Tokina

Lately my blog posts have been few and far between and mainly its been due to the fact that its been difficult to take pictures. My Nikon kit lens (which is a really really nice lens!) has been acting up since early August and it's been such a bummer. It seizes up while attempting to focus and spits out these sad whirr-thump sounds :o( My awesome gearhead husband wants to take a shot at fixing it and in the meantime thought it'd be a good time to invest in another lens.

Enter Tokina!

I am not - truly not - a real "photographer". I admire many photographers (my brother is one, so is my sister-in-law). I have mostly taken photos from necessity. To capture and document my work (murals & paintings), for promotion & for my website, and of course for the everyday life moments. But lately, and blame it on the awesome Nikon D80, I have been falling in love with photography and earning respect for all you photographers. There is so much to learn, and wow, when you know how to do certain things with your camera, your photos can really sing.

So while Jared works on my kit lens, I've begun to play with this very interesting Tokina lens. It's a wide angle - 11-16mm. Not super wide, but plenty wide enough. With very little distortion around the edges (way better than the wide angle I had on my Canon powershot). I can literally hold the camera 3 inches from the Bird's face and get a clear shot of her with tons of room around, and beautiful focus. Very intriguing.

I can also capture things like this (sorry, the blogger page I have cuts off my horizontally oriented photos...must.fix.this.soon):

And this:

I'm going to keep learning about this lens and will hopefully begin to take beautiful photos with it. My photos aren't exactly earth shattering, haha, but I'm totally enjoying the process.

Oh, and the post yesterday "Bananas for bananas" - were you wondering what the heck?? It was just that kind of day. A really ehh kind of day. The kind I don't like to rehash and talk about. BUT...that was just till about 4pm. After that things got much better. I'll share more on that as well as share photos from our little road trip and the meet & greet with someone very special whose work I really admire.

If I get time later today I'll post about it. Otherwise probably this weekend. Right now it's time to take advantage of the Bird's nap (halleluia) and work more on the portrait commission. It's looking pretty swell but there's much more to be done.

Lovely day to you!