Monthly Archives: April 2015

Good Night Moon

I was up late tonight and managed to get this interesting pic of the moon.  What’s fascinating is that with very minimal processing it turned out there were hundreds of stars in the background and they came out as perfect pinpoints of light.  My new-used 80-200mm f/2.8 is turning out to be a pretty amazing lens, especially for the price.

Zoom in to see the whole image, it's worth it.

This is without much effort since it’s late on a worknight, but I now know I’m going to have try to get some much better shots, perhaps outside the city later on this year.  I might even think about renting an even longer lens to see what I can do.

Postal Service

As I mentioned, I went on a recent camera gear bender and bought a couple of lenses which I’ve had my eye on for a long time.  One of them, a fast telephoto lens, I decided to buy used on eBay from Japan.  It was a stressful decision since I was worried about all kinds of things (am I going to get ripped off, will it be damaged, etc.) but one thing not to worry about is shipping.  The seller shipped it using Japan Post’s Express Mail Service and between them and Canada Post it’s been nothing short of amazing.

The package was dropped off on the 13th at 20:13 local in Tokyo and I came home tonight to a Canada Post slip on my door saying they tried to deliver but needed a signature.  It landed at Pearson this morning at 08:46.

Considering this cost less than $20 shipping that’s pretty much as good as it gets.  Anybody who tells you that we don’t get a great service from Canada Post doesn’t really know what they’re talking about.  In fact over the past few years, something I’ve noticed consistently is that the national postal services in the countries I’ve shipped to and from (Germany, UK, Sweden, US, Canada, and Japan) are near the top every time and their ability to ship between services and across borders is every bit as good as any commercial parcel service.

New Macro Lens

I bought a new macro lens last week and it’s pretty exciting! I haven’t really produced any photos yet that I’m particularly excited about, I’m still trying to learn how to use it properly, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be fun. One thing that it made clear is that I need to get the sensor on my D7000 cleaned though.

For the time being, you can see what the camera is capable of here: http://www.badphotography.ca/Miscellaneous/i-TFNWccn/A