Category: Photography

Nine Months

I keep thinking about my blog and it keeps sitting on the back burner. It’s not for lack of things I could be talking about, shit in the past 9 months, I’ve…

  • competed in a city league ski racing league, and our team won the whole season
  • had the worst Christmas ever #christmasfail08
  • been [positively] excited about a presidential inauguration
  • played a UO officially sanctioned flip cup tournament with the club sports olympics, and we WON
  • broke a slalom ski 🙁
  • went from 5 down to 2 e-mail accounts, and one of those may be going a way soon
  • met a girl, her name is Angela, many of you have even met her by now
  • graduated from college!!!!!!!!!
  • successfully survived a road trip with Angela through 9 states
    • Yellowstone, Ren Faire, Badlands, Wall Drug, SLC, etc…
  • partaken in a few dancing lessons (ssssh! don’t tell anyone!)
  • somehow convinced Angela to buy a Mac
  • dealt with 2 flat tires in 2 different states I don’t live in, and neither one on my personal vehicle
  • turned 27
  • competed in 9 waterski tournaments in 6 different states, and waterskied in a 7th state
    • including Collegiate National All-Stars for slalom+trick, and AWSA Western Regionals for 3-event (and qualified for but didn’t go to AWSA Nationals)!
  • upgraded my wordpress blog, twice, without posting anything
  • volunteered with a church group on a construction project
  • bought a Playstation 2 from a thrift store for $12.50 and repaired it myself
  • sold my old DSLR and bought a spiffy new one, and taken thousands of photos with it
  • attended a number of concerts
  • given up on my football team, due to some unFavreable circumstances
  • finally started getting my online portfolio and résumé up-to-date

…and some other stuff too, I assure you. But now that you’re updated on my life, maybe now I can get this site fully back on track again?

Unscientific Lens Tests

My friend David just got a fancy new 3rd party lens (more on this after the page break), and I happen to have access to some nice lenses at work and through a coworker who is looking to convert to Nikon (trying to get me to buy his lenses), so without further ado, here’s what we came up with (click any of these thumbnails for a larger version):

(above: Canon 50mm f/1.4, Canon 50mm f/1.8, Canon 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro)

Note, I did not test the faster lenses stopped down to match the slower ones. I suppose the DoF/fall-off is mostly as expected for the different apertures. But the main reason for the compact macro is it can do this (read on): Continue reading Unscientific Lens Tests

Do I Want to be a Pro Photographer?

The answer is I think so. But the cost for entering the field of selling prints online is a bit of a hurdle.

A little backstory leading up to this entry here. About 2 weeks ago, I checked out a really nice lens, and took it with the rest of photo kit to a waterski tournament where I shot a little over 1500 photos. All this with the hopes of selling a few prints to people. Now on with the research….

The first place I looked at was ExpressDigital’s PhotoReflect (I’m not providing a link, they’re not worth it, keep reading), because it’s where the 2008 AWSA Western Regionals photos were posted. I looked around the site, looked a little clunky but usable. Their rates sounded high at first glance (I’ve since found out they are indeed relatively low). For low-sales-volume accounts, they scrape 18% off the top, but don’t charge any bandwidth or storage fees.

The second place I looked at was PhotoWorks which also has free upload and storage, but their pricing markup is severely limited. The only options are a solid $ increase (ex. adding $10 to the cost of the print, regardless of size), or a solid % increase (ex. add 400% to the cost of the print, $1.14 4×6 and $209.70 for 20×30) Continue reading Do I Want to be a Pro Photographer?