I’ve been looking at the Sigma 12-24 lens for my set of Canon 10d’s for a while now and have read mostly favorable reviews. The few negative reviews have been on softness and distortion problems that will affect any lens that wide. What I have had a hard time finding is sample images.

Enter PBase. The way their database is set up you can search images by camera used and stuffed down at the bottom underneath the list of cameras you can also search by lens used. Click on the lens you’re interested in and 12 random images from the PBase database using that lens will come up making it easy to find samples.

And if any of y’all reading this have used the Sigma 12-24 let me know what you think.

The little Linux file server that sits under my desk has been getting louder and louder over the past few weeks. Yesterday it got to the point where I just couldn’t work anymore with the noise, and I was a little worried about it crashing because of heat. A fan that I assumed was part of the power supply was making a noise that sounded like a car revving up over and over again. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I ordered a refurb Canon 10d from B&H Photo along with a Sigma 24-70 EX Macro lens. I wanted to see how this lens did at f/2.8 so I took it to Austin and shot around with it. This image was in the Zilker Botanical Gardens.

Ok, so it wasn’t poisonous. At least, not according to the little girl that pointed it out to us. If I could go back I would have shot this at more than f/2.8, but I was experimenting with a new lens so probably 90% of what I shot that day was at f/2.8.

For the past couple of years I’ve been a moderator on Pro Photo Forum. Over the past few months PPF has been on a decline and one of the other moderators and I decided that we should start our own photography forum. Sure, there are hundreds of photography sites out there, but we feel that with the moderators we’ve brought on board we’ll be able to start something special. With the 4 moderators we’re starting with we have a good mix of opinions and skills and our goal is to make the Photo Arts Forum a first stop to discuss anything photographic.

I did most of the design work and am the resident geek of the project. That is, I set up Etomite for the static photography article section and Simple Machines for the photography discussion forum.

As is normal with most new sites, especially forums, the main site and forums are both fairly empty right now but we’re convinced that once the ball gets rolling it will be hard to stop.

The main site is at http://www.photoartsforum.com and the forums are at http://forums.photoartsforum.com

I’ll admit it. I have no idea what food are not safe to freeze. It seems like pretty much anything should be fair game. Milk? Honey? Sour Cream?

The National Center for Home Food Preservation has put together a list of common foods along with how to freeze them, or why to not freeze them. Sour cream separates when frozen. Who knew?

If you are addicted to Minesweeper, or like me play in on your Palm to kill time, you should take a look at the History of Minesweeper.

Almost every posting you read on how to “correctly” run a blog says you shouldn’t have too many categories. I was guilty of that problem, so I trimmed down my categories quite a bit with the help of a plugin called Category Converter.

It’s a one file plugin that you upload to the plugin folder of your Wordpress site. After activation you’ll have a new menu under Options that’ll allow you to move every posting from one category to another category while deleting the first category along the way.

So I’ve gone from about 30 categories to about a dozen, stripping out a few that only had one or two posts in them.

Need a latte, but don’t know where the nearest Starbucks is. Text your zip code to MYSBUX (697289) and it’ll return the 3 closest Starbucks locations. If where you live is anything like Houston, they’ll probably all be withing walking distance.

Looking for a new program, maybe a free php editor. A new search engine called Deligio may help you out. Enter what you’re looking for an it’ll bring up every program in its database that matches.

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