Filed under: Lens, Photography — Thomas at 7:35 pm on Sunday, June 3, 2007
Popular Photography has an excellent review on this lens. The shot at right was taken handhold months back in San Francisco at 0.04 second with focal length as 150mm. I am pretty happy with its optical performance and IS performance. Besides, it is lighter than its f/2.8 sibling. My neck felt much better after wondering around San Francisco for the whole day.
Here are fascinating reviews around the net on this lens:
Filed under: Camera, Photography — Thomas at 7:43 pm on Monday, February 12, 2007
I bought mine from amazon and got it just before last Thanksgiving.
At 7.6 ounces, the camera is light weight and compact, fit into a jacket/shirt pocket. It comes with a nice bright LCD display (see the image below). I like the black color, which gives me a more professional feeling. There are two major reasons behind my purchase:
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OIS (Optical Image Stabiliser): It works very well. OIS level 2 gives me sharp pictures when the shutter speed is as slow as 1/10 second. Compare the following two shots by yourself.
OIS level 1
OIS level 2
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16:9 Wide Angle: It is actually slightly wider than 28mm. Read the discussion thread. With the camera, I could record diagrams from white board, and shoot pages of documents in minutes. Here, I took a cover shot of the latest issue of American Photo magazine with slow shutter speed at 1/10 second.
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Battery life is decent, 300-shot for a fully charged battery, which is not bad, considering the fact that LCD is always on for each shot due to lack of view finder. It takes less than 2 hours for a full charge. There is also a tiny button at the right hand side of the LCD display for people to quickly adjust picture parameters, such as aperture.
As a consumer level camera, it is slow to write pictures to SD memory card, especially when RAW is enabled. It is not that useful under ambient lights when ISO 1600 is required.
I will end this blog with a picture of yellow leaves that I took last fall. I’ve made it painting-like.
Street painting is an Italian tradition since the 16th century. During traditional religious and folk festivals, pavement artists, called madonnari or Madonna painters in English, who reproduced the icons of the Madonna — Mary, mother of Jesus, in chalks. In modern days, of course, Subject matter is no longer confined to the Madonna. Madonnari are itinerant artists who live a life of travel and freedom and live on donations and small commissions.
In 1972, the small community of Grazie di Curtatone in northern Italy started the first International Street Painting Competition. In 1987, Executive Director Kathy Koury, a fundraiser for the Children’s Creative Project, launched the first street painting festival in North America — I Madonnari, in Santa Barbara, California. In 1994, Youth in Arts brought Italian Street Painting Festival to Mission San Rafael Arcangel, which is now the largest one in the United States.
The following pictures are from this year’s I Madonnari:
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Check out this site for galleries of street painting festivals and lists of events.