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:
I bought mine from amazon and got it just before last Thanksgiving.
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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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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.
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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.
Santa Barbara, California is a year-round tourist destination renowned for its warm weather, downtown beaches, and Spanish architecture. That explains patially why it is the 4th city across the US full of rich people. The average housing price is about 1 million dollars.
The history of Santa Barbara started on Dec. 4th, 1602, when Sebastian Viscaino sailed into the Channel of Santa Barbara. Since that day is sacred to the memory of Saint Barbara, virgin and martyr, he named the place as Santa Barbara — the Spanish version of Saint Barbara, who is the patron of artillery and mining, and who helps against lightning and fire.
After the Civil War, people from the East began pouring in and Victorian houses soon outnumbered Spanish Colonials. However, on the early morning of June 28, 1925, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake woke up most of the Santa Barbara residents. Local towns folk realized that most of the Victorians had burned and most of the buildings left standing were the Spanish Colonials, that relied more heavily on indigenous building techniques. An ordinance is passed making the downtown area Spanish Colonial. Thus the 1925 earthquake is responsible for the distinctive architecture in the city that has made Santa Barbara a popular tourist destination for over 70 years.
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In the memorial day holiday, I visited Santa Barbara with my roommate. He had a nice family re-union while I enjoyed the beauty of the city. The following places are worth visiting:
[gmap name='sb' lat='34.419769' lng='-119.696747' zoom='12' desc='Santa Barbara, CA USA']
Are digital cameras good enough compared to their film sblings? This question has been around since the birth of the first professional DSLR. Many digital advocates tried very hard to prove it. Clark’s Film versus Digital My Summary signals the new era of digital photography. Pros are adopting DSLRs feverishly while dumping their old film equipment via ebay. Some pros even prefer Canon’s 1Ds over bulky pricey film medium cameras. Though, large format film still rules for serious landscape photography.
As digital cameras prevail, even common people can get wonderful shots. But, on the other hand, pro-photographyers are telling us that digital shots/prints are flat, it is important to have accurate exposure and accurate color balance, and it takes a lot of time to do post-processing. More specifically, we are suggested not to over-expose or even under-expose a 1/3 stop. The article Expose (to the) Right (ETTR) uncovers the major difference between film and digital sensor, dated back to 2003 – 2004. ETTR has been rediscovered in the March/April issue of American Photo.
Each spot on the digital camera sensor can be treated as a bucket for water, where light is water. Buckets are always wet. There is always noise even without any light. Thus, we need enough light to avoid noise. Worse, once the bucket is full — white, it cannot contain extra light. Thus, we need to avoid over-exposure, which would turn everything into white. All in all, we need to push histogram to the right while not to over-expose shots, which is contrarily to film that could be pushed and is more tolerant on not-that-accurate exposures.
The digital new era means new ways of taking photos, and doing dark room processing. It is always important to understand the tools that we are using.
