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365 days - 365 photos. I saw it, read about it, and decided to go for it. Already today, setting up my camera for the shoot, I learned a little bit about what effect different aperture settings on my lens have on the look of it’s bokeh. Cool eh?

Follow along here.

I finally took the plunge and got a digital SLR camera. It was a long and painful journey of contemplation. In the end the decision was made more or less spontaneously at the store, holding each of the candidates in my hand (for the nth time…).

I settled for a Canon EOS 350D. I admit my biggest argument against it was that it is too mainstream and some have also said that it is not too comfortable in your hand.

I held the Nikon D50 and D70 in my hand, and their size surely did feel better, however I kept feeling that they were slipping out of my hand, especially if it was a little more sweaty.

So in the end I chose the 350D and as I have used it a bit, I am happy with most of the purchase. The unhappy portion is the lens.
I bought the 17-85mm IS USM lens in a kit along with the camera, and the lens cost almost as much as the camera itself. After using the lens a little, I am disappointed by the lens vs price ratio.
Surely the lens is good, but at it’s widest angle it is waaay too blurry for my tastes, the Image Stabilizer does not work as well as I hoped, and the maximum aperture of f4.0 (or f5.6 most of the time, since it’s widest angle sucks) is just not enough. At least for that price. I would rather have spent an extra 3k on an L lens of almost the same dimensions, but without IS (which I so far have not learned to use correctly). Although at 50mm, the lens produced almost the same quality as my EF 50mm f1.8 II lens, so there is potential there.

In any case, I am very happy that I can finally close that chapter and move on to actually take the pictures instead of trying to decide what camera to get.

Anyway, enough ranting, check out the pics I took today (with my EF 50mm f1.8 II lens).

Link

I am not happy right now.

I have decided to fuck analog and go digital. Maybe I am missing something, but this is one of the JPG files I got with my photos from the photo lab. Note that this is a very high quality professional lab, and they charge accordingly (thank god for 50% student discounts).

Aside from being only 1700×1200 in size (2 megapixels… WTF?), the photo is covered in noise that looks like the highest ISO setting on my old crappy casio digital camera.

All photos that I got were exactly the same. Some even worse.

The paper version looks just fine unless you really look close, then some noise is apparent, but nothing like the scans.

I also turned in several negatives to be scanned in, and it was the same thing there… And they didnt even remove the dust. WTF?

Is this a phenomenon that is common with film or am I just being ripped off? I can’t believe that this is a film phenomenon considering the kinds of film photos one sees in books etc… WTF.

On Monday I am also gonna go and crave my money back on those negative scans, they charged 350kr for scanning in negatives, and did not even remove the dust. In that case I might as well keep my old direct-from-photo-scans…

UPDATE: Apparently I is teh suxxor, and in fact such crap quality is to be expected from film. Especially from long exposures. I turned in some film to process at a different lab, to see if their scans will be any different. In that case I may take back some of the things I’ve said.