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Archive for June 10th, 2009

Although the subject matter is quite boring, here are a couple more shots from my new lens. 

And just for size comparison here is a shot of my 70-200mm lens next to the new 150-500. It is noticeably longer and quite a bit heavier. But it does show the relative size.

While I have barely taken any photos I have already noticed a few interesting things. As you may know the zoom and focus rings are reversed on the 150-500. The zoom is the first ring, closest to the front and the focus in located toward the back. Not sure if that’s good or bad, just different.

Unlike the 18-200mm lens I have you can really notice the OS kick in on this one. I notice quite a bit of shake as I handhold the lens at 500mm. But once you hold the shutter halfway down for a second everything smoothes out and the shake is all but gone. The picture of the fly above, while not perfect, was taken at 500mm and 1/100 sec with me handholding the camera. It’s not an award winner, but considering I was about 10+ feet away and aiming at something that small, I feel the fact you can even tell what’s there is pretty impressive. The whole picture isn’t a blurred mess so the OS is doing a fine job of holding things steady.

Even though it’s an f/5 – f/6.3 lens, I have still been able to get pretty high shutter speeds. I’ve only been able to take pictures after 6:30 pm so even though it’s still light out, the camera doesn’t exactly agree. However, it is still hitting 1/800 at some points and 1/320 without much trouble. And even at the lower speeds it’s still able to grab photos. I doubt this will work as an indoor shooter or in low light, but for outdoor summer shots (which is my main way of using it) I don’t foresee any issue in grabbing his speed shots.

I said it before, but this thing is big. There is absolutely nothing subtle about this monster. It is significantly bigger than the 70-200mm so I fully expect when I use this in a crowd I will get plenty of looks.

I’m looking forward to taking more pictures this weekend to get a better feel for how the lens works and the range it has. I really like the OS and you can hear it working. Some people may be turned off by that since you can hear some whirring and some clicks, but so far I don’t see it as a problem. So far I am very excited about this lens and feel it can really deliver some pretty impressive images.

Just this week Western Digital announced their 4TB My Book Studio Edition II.

The 4TB My Book sports two gigantic 2TB HDDs in RAID 0, and will work with both Macs and PCs. You’ll be able to connect this bad boy to your machine using eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 all while consuming up to 30 percent less energy. There’s also a fancy capacity gauge on the front that lets you see how much storage is available at a glance

It’s available now for $649.99.