This doing nothing thing is really overrated. Being fairly helpless and incapacitated from my normal lifestyle is getting old, fast. Most of what I do revolves around Facebook and my new camera lens.

While in Glen Carbon visiting Britt’s fam for her birthday I stopped in a Creve Coeur Camera. It was a pretty decent store, considering there isn’t any camera store in Clarksville closer than Nashville. I’d been looking into getting a smaller lens than my 18-105mm that came as a set with my Nikon D90. Being quite the novice, I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into. But I read some great things about Nikon’s 50mm lens that has been out forever. Because of its tried-and-true, minimum design it is great for low light and is the fastest lens they’ve ever made.

Here are a few of the first shots:

We always stop at Panera on our way out of the Glen Carbon area. I swear, the first person to open one in the Ft. Campbell area will be a millionaire. Here I was testing out my new aperture limit of f/1.8, since my other lens only goes to 3.5. At that aperture the focus is like an inch, so I can get some awesome artsy, blurry shots.

When I travel I let Dozie roam around the car. She loves to sit atop the back seat and stay silhouetted in the rear view mirror. I couldn’t stop playing with the new lens so when we stopped at a gas station I got this shot.

I was also practicing a few night techniques I had read about. Here’s one with the new 50mm lens:

Here I was able to adjust the aperture so that the speedometer was in focus but got a nice blur in the background from a car on the opposite side of the highway. Again, this lens rocks in low light.

Here’s one with my zoom lens, which I learned is called a zoom technique:

With a 1″ exposure, the key was to focus on the “Moonrise” sign, fire the shutter and wait about 1/3 of a second before zooming out. This maintained the initial focus on the signs before “pulling” the lights out. I also picked up a polarized filter for both lenses that will come in real handy in Afghanistan. Next up is to get some macro filters to substitute for the $1,000+ macro lens I’d love to have.

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