Tag Archives: photography

Renting Glass

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As many of you probably know … I’m a shutterbug … I put myself in the ‘serious amateur’ category.

My camera of choice is a Canon 7D … and I have two lenses currently.  A Canon 70-300 zoom and the lens that came with the camera and a Canon 28-135 “kit” lens.  Both have in lens image stabilization and are quite adequate for my uses.

That said … I’ve heard great things about Canon’s “L” line of lenses.  These are higher end lenses that have better quality optics.

For my current trip to Hawaii, I planned on taking a lot of pictures of surfers and whales (it is whale season in Maui).  In the past, I’ve had reasonably good results with my current lenses, but wanted to try out some a higher end lens.

A bit of digging around on the internet and I found LensRentals.com … they had a wide range of lenses available and, as an added bonus, they would ship the lens you rented direct to your destination.

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Camera Bags

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Over the years, I’ve owned a number of camera bags … some better than others. I thought I would take a few minutes and give you a rundown on the camera bags I’ve seen and what I thought of them.

The first bag I had was a Tamrac 515 … it’s a nice little bag that can comfortably hold a single camera with a longish lens. Nothing more than a 300mm zoom though. It’s got a pocket in the front to hold film or filters. It also has a see thru pocket in the top for other accessories. This bag worked quite well for me when I only had a single lens and not a lot of accessories.

After I started purchasing more lenses, filters, and other accessories that I needed to carry with me, I figured a new bag was in order. I looked at a number of bags, but decided that the Tamrac Explorer was a good choice. This bag has partitions to hold a SLR camera body with a short lens, plus spaces on the sides for other lenses and accessories. It also has a nice zip open top cover for easy access. The front pocket has space for filters, memory cards, and such.

Once I started getting even more accessories, I found that the Explorer wasn’t quite big enough. Time to find another bag.

My first thought was to get a backpack style camera bag … something that could hold a lot of accessories. I gave the Tamrac Expedition a try. While this bag certainly has a lot of space available, I found it cumbersome to use. There was no really easy & quick way to get to the camera without unslinging it from your back and unzipping it. I was worried that items in the bag were going to fall out (which is obviously not good for things like lenses).

Since I only had the Expedition two weeks, I decided to return and try something else. When the sales person handling the return asked why, I explained what I didn’t like about the Expedition. He recommend I try one of the new Tamrac Velocity bags. Plenty of space, easy to carry, and easy to access items inside.

I haven’t had a chance to use the Velocity much yet … but I think it’s got good potential.

Clean Optics Redux

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Back in October, I wrote about having forgot to clean the filter on my camera … well, it turns out that the stain on my filter wasn’t actually causing the spot on my pictures.

There was actually a stain on the filter… but the spot on the pictures was actually being caused something on my cameras CCD sensor.

I didn’t realize what the problem was until I took pictures with different lenses.

I took the camera to Wolf Camera (where I purchased it) to get it fixed. Hopefully all I have to do is pay the $65 cleaning fee.

Update 4/25: Sadly, Wolf hasn’t finished the cleaning … I’m getting kind of antsy, as there have been a number of nice days I would have liked to go out and taken pictures. I called today to check on the status, but they couldn’t tell me much. The guy who normally deals with repairs & such is out.