[soosh]

My Tokina 12-24 is probably my most loved lens. The images I get from it blow me away on a regular basis. I also have a Sigma 20mm f/1.8 that I am using a lot more this year that the wide-open apertures are really nice to have. The Tamron 28-75 is superb as well, but not so much used with my night stuff…Just not been using that focal range much lately. I had a Canon 100mm Macro that was a fantastic lens. It was stolen and I replaced it with a Tamron 180mm macro that is sharp as hell but I don’t like it as much as the 100mm. The focus is slower, and the focal length is such that I don’t use it for much other than macro, where with the 100mm, I loved it for portraits. I’m going back and forth on selling the 180 and getting another 100.

I had one Canon 85mm f/1.8 that I loved but didn’t use much and sold, but then replaced it with another that didn’t seem to be as good and had more purple fringing. I should have never sold the first one, it was an excellent lens.

I also have a few 50mm lenses that I use from time to time. My favorite is a $5 pawn-shop Yashica ML that I have an adapter for. It’s broken in that it won’t stop down at all, so I can only use it at f/1.4, but damn does it give beautiful bokeh. Here’s a shot I took with it.

I had a Canon 50mm f/1.8, and frankly, I thought it was a piece of crap. It wasn’t really sharp until it was stopped down below f/2.8, at which point my Tamron zoom was still better than it. Maybe I got a faulty copy, but I won’t get another one. The lack of features like a focus indicator on the barrel was a deal-killer, too.

I had a Zenitar 16mm fisheye, and it was a pretty good lens until I got my 12-24. I don’t dig the fisheye look that much and probably won’t buy another for a long time. A friend of mine has a Tokina (?) fisheye zoom, and it looks just awful in the corners in my opinion.

I’ve also got a Holga lens adapted to a Canon lens mount, and it’s a lot of fun. I was hoping to do some night shots with it on really clear nights, to maybe get some holga-warped star trails, but that has not worked out yet. I can’t see to frame anything with it and it’s been too cold to really give it a lot of chances.

Other than that, I have a 50mm Industar, which is a neat looking lens

but I don’t use it a lot.

Oh, and there’s the 100-400 L IS. I really really love this thing. It’s heavy, obnoxiously white and large, and expensive as hell, but it’s just an awesome lens. I wish it was a little bit faster, but that’s about it. People complain about it being soft at 400mm, but I’ve found that’s usually user error because I’ve gotten some incredibly sharp shots with it.

[soosh]

That does not look promising.

[soosh]

I wouldn’t worry too much about XP support going away. I work for the State of Alaska Dept. of Health, and we have over 1500 computers running XP and there is no plan to switch to Vista anytime soon. I believe that Microsoft will have out their next operating system before terribly long, and it is supposed to revert to having more control than Vista does. It’s my take that we are going to just completely leap-frog over Vista in the same way we did Windows ME during the Windows 95/NT to Windows 2000 transition.

I like linux a lot, particularly Ubuntu. That said, I don’t do any of my photography work on Linux machines. I don’t like/haven’t taken the time to learn Gimp, and can use Photoshop to get the effects I want. Hell, there’s a lot of Photoshop I don’t even know how to utilize, because I am completely self-taught. But if you’re looking for programs under Linux that will do stitching and such, the best places to look are probably Sourceforge.net or the forums of a particular distribution of Linux you decide upon. As far as I know, the best equivalent of Aperture or Lightroom is BlueMarine http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/, but it’s still in development.

[soosh]

Yeah, well, when we were at the pachinko arcade, and you were all stumbling drunk on snake moonshine, wasn’t it me that held your hair whilst you puked out the yakatori? I told you not to go for the rare chicken, but you were all “no, that’s the way they do it over here, people been eating this stuff for hundreds of years”. Maybe so, but who’s the one with the worm infestation now, huh?

