The Bald Heretic

Readers of this blog may remember the story of my Tamron AF 28-75mm f2.8 XR Di lens that I often refer to as my “miracle lens” after the horrible accident.

I had noticed that the lens was not performing well, at least not as well as I thought it should based on the reviews so I sent the lens back to Tamron for a warranty adjustment. I wasn’t sure if the drop had affected it or if I had a bad copy. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to send it in.

After mailing it to Tamron I called them up to verify they had received it and they indicated they had it and that repairs were running 3 weeks on average. I expected I would either get the lens back adjusted or get a call saying the lens was destroyed and not covered by warranty.

3 1/2 weeks later the UPS guy rings the bell and there’s a package from Tamron. It’s my lens and some paperwork that seemed to indicate that they had calibrated the lens.

After playing with it a bit this thing is even more amazing than I remember. This is a shot I took through the kitchen window. f/6.7 - 200 ISO - 1/1000
The top half is the un-modified full size image and the bottom half is a 100% crop

This is one bad ass lens. I get better results cropping the 75mm at 100% than I do with my 70- 300mm kit zoomed in to the full 300mm

This inspired me to buy the Tamron SP AF 17-50mm f/2.8 XR Di II LD which is also highly rated and should arrive in the mail this week! I am giddy in my anticipation.

There’s also a 1985 vintage Minolta 70-210 f/4 “Beercan” lens on it’s way that I am anxious to try out after reading all the reports of what an amazing lens this is, especially given the price which is relatively cheap for something that is apparently quite special in terms of optics.

Tags: General, Photography, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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Randomly encountered some “fire manipulators” in the back patio area of the Continental Club while I was out and about last night. I saw this as an EXCELLENT opportunity to play with some extended exposure shots using my tripod and the remote control for the camera

Not bad, but whirly-twirly shots like this don’t stay interesting for long so I shot a few more handheld with less exposure time and got some interesting shots

There’s a few more in the Zion’s Flame gallery.

Tags: Continental Club, General, Houston, Photography, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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Microsoft will pay you to use their search engine. I’m not kidding.

I know it sounds like that “Bill Gates Is Sharing His Fortune!” e-mail hoax many years ago that said that AOL and Microsoft were going to pay you money to forward this message, but it’s not like that at all.

I was casually shopping around on EBay to see what lenses were out for my camera. I was particularly interested in something along the lines of the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 or the Sigma 18-50 f2/.8 for a little versatility on the wide side in low light situations. As I was reading up on one auction the seller mentioned that the current promotion from Microsoft Live would enable the winner of his auction to save 25% if they were to use the Buy It Now option and pay through Paypal as part of the Microsoft Live Search Cashback Program.

This sounded interesting. I was pretty sure that I would, at some point, purchase the lens once I could justify the cost and the idea of saving 25% pushed the acquisition further into the realm of feasibility for a more immediate purchase.

I did my research and the cash back program is real, as are the discounts.

Basically, once I determined which lens I wanted (I decided upon the Tamron SP AF17-50mm F/2.8 Di II LD) and looked around on EBay to see if I could find one at a competitive price being sold by an EBay member that could be trusted.

The lens retails anywhere from $428 to $475 on average. After hunting a bit I found one for $440 which was in the right price range BEFORE the discount and about what a reasonable person would expect to pay for this hardware.

Once I located the lens I wanted I put it on my watch list in EBay and then browsed over to live.com to execute my search. I used the word Tamron and looked for the cashback option in the results. This is what that looks like:

Note that this one says 10%. When I did it the search result came back with a 25% link to EBay and when this promotion started the discounts were as high as 35%.

I clicked the link and once I was on the EBay site via that link I was basically locked in to the cashback option so I went to my watch list and clicked on the lens I had found earlier and bought it with the Buy It Now option and checked out via Paypal earning myself a $110 discount. On top of that, the auction I won included FREE shipping and a FREE UV filter so that saved me some additional moolah.

The catch is that you pay the seller the full amount and then you get a message in your EBay mailbox telling you that you’ve earned cash back. You click the link and sign up with Microsoft to receive your cash rewards. There’s a delay of about a week before the funds come available to make sure you don’t get the money and then return the item.

The limit is three item purchases per account and a maximum discount of $250 per item. That means if you had $3000 to spend on stuff you already planned on buying, Microsoft would pay you $750 to do it via their search engine. Not a bad deal. They paid me $110 to purchase a lens I was already planning to buy.

Sadly, the largest discount I have seen since I made this purchase is a paltry 10%, but you never know what tomorrow (or later this evening) might bring.

