365
02 Jan 2007I’ve decided to hop on the Project 365 bandwagon. I waffled at first and then it occurred to me that I take at least one picture a day anyway, I just rarely post most of them. I think it will be fun and also make me a better photographer, as mlis has vouched that it helped her with composition and such tremendously. And it’s not like I’ve been posting much around here anyway. It’s been a long 2006.
This gives me an opportunity to kvetch about camera crap:
I love my D30, but I’m learning to hate some things about it. Namely, all things focus. First, the viewfinder: it blows. It’s dim, and it lacks clarity. Granted I am not looking through multi-thousand dollar lenses, but it still doesn’t seem great. I have a Pentax P30T that has a viewfinder that I can tell is much better, and it’s got the prisms for focus alignment, which makes it a dream to use by comparison. The autofocus on the D30 also isn’t that great, and the AF light is too bright to be useful. The result is that I have a lot of pictures (mostly otherwise awesome portraits) I have to discard because even though they looked in focus in the viewfinder, and looked in focus on the LCD, they were not in fact in focus. And the narrow DoF on the 50/1.8 lens is not very forgiving.
And the CMOS sensor on the D30, which was excellent for its time, is fairly damn noisy at high ISO. So all in all, portrait-shooting in low light (the thing I like the most) is sortof a bitch to do with the D30. So, it’s with much sadness that I’ve decided to buy … a new lens.
What, you thought I was going to buy a new body? Do I look like I’m made of money? Besides, only pussies blame their equipment. I am pumped. The 85/1.8 appears to be a well-liked lens and I’m hoping it will help me focus on portrait-taking, since I’ve really been enjoying that the most.