Category: Roger's Corner
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The Gear Head Pixel Peeper Quiz
I admit it. I am a card-carrying gear-head pixel-peeper. But I have an excuse (well, at least now I do): gear is my business. There was a time, before I got honest with myself, when I thought I was a just a photographer who was really interested in the tools of my craft. Eventually, I came to admit…
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Sharing a Good Read
One part of my job that gets to be a job sometimes is reading. The writing I do requires a lot of research reading. Making purchasing and troubleshooting decisions for Lensrentals requires a lot of research reading. So when I received a copy of Steve Simon’s book _The Passionate Photographer: Ten…
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Notes on Lens and Camera Variation
A funny thing happened when I opened Lensrentals and started getting 6 or 10 copies of each lens: I found out they weren’t all the same. Not quite. And each of those copies behaved a bit different on different cameras. I wrote a couple of articles about this: This Lens is Soft and Other Myths…
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58 Lines by 36 Photographers
I loves me some quotes, so I thought I’d gather up my favorites and share them. I tried to get to 88 lines, wanting to pay tribute to the ultimate 80’s cult band, the Nails (or the less classic “88 lines about 44 Simpsons“). But when the dust settled I only came up with 58 that I thought were…
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Good Times with Bad Filters
OK. First and foremost this is a fun post. It is not episode 362 of “Should you put a UV filter on your lens”. Some people use them. Some don’t. There’s not enough bandwidth to ever end that argument. But here at Lensrentals, we have a ton of filters. We have some really good, very expensive…
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The Full Frame Move
I hear it all the time: I’m thinking about moving to a full-frame camera. It’s getting more common as the price gap between full and crop frame cameras is shrinking, at least to some degree. But often it said as if moving to full-frame is, by itself, an upgrade. As someone who moves back and forth…
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Lenses: Don’t Collect the Whole Set
> Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions. Author unknown This article is written for those people who not too long ago walked into (or more likely logged onto) a camera store and purchased their first digital SLR and a lens or two. It was 12 years ago for me, but I still…
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The II Conundrum
_First, things first: this is simply an editorial. So there’s no worthwhile knowledge in this article, just my opinions._ A few years ago, when a new version of anything came out, here was the Lensrentals drill: 1. Buy the new version, anywhere at any price because we couldn’t possibly get enough.…
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The Light at the End of the Tunnel
# The Light at the End of the Tunnel Won’t Be a Strobe One of my jobs at LensRentals is to predict the future. We have some flexibility, but in general we have to decide what to buy, and how many copies to buy, before an item is actually released. So I get to spend a few hours each day haunting the…
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This Changes Everything Award for 2009
I like to write two things: history and predicting the future. I’m pretty accurate on the former and usually entertain people when I try to do the latter. I started to write a history article about the most important, landscape-changing advances in the digital camera world. When I started…
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The Polymath Photographer
A polymath (Greek polymath?s, “having learned much”) is a person whose expertise fills a significant number of subject areas. We more often call them Renaissance men, for the days when it was common for someone to be an artist, scientist, writer, etc. During the last several years, I’ve had the…
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Thoughts on Micro 4/3
Over the last month I’ve spent a lot of time with the new Micro 4/3s cameras: I took a Panasonic G-1 on vacation a few weeks ago, spent a week shooting the Olympus E-P1 with various lenses and adapters, and then this last weekend took the new Panasonic GH-1 out with the 14-140mm kit lens. Plus…