New Lens

After a week in San Diego, I decided that my 18-70mm lens wasn't quite enough for me. I want to be able to get even closer to safari subjects...without endangering my life. I set out to get a new lens. I found Ken Rockwell's site, and he reviews (and uses) Nikon lenses. He spoke favorably of the Nikon 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 lens. I like that the lens is mostly made from metal (not plastic like most newer lenses). As someone who is used to how rapidly computer technology becomes obsolete, I'm fascinated that this lens, which was introduced in 1989 (and discontinued in 1999), works with my camera. In fact, it supports every function except 3-D matrix metering (but supports color matrix metering).

I won an auction on eBay to get this lens. I think I got a good price. I actually computed the average price of all of the (still visible) completed auctions for this lens and made sure I paid less than the average. I got it today.

I took an extended lunch to meet the UPS guy. At about 1:20, the truck pulled up. I was sitting there waiting and, ten minutes later, the truck pulled away. I was thinking to myself, Is this a joke? I check out the tracking online and it said that the package couldn't be delivered because no apartment number was specified. What the hell. I looked at what I sent them and, sure enough, my apartment was given. I put on my shoes, grabbed a pop and left to go back to work. But just for the fun of it, I decided to drive around a little bit and see if I could catch the UPS guy. I went around the next block, and as I was heading back up a street (completing a U), I saw a UPS truck stopped and delivering a package to some house. I put the car in reverse and then headed down to meet the UPS guy. As he walked back to his truck, I asked him if he had just been unable to deliver a package because there wasn't an apartment. He asked me my name and address. Yeah, he had it. I asked him if he wanted to see my driver's license or anything and he said no, if I knew that much about a package he believed me.

After that debacle, I went to work. When I got home, I was finally able to try it out. Ok...so the subject matter here is pretty boring, but it illustrates the point quite effectively. The top two pictures are at both ends of the lens that came with my camera, the 18-70mm. The bottom two shots are the opposite ends of the new lens. All of these pictures were taken at f/6.3 for 1/1250 of a second. As stated on the image, none of the images were resized, only cropped. If your web browser automatically resizes images, you may want to view it at full size. So far, I'm happy!