s changing.

No Picture Tomorrow

There won’t be a picture of the day on the photoblog tomorrow. My upgrade is still running. I started it at noon, and it’s 8:30 PM. It’s almost to the halfway mark (%48), and it’s nearly 2/3 of the way through ‘upgrading thumbnails’. 58,017 left. Sheesh.

Slow going?

After nearly an hour of imports, this is where I am. There are nearly 76,000 images in the library, and it's going through each one.

UPDATE: 45 minutes later, it’s processed 10,000 more images. 65,181 to go.