I got a chance to walk around downtown Helena for an hour this afternoon and take some photos. Helena is a city founded by four gold miners who have striking it rich one last chance. Most of these photos are of Last Chance Gulch. Many of these buildings were built during the days of the gold rush by the millionaires that had made their fortune. Helena at one point had the most millionaires per capita than anywhere in the US.
-
Eddy's Bread, good...
-
The Power Block, My dad used to work in this building
-
The Atlas Building
-
The Parrot Confectionery
-
The Montana Club
-
The Montana Club, It's different in Helena
-
A giant mural
Sigma 18-250mm and Canon XT
I've received the new lens and taken a very view photos with it (mostly because it's too cold out), but I've been playing with it, trying to get the hand of this fancy new piece of equipment.
Pinecone
-
The 'M' shot from near the tennis courts on campus
-
It's a little off kilter, but i like the photo anyway
-
Another light in The Break
Recently I've been in the market for a new lens for my Canon XT. I want something to replace the kit lens that came with the camera and I wanted something that would do the same and more (in terms of magnification). And so I've been reading and researching and a lot of the forum posts i've come across start with someone asking how to convert "zoom" (i.e. 12x) to mm (i.e 250mm), and the next several posts are generally along the lines of "zoom" is a verb, you can't convert the zoom factor to a focal length" by people with an over-inflated sense of self because they are forum admins (thus the reason i hate forums).
It seems that it comes down to a couple of simple things.
- First the answer most folks are looking for is this: a normal field of view is (generally accepted on the internet as) 50mm, thus a lens with a focal length of 250mm will have a magnification rate of 5 times (250/50 = 5).
- Second lenses that are generally labeled in terms of mm of focal length are often advertised as having a zoom ratio (i.e 12x) which is not the same as a magnification ratio. So a lens that is labeled as 18 to 250mm will magnify at 5x but may be advertised as as having 13.8x zoom ( thats 250/18 = 13.9).
All of that being said, I've procured a new Sigma 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM IF Lens, It's not actually in my hands as of yet but I'm quite excited to give it a try as it will have me a lot more reach and flexibility than the kit lens, some of the reviews on Amazon also said it was sharper between 18 and 55 which is all the kit lens allows.
Here are some photos I've taken recently:
-
Nemo
-
Whitefish train station, 2009
-
Flyover
-
A dog named Grizzly
-
The light
