Zoom Zoom

I spent $40 to triple my nail polish collection. But the really cool thing is, my camera. This picture was taken with the lens that came with the camera, an all-purpose 18-55mm:

The lens:


hi

It's a pretty bad picture, the one of the nail polish. It obviously involved little effort, except for stacking the bottles on top of each other. I wasn't really trying to "make art," but I thought I could probably do better without putting much time into it, so I switched lenses.

This is the 75-300mm lens I got for my birthday. When I opened this gift, I was kinda disappointed, because I didn't know what to do with it. All I knew was that it could zoom a lot farther than my 18-55mm could. I thought it was only good for use as a one-eyed binocular, or for trying to see into other people's apartment windows. But I've slowly been learning that it can do more than that.

Due to aperture or something technical like that, I don't know, this lens puts a lot of blur (aka "bokeh") into the background when you're taking a picture of someone or something close-up. The blur in the background draws attention to the in-focus subject of the photo. That's why this lens is fantastic for portraiture.

Blur.



Now, look at this one again. One of the main reasons this photo looks so point-and-shooty is the weird fisheye effect my 18-55mm gave it, and how everything on the right side of the picture is tilted away from you because I wasn't paying enough attention when I took the picture. This next one is what I got when I switched lenses (and moved back about 10 feet):

The background is the arm of my couch with some pants draped over it, yes, but ignore that part and see how much flatter and better the whole picture looks! Wow! There's a lot of science stuffed into those camera lenses!