Carry a *really* long lens

This photo may seem mundane, but the fun thing about it is that it's taken with a silly, silly setup: The EF-S 60mm macro lens plus an 8x CrystalVue teleextender. The thing to note isn't the incredible quality, but the fact that it's of quality at all. There's quite a bit of blue/red fringing around the camera, but the hand actually has quite a bit of detail. I borrowed it from my brother, who kept getting bad vignetting with it on the compact camera in the picture. Not sure why I didn't get any, but we're swapping this for the smaller 8x CrystalVue teleextender I had lying around.

Yes, I know it's really small aperture, cheap glass, etc etc, but it's fun to play around with, and I definitely want to try it out on my 55-250, which it would turn into a 440-2000 (!) mm lens. Dunno if it'll work, but it'll be fun to find out. I'm a fan of the idea of front-mounted tele extenders. They allow for having a larger entry pupil, so they don't necessarily cut the aperture as badly as a rear-mounted one. Unfortunately, they are mostly made for compacts and video cameras, so generally not of the best quality and with small rear pupils. I was amazed that there was no vignetting to speak of in this case.

The image is so small because I'm using a limited version of the LR/Blog plugin

Moving time

If you take a careful look at my blog profile info and the posts in this blog, you'll notice some posts that are older than the profile. How's that? Elementary, my dear Watson, this blog has moved from its old home on LiveJournal (where the ads finally got to be too annoying). And, it got a new name in the process: Walk Softly and Carry a Long Lens.

This name came about as I looked over shots from my various outings. I tend to take many shots at many focal lengths, but was finding that the most striking and interesting images were taken at longer lengths. For instance, the photo on the right was taken in a crowd of costumed people at 250mm. While I have other nice photos from the Fasching party at Viktualienmarkt, this is the only one that really "speaks".

So while I used to have my "walkaround" 18-125 lens on my camera by default, now it's the 55-250 that lives there. It has a nice zoom range for getting details and still getting some context when needed. At the same time, I would like to get an ultra-wide like the Sigma 8-16, but that would call for a different and much more deliberate style of photography.