Thanks Ron, you know I love the animals.......
Win for me this weekend. I bought my sister a 50mm 1.8 Nikkor so she'd have a decent low-light lens,
and for fun, I picked up this lens for me.....
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It was $20, and the aperture was stuck. Now I do not have a very great history of taking things apart and
putting them back together, but over time, I have had a few victories on stuck mechanisms on old tape
decks and such that did not require anything but some jiggling and maybe a little dis-assembly. Problem is,
these lenses are pretty complex inside, so I REALLY figured I would most likely destroy it, giving me a few
lenses to burn ants with, and if I got it to work, I would have a cheap 70-300 to carry around when I didn't
want to get something better ruined. On the day it was delivered to work, I tried to take it apart and found
I needed a finer screwdriver than I had here once I got past the mount.
So on Friday after work, I took it further apart, and got the aperture unstuck, put it back together and took it out
for a quick test shoot. Halfway down the greenway, the thing looked like it was gonna break in half. I got it home
and took it down again, this time a little further. Apparently the previous owner had tried to fix it, and couldn't,
but half re-assembled it for a quick sale to the used dept. There were three screws that were loose inside. I tightened
them up and put it all back together and it worked fine. It has a REALLY nice macro feature with 4 settings, it is a
so-so focuser speed-wise, but for the most part is sharp enough. While it is extremely cheap in overall build quality,
I bet it is worth $100-$125 new, so I septupled it's value, lol. I am not going to buy any more beat lenses, although
I did want to try and de-fungus a short prime instead of this one, but that prime 50mm was 60 bucks. Not worth trying that.
I like a $20 project much more.
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I wish I could just randomly pull out MY full frame camera and shoot with it. But that sucker stays in the
closet til I HAVE TO USE IT, lol. It's like
the Iron Shiek's knees, it ain't got many flexes left in it.
On that note though, I finally got around to checking the shutter count on my NEW old D90. 8069. That made me
VERY happy. That means two D90s and only about 15k shutter acts between them. Whew. I love the idea of
full frame A LOT, but that D90 REALLY pleases me in real time situations. I am always happy with what I come
home with even though I sometimes force it to create bad shots. What I most want is to STOP SPENDING MONEY
on camera stuff and just take pics. If I had listened to Justin, I'd be buying a house by now.
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Ahh, another D200 user. I love mine. YES its OLD, but only in dog years. And man do I love being able to
strap on an $60, old, heavy, optically juicy lens on it and shoot away with full metering functions. Great
camera.
Nice pics, too, I ALMOST bought one of those 7000s this morning surfing the used market, but in terms
of point and shoots, I guess I am gonna keep my ten year old model. I wish I was the kind of guy that actually
needed the 'slip it into a pocket' ability my brain seems to think I need to complement my DSLRs, but if that day
arrives and I need a pocket cam, I doubt I will be fussing about my little ELPH's lack of this or that. I am just
happy it still WORKS, lol.
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