Delectare

It’s been far too wet this week to do anything productive in the back yard, fence-wise at least. There’s actually a puddle where the garden shed used to be… I guess I’m not building the coop there. Sara and I stayed up until 5:00 AM last night watching Atonement and Lust Caution, and made it through Hard Candy tonight. All greats in regards to story and cinematography, but not the kind of films you necessarily want to watch a second time.

The only marginally productive thing I did today was wander up the Amazon bike path and play with my new lens some more. I got some great pics of a rainbow that I happened to catch - you can even see (in Lightroom at least) where the sensor picks up the UV section as sort of a hint of green just past the purple. Very cool.

Protip: Check the second page.

So I got my sexy new lens yesterday. It’s a Nikon 55-200mm DX-format with vibration reduction. It picks up nicely where the stock 18-55 leaves off, and actually does better at 55mm than it does.

I took it out this afternoon and put it up against the stock 18-55 and the AF Nikkor 70-210 that I’m borrowing from Dylan. TL;DR is that the new lens is great, but check out the full post for comparison images and some other thoughts. Keep in mind that, as Dylan said, “lens comparisons are for dorks.”

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I didn’t get much yard work done today, but I did spend some time on the lawn playing with Dylan’s 210mm zoom telephoto lens and macro filter. It’s a fantastic piece of hardware, but somewhat temperamental on my camera. The lack of autofocus combined with the .5mm depth of field at full zoom makes for some challenging pictures. I need to play with the aperture controls a bit more; for some reason I didn’t pay enough attention to how the D40 worked with this lens and thought it was locked wide open. I had tons of fun anyways, and did end up with a few shots that don’t look like total crap.

Hay check it out! First section of fence: COMPLETE. We also ended up using some of the cut-off stringer ends and extra boards to make a short temporary section to fill in the gap between the end of our yard and the beginning of the wire mesh fenceing that runs the rest of the way back to the end of Sara’s parents yard. It’s just kind of tacked to the post, as I didn’t want to waste any brackets on something that’s not going to be permanent. Other than that, I think it all looks fantastic.

Mouseover for before/after:

I got the first line of fenceposts in. I’d been a little worried about getting everything even and square, but it went a lot better than I though it was going to. The hardware store had a nifty post level that made that bit of the process a piece of cake, and the rest of the holes went a lot better than the first one. I ended up doing 3 foot holes with 1 foot of gravel at the bottom, mixed up the cement one bag at a time in the wheelbarrow, and now they’re all rigged up and curing. Sara and I even found some time to put a little bling in one of the footings.