Illuminares and My New Telephoto Lens
After owning my Nikon D70 for about six months, I decided to increase my total number of lenses from one to two. I bought a zoom lens because I wanted to take more photos of people, and could do so from a more comfortable distance. Additionally, after going on safari with a film camera and manual zoom lens, I found it extremely difficult to manually track, zoom and focus on moving animals. I figured I could optionally out-source the focus part to the zoom.
On advice from two professional photographers, I eschewed the Nikon lenses for third-party knock-offs at half the price. I’m not a good enough photographer to know the difference. I bought a Tamron AF70-300MM F/4-5.6 from the excellent folks at Dunne & Rundle on Granville St.
On Saturday night, I took it with me to the Illuminares Lantern Festival at Trout Lake. It’s a kind of anarchic gathering and pagan celebration of something, something…the tip of the Burning Man iceberg, except with lanterns.
I took a ton of photos. Ironically, most of them are before it got dark. Combine my lack of skill, the big lens and darkness and all you get are a lot of bright, blurry lines. These are three of my favourites:
The lens also has a macro setting–here are a few mundane experiments.
