Not a lot happening lately. While I may not have taken many photographs recently, I have been busy planning out some new photo shoots. Just keeping an eye on the weather forecasts to try and time it right to get the best conditions.
Also, my attention has been elsewhere dealing with non photo related things that have demanded my attention - can't get to locations without a reliable car.
I did get to take a couple of quick test shots of downtown Tulsa today. Wasn't able to stay for long, as the sky was getting less photogenic as I checked out locations, so I called my scouting trip short. I noticed as the afternoon continued, the overall light quality continued to drop until it was a fairly flat, overcast light, the kind that comes out white/grey in photos - yuck!
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Thursday, February 6, 2014
New lens
With my move to specializing in landscape, cityscape and architectural photography I came to the conclusion that I needed to add to my lens arsenal as I lacked a higher quality wide(er) angle lens. In particular something wider than 28mm and to this end I paid a visit to my favorite online retailer - www.keh.com where I found a great deal on a Tokina 12-24mm f/4 zoom lens.
Now some may wonder why I picked this lens over other options such as the Nikon 12-24mm f/4 or even the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, which is very popular. My choice came down to reading some reviews by Ken Rockwell where he actually compared all of these lenses (and some others) and pointed out how little distortion was present in the Tokina 12-24mm f/4 compared to the others, in particular at the 12mm end where it only exhibited simple distortion while all the others exhibited complex distortion that was not able to be fully corrected. To me this was the major selling point as I wanted something that could be easily corrected for distortion and not require additional (and possibly lengthy) post production work, especially when shooting 9 exposure HDR brackets.
The lens arrived today and I spent a little while this evening testing it out on my Nikon D2X to ensure it didn't get knocked out of alignment in shipping - plus it's always a good idea to test out any used lens as there is a limited time to exchange it if there is anything wrong. Well, I can report that so far everything has checked out well and I'm certainly happy with my choice. This coming weekend I plan on getting outside and undertaking some further testing and just getting acclimated to how it handles. And yes, I will share one of my test shots that I took tonight, which while not landscape or architectural in nature did show how well the lens handles fine detail.
Meet our Maine-Coon cat Sylvester, who decided to pose nicely for me.
Now some may wonder why I picked this lens over other options such as the Nikon 12-24mm f/4 or even the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, which is very popular. My choice came down to reading some reviews by Ken Rockwell where he actually compared all of these lenses (and some others) and pointed out how little distortion was present in the Tokina 12-24mm f/4 compared to the others, in particular at the 12mm end where it only exhibited simple distortion while all the others exhibited complex distortion that was not able to be fully corrected. To me this was the major selling point as I wanted something that could be easily corrected for distortion and not require additional (and possibly lengthy) post production work, especially when shooting 9 exposure HDR brackets.
The lens arrived today and I spent a little while this evening testing it out on my Nikon D2X to ensure it didn't get knocked out of alignment in shipping - plus it's always a good idea to test out any used lens as there is a limited time to exchange it if there is anything wrong. Well, I can report that so far everything has checked out well and I'm certainly happy with my choice. This coming weekend I plan on getting outside and undertaking some further testing and just getting acclimated to how it handles. And yes, I will share one of my test shots that I took tonight, which while not landscape or architectural in nature did show how well the lens handles fine detail.
Meet our Maine-Coon cat Sylvester, who decided to pose nicely for me.
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