Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Sunday, July 3. 2011

She wants this for her birthday present (with a comment on habits)

Or, at least, some modest help towards buying one of them, which is far more likely. Just a little help. 


Canon EOS 7D Digital SLR Camera with Canon EF 28-135mm IS lens


Imagine the pics I could take for Maggie's with one of these sorts of babies instead of my Costco pocket point and shoots. Trouble is, I'd never carry one of those larger things around - just a pain in the ass to lug a camera around all day when you're hiking in the woods with bottles of water, or up and down the hills of Spoleto or Norcia with a shopping bag full of jars of truffles and truffle sauce and and cinghiale salumi and Umbrian olive oil and stringozzi. When you shrink all those magapixels down to size, you lose the detail anyway.


The experience is the thing. A pic is just a souvenir, and the camera can be a distraction from simply "being there". And, in general, nobody wants to look at anybody else's artful pics (altho some folks seem to enjoy my travel pics on Maggie's but I make extra effort to make them informative rather than artful, illos of a mini-narrative).


It's fun to go places, sometimes, camera-free so you don't end up a slave to the lens. Same thing with periodically going a week or two without looking at the internet, or without beer.


 Freedom from habits, whether good habits or bad ones, can be enlightening.


(I'm sure I will get arguments re this.)

Posted by Bird Dog in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 14:19 | Comments (12) | Trackbacks (0)

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Sweet camera. I'm an Olympus guy, but that is a great camera - know some pros who use them with great results.

Good choice.
#1 Tom Francis on 2011-07-03 14:17 (Reply)
"SLR"??

I can see the "single lens" easily enough -- but where's the reflex part??

Canon makes great stuff, hard to go wrong. And if one's not going to go with some mini-micro camera, you might as well go with a camera that actually looks and feels like a camera. I have a Kodak that's similar to the above. I like a camera that I can look at and intuitively know which side is the front.
#2 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2011-07-03 15:11 (Reply)
And, in general, nobody wants to look at anybody's artful pics (altho some folks seem to enjoy my travel pics on Maggie's but I make extra effort to make them informative rather than artful, illos of a mini-narrative).

I love looking at artful pics - anyone's! It's a visual stimulation that evokes an array of visceral responses, stimulates the imagination, and often takes me on a short little mental jaunt of great longings and curiosity. Often, after a spell of reading intently about our ongoing political and cultural demise, gazing at artful pics is rather like applying salve on a festering wound. A soothing balm that reminds me that not all in this vale of tears we walk is a sharp, unrelenting angle and blunt harsh light.

Plus I have have a Canon EOS Digital Rebel and consider it one of the most compliant and delightful companions ever.
#3 Dana (Link) on 2011-07-03 16:55 (Reply)
That's a nice comment.
#3.1 BD on 2011-07-03 18:57 (Reply)
As I posted earlier, I've just returned home from a 3 week trip to China. I own both a Canon and a Nikon DSLR with quite a few of their best lenses, yet I took neither one on my trip. Instead, I took a simple superzoom Panasonic FZ28 and a point-and-shoot Panasonic DS6 as my travel cameras.

Both of my expensive cameras take great pictures; neither one would have been very useful in cities like Beijing, where the crowds at the major tourist sites like the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace are just enormous and oppressive. When you are surrounded by a million other tourists (and I mean that literally), there's little opportunity to whip out just the right lens and take the time to do a proper set up of a photo. It's shoot and move on. Actually, it's shoot and BE MOVED ON by the sea of humanity in which you are immersed.

During my trip I saw lots of tourists with expensive DSLRs, many of them Chinese tourists, but mostly the cameras were hanging around people's necks and not seeing much action in the middle of the big crowds. My cameras saw lots of action every day but did not interfere with the travel experience by requiring me to view my entire trip through a tiny camera viewfinder. Looking back on my trip, however, I'd say that a better choice of a travel camera would be a light weight Sony NEX + superzoom lens combination, which has the advantage of a larger sensor than a point-and-shoot camera and takes raw images as well as jpegs.
#4 Agent Cooper on 2011-07-03 17:06 (Reply)
35mm f/2.0 AF-D Nikkor :)
Small, lightweight, very good optics, and fast.

