Woo I'm back!

Aperture UK

Finally got access to blogger from home! Woo! Time to spend some time angst-ting online.

Didn't go out shooting this Saturday as I had stuff to do that couldn't be done on Sunday.

For fun and giggles I went up along New Oxford street, where there are a few camera shops that are supposed to have used goods; Jacobs, Jessops and Aperture.

Jacobs had a fair amount of used stuff, but nothing that caught my eye. Jessops, I only browsed quickly and did not find out where their used rack was, but I spent some time playing with the new Olympus Pen. Damn, it's a really small camera. The AF speed was not very good though, perhaps this was a pre-production camera. 3 were on display, two with the kit zoom lens (I played with that) and one with the pancake lens and viewfinder. OMG, that is really pretty. I'd expect the build quality to be better though - for the price - I think my old rangefinders were better built. Oh well. That said, I tried the Olympus E series SLRs, damn, their autofocus speeds on the kit lenses were _fast_.

Finally, I went over to Aperture (shops were very close to each other) and this is what I saw on the window sill:



Holy Moly! Super telephotos in the flesh! From left to right: 600/4IS, 400/2.8IS, 400/2.8IS, 400/2.8 AF-S, 300/2.8 AIS, 800/5.6 FD.

Inside the shop, there were lots of MF camera gear that I kinda glossed over (sorry). The only thing that caught my eye, was a grey barreled 500/4 AF-S. Drool.... They also had a 300/2.8 AFI.

But I was there for the food; the shop combines used camera gear with a snack cafe. I had probably the best ever smoked salmon ciabatta. ever. Too bad they aren't open on Sundays as I usually shoot stuff on Saturdays :(

Work has been busy, didn't spend much time at home on Houdini though - let's just called it OS issues. I'll be getting a Dell soon, and get rid of this lovely macbook pro. I'm looking forward to running Vista/Ubuntu dual boot - work OS + an OS i can use for photoshop work and gaming :)