Life Through the Lens

Rokinon 8mm Fish Eye

Having the itch for a new lens...and carrying on the New year new lens tradition, I decided I needed fish eye.  Having had my eye on the Canon 8-15mm fish eye zoom for a while, I realized that $1400 for a niche lens wasn't the greatest investment.  As I searched for alternatives, I came across this Rokinon 8mm fish eye.  Its sold under many different names, but essentially made by the Korean Samyang corporation.  All the reviews showed impressive performance for the sub $300 price. The drawbacks are manual focus and manual aperture.  Luckily, fish eyes have so much DOF that you hardly need to focus for anything from 3 ft to infinity.  I quickly purchased it on Amazon prime, then promptly got my first lens stolen from my door step because the horrible On Trac delivery service was to lazy to deliver it to the leasing office of my apartment.  Once I got the replacement, I took it out for a test.  The lens is designed for APS-C cameras, so it severly vignetted on my 5D2 but wasn't so bad on the 1.3x crop 1DIII.  I just cropped in a bit in post processing.  The Canon fisheye at 8mm is not full frame either, so the performance is similar.  Here are some test shots.

First Bike Ride on Huntington Beach

Now that I’ve moved to sunny SoCal, I decided it was high time I went for a bike ride on the beach.  Since I was to the point of being mostly unpacked, I headed down to Huntington to rent a beach cruiser for the afternoon.  I rode up and down the beach until I was too saddle sore to take it anymore.  The temps were dropping and the wind was picking up, so I grabbed a hot dog from the snack shack, then headed home after snapping a few pics of the sunset.  Here’s a few choice pics below, the rest can be seen here.

Christmas 2011

Christmas this year was pretty hectic.  I was in the middle of a move from Texas to California, there was a lot of work we had to do to the house including refinishing the kitchen cabinets.  It was fairly drama filled too, but everything worked out and everyone is happy again.  Besides all that, we did manage to eat copious amounts of food and I got to hang out with my old high school / Ford buddies.  I even got to see Mark and Jean’s new bundle of joy. Rest of the photos can be seen here.

 

Kitchen Fun…

 

Catching up with friends…

Connie’s Vegas 21 Run

Its been a while since I’ve posted anything, but with the big move and unpacking pretty much complete, I have some time to catch up.  Before Christmas my sister, bro-in-law, and I took my little cousin Connie to Vegas for her 21st birthday.  When I was in high school, my sister and I used to pick her up from daycare.  She would then proceed to cry for her mommy in front of the window.  Eventually that stopped and we bonded quite well.  Now she’s like the little(est) sister we never had. In any case, we took her to Vegas to drink, gamble, and eat…oh, and watch shows too.

Happy Birthday Yama-chan!

Since there has been so much going on, and my preparing to move, we couldn’t get everyone’s schedule to work out for Yama’s birthday dinner tonight.  Yama, Dave, and I headed out to Shogun for some Sushi goodness…in honor of our 44 yr old Japanese friend.  We bought him dinner and the restaurant provided a free tempura ice cream (Yama cannot resist ice cream).

My Going Away

I’m starting a  new job in Irvine, CA and will be moving there at the end of the month.  The fellas at work got together and took me out to dinner and made some presents for me.  Most of them were pretty cool, but some were a bit NSFW, so I won’t post them here.  We went out to Sealy Flats, which normally is pretty rockin’, but not that Thursday night.  It was cold, the band was not great, and it was the band leader’s birthday party.  Lots of older folks in the crowd.  In any case, dinner was good, and the guys presented me with some gifts.  The best of which was a cowboy hat signed by everyone.

Taste of Asia – San Angelo

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but it kind of got lost in the shuffle. This was the same weekend I went to the Austin Photo Expo and did those portraits for my friend Anne…and went to Aurore’s Birthday brunch.  I then drove straight back to San Angelo and came this event.  Its surprising that San Angelo had much of an asian population at all, but we had a Taste of Asia celebration.  Its was pretty cool, full of good eats and cultural entertainment.  We had food and entertainment from India, Philippines, China, Korea, Japan, etc.  It was pretty nice to see some asian culture…even it had to be bussed in from Austin :)

Here’s some video of the Coconut Dance.

*UPDATE: Yama said the Coconut Dance was too lame, so here's a video of the Korean Drum Dance.

 

Barker Family Photos 2011

Justin’s mom and sister’s entire family came down to San Angelo for Thanksgiving and Megan asked if I would shoot some family portraits of all of them together.  This was a day before I was leaving for Carlsbad, so the timing was tight.  I couldn’t promise much as its almost impossible to get a group photo that big without someone blinking or looking away, especially when you have 4 kids.  The weather was chilly, the girls were uncooperative, and the light was perfect.  It was like a perfect storm, but we managed to get some photos I was pretty happy with.

Carlsbad Caverns & Guadalupe Mountains Roadtrip 2011

This was the first Thanksgiving that I wasn’t able to go to Big Bend with Doug and Jim.  It was kind of a bummer, but I essentially ran out of vacation this year…although that doesn’t matter anymore.  I then planned a trip to Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico, and asked Yama if he wanted to come along.  After work in Wednesday we headed west.  As it turned out the drive wasn’t much longer than the typical traffic filled drive to Dallas.  Click here for all the photos.

 

I picked out this cool hotel called the Trinity…it was the only non chain option, but seemed to be the nicest option in Carlsbad.

The room was pretty swank, but they only had one bed and a sleeper sofa.  We alternated who had to sleep on the sofa. Still it was worthwhile.

Especially since the room came with free coffee and pastries in the morning.  I was expecting danishes and some french toast, but got lattes and scones/muffins/cinnamon rolls/strudel instead.

 

We decided to hit Carlsbad Caverns on Thankgiving as the crowds would hopefully be smaller that day, and it turned out to be a pretty wise decision.  There were so few people there, we could easily setup tripods and shoot.

Here’s some highlights of the Caverns

 

Being that everything was closed on Thanksgiving, we made our way to the Best Western for the Thanksgiving buffet.

 

The next day it was raining in the morning, so we headed up to Roswell to look for some aliens and see the sights. First stop was the visitors center to get a pic with aliens and figure out what sights there were to see.  Needless to say, it was a bit disappointing.  We checked out the Bitter Lake Wildlife Refuge and saw nothing but birds. Then went to the Lea house to see the house of one of the founders of Carlsbad. Also saw the POW memorial, where WWII German POWs built an iron cross into the bank of the river while working on the chain gang.

 

The next day, we went to the Guadalupe Mountains to hike the Devil’s Hall trail.  Its freezing in the morning, but warmed up a little later.  It was an awesome hike with some sweet sights.

 

Sunday morning, we headed back to San Angelo, but on the way we stopped off at the Living Desert Zoo.  It was pretty cool, but the animals were less than active.

Adorama Tri-flash FLH8

Browsing around the Adorama site for cool stuff that I couldn’t live without, I ran across this little hidden gem.  Being a hard core speedlight user, I had always needed ways to get more power out of little flashes.  Way back in the day, I made up a triflash adapter of my own, instead of paying $80 for Lastolite’s version.  Downside was that it was made of 1/4-20 bolts and didn’t look really nice, and was a real pain in the butt to assemble and use. So imagine my surprise when I found this Adorama Triple Shoe Adapter for $16.  It is pretty decently made of high quality plastic.  It takes the weight of speedlights without any creaking or free play.  The best part is that it has an 1/8” phono jack for triggering with a wireless trigger or optical slave.  At full power it gives me 1.5 stops over what a single speedlight can provide. Definitely useful in a pinch or when E-TTL is more convenient.