A new phone and a new lens…

I am probably the dumbest guy who ever owned a smart phone.   I resisted getting one for a long time mostly because I didn’t want to become an iPhone zombie like all the folks I see whenever I go to a restaurant, the mall, or anywhere you see people.  You’ll see people playing on their cellphones when they’re on a date…young couples seated at a dinner table in a nice restaurant, both absorbed in their phones, tapping away with their thumbs on those tiny keyboards.   Hey, wake up!  You’re on a date.   Put the phones down!

Okay, enough old-guy-not-liking-new-technology stuff.   A few years I bought an iPhone and I was okay with it, until I noticed how terribly slow it was when accessing the Internet.   I finally did something about that the other night.  I didn’t want to get another Apple product.  I can’t say why.   I just didn’t want any more of my money flowing to those guys.   I went with the Droid.

Now I have a 90-degree vertical learning curve in front of me.  What had become intuitive on the iPhone doesn’t work on the Droid.   Fortunately for me, Patty and Matt here in the office are pretty good with the Droid’s evil approach for doing things.  Unfortunately for them, I have a lot of questions.

But the Droid is way, way faster on the Internet.   So much so that the first night I had it I accessed my email, and what do you, there was a email from B&H Photo telling me about a lens sale they were having on an 8mm wide angle lens.  I started scrolling through the screens, and before I knew it, I had purchased the thing, online, using only my Droid…and it arrived just two days later!

I took the lens to the plant today and I had a lot of fun with it.   This is a lens that is designed for the smaller digital camera sensors (what they call the APS-C format, I think), which is what the D3300 Nikon has.   You can use it on cameras with the full size sensors (like the D810), but it vignettes the outer areas of the image (it obscures these areas).   That isn’t entirely a bad thing, as it creates kind of a cool effect.  And if you don’t want to see the vignetted black edges (did I just create a new verb?), you can crop them out.

I first tried it in the shop on a monster Yamaha V-twin Gerry is servicing….

The lens has 180 degrees of coverage.  That means it can see everything in front of it, from stuff directly on the left to stuff directly on the right, and everything in between.   It’s cool.

I next went into the showroom in front of the plant, and I took another photo..the first shot is as it came from the camera, and the second one has the dark borders cropped.

That lens was a super deal…it was on sale for only $169.  It’s a strictly manual focus, manual shooting arrangement, but for the money, it’s pretty cool.  One more arrow in the quiver, as they say.   You can bet you’ll be seeing more photos on the blog with this lens.