1015 - Liars' Bar



I’m on the train to Carinthia now, and I can say that it’s the first time that I am greatly thankful for a major delay of the train.

Due to deviations, the tramway line 18, the line that’s normally a pretty direct connection from my home to the train station, a 20 minutes affair, today took almost 40 minutes, and that after having been severely late. It was no problem though, because the train to Carinthia was late as well, thus I sit here and everything’s fine and dandy.

I had taken a day off and after a late breakfast I decided to go out and make some pictures, this time with a lens that had lain idle for maybe half a year, a lens that I have bought more than three years ago, along with the Nikon D200.

It’s the Nikon 18-200 VR, a lens that featured in over 220 blog posts since, but that had fallen more or less from grace. You know how much I love shallow DOF, you know how often I photograph in dark places, and of course these are all disciplines where my primes fare much better. On the other hand, where such a long zoom is unbeatable, is the ability to react to every subject.

What I did today was really casual, almost mindless photographing. No big effort, no restrictions, freely changing focal lengths from fairly wide angle to an equivalent of 300mm, and that’s without ever changing lenses. Relaxing, I tell you. It’s not for every day, but at times it feels really well. And not only that: There is quite a number of images that otherwise I would not have taken at all, and that’s regardless of how many primes I would have had with me.

And then? Well, then I called my camera dealer “Blende 7”, one of Vienna’s best camera shops, asked them if they had the Sigma 28/1.8 in stock, they had and, well, as I said, the 18-200 is a fine lens, but not for every day 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Liars’ Bar” from the 1996 Beautiful South album “Blue Is The Colour”. Dailymotion has the hilarious video.


There are 5 comments

Ove   (2009-07-25)

I can imagine that lens feels good from time to time. I had a super-zoom compact a while ago, with a lens capable of 35-420mm in 35mm speak. That was convenient, for sure. It was important to work with the right aperture, though, because sometimes the lens really did not deliver others than sharpened blur. The 420mm was however extremely useful sometimes, never mind the quality. 🙂

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Andreas   (2009-07-26)

Well, I began with a super-zoom compact five years ago. I simply couldn't imagine living without the convenience of having such a long range. I can now, but hey, as I said, sometimes it feels good to come back 🙂

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Emma   (2009-08-09)

Topaz adjust, that's the common thing I found at every picture with that marvellous adjustment.

Sometimes I like it a lot, sometimes I don't know if I do.

But one's for sure, it's intriguing.

What do you do to this images with the adjustment called topaz??

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Andreas   (2009-08-10)

Topaz Adjust is a plugin for manipulating local contrast. Recently I have begun to use it together with the plugin that you really mean: Alien Skin Spap Art. That's how these paint-like effects come to pass.

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Emma   (2009-08-10)

Thanks, Andreas.
That Snap art thing is what I ment.
The Topaz adjust is also a really cool plug-in

Very cool image btw 🙂

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