My new toy!

No "real" photo to show you today (check back tomorrow!) but I just had to show off my new toy:



You know I'm on the mend and about to start shooting again (soon) when I go out and blow a chunk of cash on a major piece of machinery like this.

It's the Sigma 135-400 APO DG. Honestly, this is the first "serious" lens I've ever owned. I'm not really a big believer in glass quality making all that much difference in the quality of photos any given photographer turns out. A great photographer with a $50 lens will take a better photo than a bad photographer with a $4,000 lens, given the same subject. Too many people use their lens as an excuse for taking bad pictures, when the fact of the matter is they're just a bad photographer. So I've always just made do with the cheap stuff and tried to focus on finding better subjects, and I've never really wanted anything more.

But we're about to move to the suburbs, and our new house is almost directly under one of JFK airport's takeoff patterns. Luckily they don't use this pattern all that often, and I'm not a huge fan of being right under low-flying airplanes under that kind of stress (especially given JFK's checkered past), but I figured I'd make the most of the situation. I've lived near airports before - San Francisco in the early 1980's, La Guardia just a few years ago - and I've never taken any photos even when all I had to do was step out into my back yard and look up. I've always regretted that.

The upshot is if I wanted to finally use my local airport to its fullest, I needed the longest lens I could afford. And as badass as this lens looks, it was the cheapest 400mm lens available to me. It is definitely a quality piece of glass, but it was not all that expensive (relative to other lenses - it was about half the cost of Canon's 100-400L, although that lens does have image stabilization and that's what you're paying extra for.) It is built like a tank, though, and it is huge - it feels like a wild boar when attached to the camera, and I only hope I can tame it!

I'm not sure when I'll have photos taken with this lens to post, but you can bet I will sometime. But check back tomorrow for yet another new photo from the archives!