So back from China, I got most of my rolls developed, and I am quite happy with them. It was the perfect environment for me there... I always feel a bit weird about photographing random people in the street, even though they are great subjects. Here I could do it with relative impunity; the locals already think I'm weird, carrying a camera around doesn't make me that much weirder. Plus, the average street in Chengdu is about 100x more interesting than in Singapore or Berkeley.
So the whole time I was shooting, I felt like I couldn't fill up the photo with the subject quite as much as I wanted to. I was maxing out my 75-300mm lens, so the only thing to do is get closer, which is often either not possible or irksome from my bashfulness. I loathe photos where the people are a tiny fraction of the shot. More is better when the subject is concerned.
Well it turns out that my photos (to be posted this weekend earliest) had pretty good composition -- the subjects generally occupied enough of the frame. But I still cannot help but wonder how much having an extra 100mm of focal length would enable me to get better composition or bring more subject material into my sniper range of 50-100ft.
I have a Canon camera system, so I have to check out what lenses they offer. There aren't that many options. Lenses 500mm and up are absurdly expensive, plus they are prime lenses -- I'd lose out on anything inside of 500mm. So it looks like I don't have much choice other than the Canon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6. By all accounts it is a good lens, even great, but the thing costs $2600SGD (something like $1450USD). Ouch. That is a huge amount of money for the marginal improvement (an extra 100mm of focal length, one or two stops of extra light, and electronic image stabilization).
So I'm a long way from getting a craving for this lens, principally because I don't know what the marginal benefit of it would be over my 450$ 75-300mm 4.5-5.6 would be. For that matter, I might not even be appreciating the marginal costs of adding an extra three pounds of weight to an already painfully heavy EOS3.
I could do some calculations for a first try -- figure out for a given size subject size as a percentage of a frame, how many extra feet of distance that would give me. But at the end of the day, I really need to use one before I can crave for it.
If I still lived in Berkeley it would be an extremely simple matter to just run into SF and rent one for a day or a week or whatever for a somewhat nominal sum. However in Singapore renting something like that is anathema. No one does it. The only place I found that would do it charged a ridiculous sum... sort of on the order of "if I rented this for two weeks, it would be cheaper to buy it." So I'm a bit boned. I don't know anyone who owns one that I can borrow, or else I will need to make increasingly blunt hints to my regular camera store that I want to try one.
But then if I like it enough to buy it, I might just buy it used from somewhere, which would be a bit weird after using the store's model. But screw it; we've spent a lot of money there over the last several years.
Anyway, at this point it just seems like daydreaming-out-loud, and after I do it enough, it'll blow over, like so many other things. After all, even my earliest craving need, the Earth Ball, passed eventually. (I hadn't recalled that old chestnut in more than twenty years before it popped out of nowhere to me yesterday. {i was reflecting on my stomach feeling like it was the size of one}),
Posted by Nils Blutig at October 10, 2002 02:06 PM | TrackBack