I went photographing with Gopi today, and had a lot of fun.

I got to try out Gopi’s 8mm lens, with 180 degree view:

Also, it was rainy:

I also shot a lot of photos with Gopi’s 50mm f/1.4 lens. I’d forgotten how much I loved the lower fstops on my film cameras because of the amazing depth of field you get, and the ability to handhold after sunset or indoors (such as the cluster):

Have to end with this:

As a result, I will likely almost certainly be buying myself this lens (50mm f/1.8, ~75mm equivalent for digital) later this week. My normal-use lens (18-200mm) only stops down to f/3.5 at the 18mm end and f/6.2 at the 200mm end (and my 100-300mm isn’t much better), which is generally worthless for depth of field. Also, this would be an ideal portraiture lens, and I tend to prefer shooting portraits. Meh.
…
…I can afford to spend $130, right?
…I still feel bad spending it though. Blahhh.
…I’m also tempted by the 50mm f/1.4 but I don’t think the extra stop down is worth an extra ~$250.

So some of you probably remember my horror stories about this camera repair service (such as not fixing it the first time, not being open during their advertised hours causing me to waste a trip downtown, not having people on-hand to do repairs despite that being their name, losing my flash popup button such that I had to use a paperclip to pop it).

Turns out they left me with another present: When they fixed my camera, they set the time on it behind by 12 hours. This isn’t something I noticed before because I usually don’t use timestamps, and the time itself is right (it’s just the AM/PM part that’s wrong). Noticed this today while tagging photos because Photoshop Album (which is a rather terrible program in itself, but I digress) sorts photos by chronological timewise but reverse chronological for days (i.e. as you’re scrolling down, 12:01 midnight on January 2 appears before 11:59 PM on January 1, but 11:58 PM on January 1 also appears before 11:59 PM), so some days were being split up (because photos taken before vs after noon on that day were being reported as different days). So yeah, now I have to go and fix the timestamp on every photo from August 5, 2007 until today. Argh.

Don’t ever use this camera repair service. Seriously.

On the plus side, I have now tagged 104226 photos. Yay photos.