Look man, I’m not saying you’re a bad person. You’re a nice enough guy, but you’ve gotta loosen up about some things.
And don’t act like you didn’t benefit from it too. Yes, I vomited. But I’d like to point out my mom says by the 3rd or 4th time lots of other people were joining in, so it’s probably a custom. Yes, in retrospect I realize that smashing the bottle to eat the snake was culturally inappropriate and gastronomically inadvisable. I get caught up in the moment sometimes, and I may have thought I was in Mexico drinking tequila, what with the clanging, screaming and puddles of stuff that should ne’er be seen on the face of the earth. And didn’t we get to stay for free at that wacky theme hotel because of it? That’s the kind of cross cultural generosity you get from trying to reach out to the host country with understanding.

So yes, I have worms. Yes, I have a host of unsightly cuts, bruises, organ transplant (hopefully) scars, but I also have intermittent memories of, and a host of denied extradition requests describing the best times of my life.

I think the “ホチキスモフォ万歳” and “肝臓全滅”　tattoos are pretty sweet too.

The tattoos are awesome. Every time I take my socks off, I see them and think of you and me and those three old ladies from the Samsung counter. I mean, I never knew you could get that many goats in a Delica. And that sweet sweet mix of the blue lotus and hashish, that, my friend, is a sunrise I will not soon forget. That damned mountain walked across the bay and don’t tell me you didn’t see it.

You’re right, I should loosen up. It’s hard, though, after the way we were treated on the Tibetan plain, with the yak butter and that guy with the cloudy eye. I mean, my god, what the hell were we supposed to do? Just leave and pretend it never happened?

So are you gonna come get these Earth Wind & Fire records or do you want me to just leave them where you left them by the soaking tub?

[soosh]

your mom and I were in the shower and she didn’t mention you at all.

Guys like you are why I didn’t follow her into the ソープランド industry.
If you’d just go in, let the woman dressed as Pikachu do her thing and keep in character, it’d be good fun for everybody. But no, guys like you come in and start talking about families and how (local sports team) is doing and it just makes things awkward. I mean, how are they supposed to know when to be Pikachu again? Do you think they can just improvise a song for the bubble dance? If you’re going to go to these places, spend the time to know these places. If you want a U１5　アイドル　喫茶店, go there. If you want a woman dressed a Pikachu showering you with soap, water, and high-pitched jibberish, act like it.

Yeah, well, when we were at the pachinko arcade, and you were all stumbling drunk on snake moonshine, wasn’t it me that held your hair whilst you puked out the yakatori? I told you not to go for the rare chicken, but you were all “no, that’s the way they do it over here, people been eating this stuff for hundreds of years”. Maybe so, but who’s the one with the worm infestation now, huh?

[soosh]

your mom and I were in the shower and she didn’t mention you at all.

[soosh]

Two quick comments on this week’s voting, both pure speculation based on very little data. Welcome to the Internet, eh? 🙂

1. The number of votes seems pretty low overall. The leading entry only has 24 votes for instance. I think the fact that it’s the week before Christmas has many people’s work and personal schedules in disarray.

2. Usually there’s a couple of “break away” images in terms of vote count which are the clear favorites and then a group of popular, but not leading entries clumped together with less votes. This week, at least so far, there’s no breakaway group.

So maybe a running/cycling competition analogy will help? There’s no smaller group of leaders that have broken away from the main pack. That leads me to believe that this race isn’t normal in some way, probably because less people are voting.

or to sum up, it’s not x, it’s Farktography.

[soosh]

wow. what the hell kind of machine?

it is very similar to this one. http://www.davesweblife.com/images/stuff%20for%20friends/finger2.jpg see the red arrow. there was a two hole punch/die in the machine at the time. the good new is that the die length kept the machine open some. the bad news is i got two small holes to go with the broken bone.

yowza. and I thought some of the knife injuries I got while working in kitchens were bad.

[soosh]

wow. what the hell kind of machine?

[soosh]

shit, today’s wednesday, isn’t it?

[soosh]

Only if he’s been down to Juneau. I’ve never had anything for sale up in Anchorage.

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wha? please to be giving details.

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that kind of takes the whole point & shoot out of the equation.

[soosh]

I think this Panasonic Lumix will do all of that for $150.

http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-DMC-TZ4K-Digital-Optical-Stabilized/dp/B0011Z6D86/

Jesus. I may have to get myself one of those.

[soosh]

lesson I learned late last night: if you’re really really really high, you don’t want to be scrolling through so many photos of eyes. But you won’t be able to stop.

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