New lens

danka 1, originally uploaded by Mr. Wright.

To commemorate passing the 60,000 frame mark on my 20d, I present to you shot #60,001. No joke, I've clicked the shutter on my camera 60,000 times in less than three years. Hard to believe.

I also bought myself a new lens (not as a tribute, just by coincidence). It's a 35mm, f/2. Much sturdier than the other low-light lens I'd been using, much better glass, too. Too bad the auto-focus gears whir louder than any lens I've ever had.

Anyways, the point of getting this lens is to mimic Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yes, I'm fully aware that I introduced a post claiming to imitate effing Cartier-Bresson with a picture of my girlfriend's cat. The point is, HCB used a 50mm, f/1.0 super-luminous Leica lens for nearly all of his portraits, and quite possibly, for most of his amazing body of work. It seems to be an ideal lens for creating a noticeable depth of field (hard to do with wide-angle lenses) while still be versatile enough to capture a larger scene with many complementary compositional elements. It's a great lens for just shooting, in the amatuer sense, free from the professional constraints of "getting the shot." There's a certain immediacy to a 50 that's hard to come by anywhere else.

I learned to shoot in high school on an old 50mm, f/1.4, where I found all this out for myself. So one of my first purchases for the 20d was a super-cheap 50mm. But thanks to the "digital zoom" effect, my 50mm performs like a 70-75mm. That's too much zoom.

I made do for a while, but finally had to get the 35. It behaves like a 50, and at f/2, it's not too bad in low light or portraits, like this one that Danka so graciously sat for right after I pulled the lens out of the box. Next stop: international acclaim.