Not sure how they’re doing this, but B&H Photo Video have some great rebates going on Lexar pro-quality CF cards at the moment.
Like $40 rebate on the $45 4G 133x cards. That’s a 4G card for (effectively) $4.
There’s a limit of 3 rebates per person, but get over to B&H now to stock up. And no, I don’t get a cut.
Thanks to Charles Mann for the tip.
Alec Soth – the photographer who would have been perfect to accompany me on my ill-fated bike ride down the Mississippi (but that’s another story) – recently had a simple but brilliant blog post over at the Magnum Blog.
He asked 35 of his fellow Magnum photographers 2 questions:
The answers are fascinating, but one from Alex Webb really struck home:
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. . . . Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
This view gets to the heart of the conundrum keen amateurs like me face when we start making some money from our photographs.
Last weekend I went out to Fort Marcy to watch the cyclocross event that some friends of mine organized. As a keen cyclist, I was happy to be there for itself, but I also brought my camera and took some shots.
It was the first time I’d shot any cycling, and so while I’m a long way from being Graham Watson, but I enjoyed it, and came up with a few lessons learned:
While talking to Chuck West, the pro photographer who accompanied us on the cattle drive (shown here – the cowboy photographer at work), he made an interesting point about the choice of lenses he’d made for the trip. (I was on assignment from a magazine to write an article about the trip, so only taking photos in an amateur capacity.)
He uses a Canon 5D
The 24-105mm clearly makes most sense on a full-frame camera, where you could go from genuinely wide to pretty zoomed, and so don’t need an additional wide-angle lens most of the time.
On a crop body like my XT, it’s equivalent to 38-160mm, which might give you some extra reach, but isn’t actually as useful.
If you were trying to cover around the same 24-105mm range on a crop sensor camera, I guess you’d go for the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
So even if you had a swanky new 50D, for this job you’d be carrying two lenses – maybe the pricey but good EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM
So I’m sitting in Ecco, my favourite cafe. It’s hard to believe what happened yesterday.
I’m a green card holder, so couldn’t vote, but I knocked on some doors for the Obama campaign, and like millions of people, made some donations.
I have my naturalisation interview next month, and it makes me very happy that I’ll get to become a US citizen under an Obama administration.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. Now the real work begins.