So I found out recently that one of my most useful lenses has mold inside of it and its pretty much shot. Its the Tamron 17-50mm f2.8. Its actually a really good sharp lens and the wide aperture makes it useful for low light conditions. Tamron said the least it would cost is $155 but often times mold is more difficult to clean and could cost over $300 to fix. The lens itself is only worth about $399 brand new so it may not even be worth fixing if it is going to cost over $300. Oh well I guess it will make a good paper weight eh? I may take it to a local camera repair shop and see what they will quote it at because I've heard that shops like that can often fix them for half the cost of what an authorized repair center will. Even if they can repair it, i'll probably just sell it because I don't want to keep it in case it develops mold again. I'm not sure how it got the mold, maybe using it on the coast a while back and zooming in and out sucked moisture into the non-weather sealed lens. It could also be the old house I moved out of a couple months ago, we were pretty convinced the house had a mold problem even though our landlord kept denying it. When we moved out a pair of my girlfriends sandals which had been sitting in the closet and not been used the whole time we lived there were absolutely covered in green so I'm pretty sure we had a mold problem.

So as of right now I have nothing in the 22-100mm range which is probably one of the most useful focal ranges for photography. I'll probably be without that range for a little while since I've been living paycheck to paycheck with just enough for rent, bills and food. I'll start trying to save up but it may take a while. I've been looking into getting the Tamron 28-75 f2.8 which has pretty good ratings and is relatively cheap, it will also give me a wider focal range than I had before. Since I've not had anything in the 50-100mm range and that one will also close the gap. With that lens I'd only have a gap from 22-28mm and 75-100mm, two small gaps is much better than having two big gaps.

One other thing I have been looking into is using old manual focus lenses with a lens mount converter. I have some old nikon lenses from the 70's which are actually still good lenses, they just need to be manually focused. I've already ordered the converter off of ebay. I often use live view and zoom in 10x to manually get my focus perfect anyway since my landscape subjects are usually not moving so having to manually focus those lenses will not be a big deal to me. I also found out that I can get an old nikon 50mm f1.4 lens for about $100-150 where the canon 50mm 1.4 is $400, I can do without the autofocus.


I don't have the time at the moment to pick new features so I'll keep the same ones from the last journal.

bada


danUK86


drewyboy


futureplug


jozefm


kkart


niel4