You Don't Need a Zoom Lens
I stumbled across it two more times this week, the advice about using a high-quality prime lens instead of the zoom lens that comes with most DSLR kits. The idea is that a high-quality prime lens is much more affordable and takes sharper and more vibrant images than a zoom lens at the same price.
The loss of versatility is mostly an imagined problem. A prime “portrait” lens will work great in most scenarios. You don’t need a zoom lens. You certainly don’t need a zoom lens as much as you need your DSLR sensor to be bathed in as much light as possible, at a price you can justify to your spouse.
Taken at f/1.4 under cloudy skies at ISO 800.
I purchased a Nikon AF-S 50mm f/1.4 G based on Ken Rockwell’s review. He’s not a great photographer, but he’s a fantastic product reviewer. I trust his opinions on gear more than anyone else’s. He’s also more likely to be found shooting with Nikon gear (I have a D5100), so his opinion is backed by a lot of real-world use.
For an everyday prime lens he still prefers the older AF-D model, but that lens won’t auto-focus when used with a D5100, so I went with the closest alternative. I was expecting good results, but I was not prepared for just how much better it was than our old kit zoom lens. Believe the hype.
Getting It Right
Two big things happened to me recently: I quit my day job to become an indie iOS developer, and I became a father.
Needless to say, I now have a lot to think about.
In-between diaper changes and bottle feedings, I’ve been wrestling with some hard design challenges for my next app. Every day this week, I worked late into the evening, pushing the design to a point that seemed like the right solution, only to wake up the next day and see that yesterday’s solution wasn’t right yet.
It’s taxing to work like this, but rewarding. Vonnegut’s advice to young writers was to work passionately on a sonnet for a week, polishing it more every day, then to tear it up and toss the pieces into seven different trashcans. Your best work today will not be as good as your best work tomorrow.
I have my dad to thank for my capacity for this kind of work, such as it is. If I had had a different upbringing, I would likely have a bad habit of settling for my first attempts. My dad taught me the importance of getting it right.
The stories about my dad’s tireless attention to detail could fill a book. He pushes himself to do his best in everything, even in menial tasks around the house. He mows the lawn as carefully as he composes music. He’s a pianist and a music/drama teacher. Somewhere he learned how to draw well, too. I think he taught himself. When he directed Little Shop of Horrors at a local high school, he ordered an enormous collection of realistic plant monster puppets. They arrived in an 18-wheeler. The biggest one filled the stage and took five people to operate it. It was the coolest thing many of those kids had ever done.
My dad pushed me as hard as he pushed himself. When I was in high school, my chemistry teacher had us create trading cards for the periodic table of the elements. Everybody had to pick an element and make three trading cards for it. I picked phosphorus because it glows in the dark. I stayed up very late the night it was due. I designed the cards with our Power Mac. They looked like dossiers from the X-Files. They had glow-in-the-dark stickers and distressed paper textures. It was 1996 and they were awesome.
My dad saw what I was making and took me down to Kinkos to get them laminated. It was after midnight when we got there. He showed me how to get them laminated thickly, like drivers’ licenses. We even rounded the corners. The cards were impenetrable. I kept thumbing my fingers over the edges of the laminated cards, admiring their thickness, grateful to my dad for showing me how to make them.
Then the unthinkable happened. On the way home, one of us noticed that I had misspelled phosphorus. I spelled it “phosphorous,” which is the adjectival form.
“No one would notice,” I said to my dad.
“No. We’re going to get it right,” he replied.
He sent me back to the Power Mac and I re-edited the design and reprinted them. I applied a new set of stickers in just the right places. Then my dad took me back to Kinkos where we laminated the replacement set of cards, doing all the work over again, even rounding the corners. It was after 4:30 AM when we finally got home.
The second set were even better than the first. I got a good grade on them. But the satisfaction of an A+ paled in comparison to the reward of getting it right.
If nothing else, I want to share this lesson with my own son. It’s the greatest lesson my dad ever taught me: always do your best.
Unread - An RSS Reader
Unread - An RSS Reader:Announcing Unread: an RSS reader and my first indie project. The teaser site went live this morning. I won’t say much about the app until it’s out, but I will say this: if you use RSS and like Riposte, then you’re going to love Unread. It will ship after iOS 7 is released this fall. Head to the teaser site and join the mailing list to be notified when it’s available.
Announcing Unread: an RSS reader and my first indie project. The...
Announcing Unread: an RSS reader and my first indie project. The teaser site went live this morning. I won’t say much about the app until it’s out, but I will say this: if you use RSS and like Riposte, then you’re going to love Unread. It will ship after iOS 7 is released this fall. Head to the teaser site and join the mailing list to be notified when it’s available.
Is That It? — My First Short Story
I was reorganizing my Dropbox folders when I stumbled upon my first short story, Is That It?. I wrote it back in 2008. It suffers from numerous flaws, but I think it’s a pretty good effort from a guy who should have been going to bed on time for nursing school, instead of staying up late writing about pointless miracles. Read it all here (PDF). Here’s the first paragraph:
Five years ago today, Saul Zuero, now an obscure philosopher and former zoo janitor, then an obscure zoo janitor and former philosopher, discovered what was and remains the World’s Only Officially Documented Miracle. All doubts have been dispelled, all possible scientific explanations exhausted. All things being equal (and in spite of the fact that there is every indication that they are not), only one avenue of theoretical causation remains open: the Divine. It happened in Chicago, on a Tuesday.