Tags: General, Photography, geek by Jay Lee
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Trish and Darin Murphy’s current musical project “Skyrocket” performed at the Houston Continental Club on Friday night to a packed house. The group is made up of a fantastic batch of Texas musicians and the performance is nothing less than spectacular.

Of course you must like 70’s and 80’s cover tunes because that’s what they play, and they play it remarkably well. Trish Murphy sang Heart’s “Crazy On You” in the first set and it was spot on. Other songs for the evening included “Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss and “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds just to give you an idea of the repertoire.

Their song list is available online here.

It’s an amazing show and I highly recommend checking them out if you have the chance.

Pics from the evening are here in the Skyrocket gallery.

Tags: Concert photographs, Continental Club, General, Houston, Live Music, Music, Photography, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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Cynthia is well underway on her latest quilt. I am not allowed to publish pics yet, but I captured this one from the hall which has been screened and approved for release.

This is one of her coolest quilts yet. I can’t wait till it’s done so I can photograph it properly.

Tags: Cynthia, Photography, Quilt, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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The Tom Waits show was literally fantastic. Not only the performance, but the cast of characters in attendance. I got to see many current friends as well as people I don’t tend to run into except every so often when an event like this rolls around.

I struggled with the idea of not bringing a camera and I knew that cameras were technically verboten but I really wanted to get some shots of this once in a lifetime show.

It’s been many many years since I smuggled a camera into a concert. The last time was at a Frank Zappa concert in 1984. I pondered tucking a camera as I could not imagine the staff of Jones Hall patting people down or scanning anyone with metal detecting wands. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do that so I opted to bring my Alpha 100 with the good old 50mm lens for a low profile shoulder bag “hope they don’t make me go back to the car” casual walk through the front door and what do you know? It worked. In hindsight I should have brought the new camera and bigger lens. Ah well, live and learn.

Once the show was underway point and shoot cameras as well as pocket video lit up the audience and the staff at Jone Hall did nothing to stop any of it so I snagged a few shots of my own.

The set list from the show:

Lucinda
Down in the Hole
Falling Down
November
Dead and Lovely
Lie to Me
Day After Tomorrow
Hoist that Rag
Get Behind the Mule
Cemetary Polka
Trampled Rose
Jesus Gonna Be Here
Lucky Day
Tom Traubert’s Blues
House Where Nobody Lives
Innocent when you dream
Make it Rain
Murder in the Red Barn
Come on up to the House
Dirt in the Ground
Eyeball Kid

Goin’ Out West
All the World is Green

For a recap of the show itself you can check out the story at The Houston Chronicle

The above two photos are my favorites of the evening. The rest are here in my gallery.

Tags: Concert photographs, General, Live Music, Music, Photography, Sony Alpha 100 by Jay Lee
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Click image to view larger size. Or even better, see a larger version on a black background.

This is my second pass at this image. I was able to clean up the chromatic aberration that was distracting in the original image as well as the HDR version. I have also (I believe) brought out more of the "menace" in the clouds. I was also FAR less aggressive in correcting the angle than I was in the first version allowing the building to have the appearance of bowing or bending in the wind that comes from shooting at a slightly up-angle with a an ultra wide angle lens like the 11-18mm

For those who have expressed and interest, the high res version is available for download here.

Tags: HDR, Houston, Photography, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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The Allen Oldies Band celebrated the release of their new album “Ride The Wild Surf” last night at the Continental Club. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.

Especially entertaining was Tomas Escalante (Suspects/Clouseaux/El Orbits) and his son singing backup on “Sweets for My Sweet”, a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and originally recorded by The Drifters in 1961.

Tags: Concert photographs, Continental Club, Friends, General, Houston, Live Music, Photography, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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Cynthia had the idea to put together a clone shot that would portray how she sees the distribution of the workload around here. I was able to hammer this out in about an hour. Click to see full size:

Tags: Cynthia, Humor, Photography, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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From Wikipedia:

In optics, chromatic aberration is caused by a lens having a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light (the dispersion of the lens).

In real ife what it means is that in some lighting situations my ultra-wide angle lens shows some abnormalities in the form of colored fringing on objects to the far left and the far right of my images as evidenced in my recent photo of the lightning strike over 610 in Uptown.

This is taken from the left side of the original image:

As you can see, the building has a red border along the right edge that is also noticeable along the top of the tree line. If you look at the HDR image I rendered from the original RAW file you will see that the cromatic aberration is much more pronounced.

This is pushing me to learn more about post processing software tools. I have been experimenting the Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop and the initial results are promising:

Tags: General, Photography, Sony Alpha 700 by Jay Lee
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