My lens of choice in such environments (with maybe a second body equipped with a 20mm f/2.8 AF-D).

When I travel with 2 bodies, one of them almost always has either of those lenses fitted. The other anything else I own, from the 10-17 fisheye to the 70-200 tele with TC depending on what I expect to be shooting that day.
#4.1 J.T. Wenting on 2011-07-05 04:45 (Reply)
I think you meant "thespian."
#5 Randy on 2011-07-03 17:26 (Reply)
Ha! My first error of the year!
#5.1 Bird Dog on 2011-07-03 18:02 (Reply)
not my choice of a camera, but a decent one (I'd have gone with Nikon, having used their products for a decade now and owning a lot of it).

I love images, not just for themselves but as a source of inspiration.
But I guess people who aren't photographers aren't as much interested in "artsy" photos as they're not attracted by the technical aspects of creating those which is part of what makes them interesting.
#6 J.T. Wenting on 2011-07-04 04:27 (Reply)
Great camera, but the lens is dated. I have one of those lenses, and it's nice, but the IS is two, maybe three generations old, 2003-era or so. I believe it's two stops, compared to four for the latest lenses. That's a huge difference in handheld shots, especially at the long end of the zoom range, where all consumer-level zooms are slow, and shakes are magnified. And the zoom range isn't as useful as it seems when you take the 1.6 crop factor into account because of the smaller sensor of that camera. Sure, it's 28-135mm on a full-frame camera, but more like 44-216mm on the 7D or a Rebel. 28mm is actually a pretty wide lens, but 44mm is about "normal," or close to what your eye sees. So you can't ever take a wide shot with it, making it much less useful if it's your only lens.


Here's a link to an Amazon discussion that's on point:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3s2xrrq

I'd consider that 18-200mm lens, and the 18-135mm lens that is also bundled with the 7d, before she goes with the 28-135mm. I haven't used either one of those, so can't comment on them except in general. But multiplied by the 1.6 crop factor of the 7D and the Rebels, that 18mm is about 28mm, so it's actually still pretty wide, comparable to a 28mm lens on a pro camera with a full-frame sensor (one that's the size of a frame of 35mm film).
#7 DW on 2011-07-04 23:02 (Reply)
IS/VR is way overrated. Most if not all people that have it either don't use it (because they know its limitations and find it makes using it too much of a hassle) or use it incorrectly and get failed images as a result.

Read http://bythom.com/nikon-vr.htm for an excellent expose on the system (it's about Nikon's system, but Canon's is almost identical).

I don't care about a lens being "old". In fact most older optics are superior to their more modern counterparts (when thinking post-1990 certainly).
Note I'm not a big fan of zoomlenses in that range overall. I much prefer primes (though I admit I usually have my old 28-70 f/2.8 fitted for convenience when shooting casually, for more serious work I carry mostly primes).
#7.1 J.T. Wenting on 2011-07-05 04:52 (Reply)
Thom Hogan is a sharp guy who knows a lot about cameras and photography---and I respect him for that---but his Rule #2 about when not to use IS/VR is only for the purists, not for the average person who can benefit a lot from image stabilization. I've taken a lot of photos in my lifetime, enough of them (nearly 100 thousand) to be able to claim from experience there's little or no harm if the average person leaves IS/VR on full time even at the fastest shutter speeds when Hogan recommends turning it off.

You're not a big fan of mid-range zoom lenses? LOL. I can tell. That's why you suggested a 35 mm prime for me instead of the 16-85mm zoom, which is a competent walk around lens and the better choice for a traveler. It's one lens that I own, along with the brick-like, break-your-back 70-200mm VR II telephoto. Take them on a trip? No thanks. I'm waiting for the Sony NEX-7.
#7.1.1 Agent Cooper on 2011-07-05 05:30 (Reply)
Can't think of a time, when I was without some type of camera. I don't have a preference in brand, but Cannon is one of the best in Travel Cameras, there is to be had.
#8 T. L. Ferraro (Link) on 2011-08-23 17:49 (Reply)

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