My First Lens Upgrade Project

I've had my Canon 450D for about a year now, and my lens array almost as long. At present, my kit contains:

• EF 50mm f/1.8 II aka 'nifty fifty'. The only lens I'm happy with.
• EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6. This lens is okay, but annoys me sometimes.
• EF 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 II USM. This lens is increasingly really annoying.

Also, I've got some big events coming up (trips to Seattle and Florence, also the Olympic fencing), and I really don't want to miss out on those shots of a lifetime. 

Considerations are that I would like to stick with the Canon system - yes, the grips etc are too big, but no current full frame cameras are meant for children-size hands anyhow. I'd like to upgrade in future to something like the Canon 5D mk III. Not this year, probably not next year ... but sometime. This, however, means that I need to primarily consider EF mount lenses, rather than the cheaper EF-S mount, unless I feel like replacing glass when I upgrade.

So why am I finding my current kit irritating and limiting?

Well, between tiny hands, not so awesome muscles, and various other things, there's quite a lot of shake when I try and take pictures at 100+mm, or in low light conditions. This means I seriously need to consider image stabilisation in my lenses. I lose a lot of otherwise awesome shots because I simply can't hold the camera still enough. Yes, a tripod would help with this. I do need a monopod or full size tripod one day. At this point, however, I think a new lens or two is probably cheaper and more flexible, although I am researching tripods on the side, as it were.

The upshot is I've been reading a lot of bewildering information about various lenses available for my camera. And it truly is bewildering - between poor site design, ambiguous google results, and my profound lack of knowledge, I've been feeling a little overwhelmed.

Most advice articles say something like "when upgrading, consider what you use lenses for" with the goal of pinning down which focal range you use most. Looking at my photos, I tend to take pictures of very small things and things very far away. I would like a macro lens, but that would be in addition to the current range of things I can do. Talking to another member of the London Photography Meetup Group on our Kew Gardens walk, he said "Well, you're kind of between a rock and a hard place then, aren't you?" which I believe is an accurate summation of my dilemma.

I use pretty much everything in my current range from 18mm through to 200mm, and keep wanting more at both ends. Oh, and smaller f-stop numbers. And a pony while I'm at it.

Ponies aside, I can't afford L lenses (Canon's pro lens range), so I'm going to have to compromise somewhere.

I've been using dpreview to read up on lenses, suggested to me by ... someone. It's got a nice interface for presenting only the lenses I'm interested in.

Thinking about my current issues (and budget limitations) I think it's more important for me to upgrade the telephoto lens than the zoom lens. I walk around with the zoom lens more, and take more shots with it ... but that's partially because my success rate is significantly higher. With this in mind, I've narrowed down on a few candidate lenses. Prices are from a google search, amazon.co.uk price included as a baseline retail price.

Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM. This is one chunky lens. Someone had one at the Kew Gardens walk, and let me play with it a bit. It's really quite nice to use, and I think the extra range would be something I'd very quickly become addicted to. However, it is large. And heavy. £300 or so, £420 from amazon.

Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM. Those two extra letters mean that it's a lot lighter, smaller, and more expensive. Also reviews seem to indicate it sucks.  £840 and up, £1103 from amazon.

Tamron SP 70-300mm f/4-5.6 Di VC USD. This lens gets good reviews, and has lots of technical acronyms in the name. From what I can tell, it's basically equivalent to the Canon, perhaps with better build quality. On the other hand, I haven't heard of this brand before, not that I'm overly educated in the field. £225 and up, £319.27 from amazon.

Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 DG OS. No reviews on my chosen review site, but a bit further afield gets me a couple of articles. It seems to be an okay lens, nothing special, but annoying if you want to use polarised filters. Affordable at £176, and £286 from amazon.

Sigma 120-300mm F2.8 EX DG OS HSM. Again, very good reviews, and lots of fancy letters. The major problem with this lens is the gap in range it leaves me, as explained below. But ... that f value is really, really, really shiny. And HUGE. And horrifically expensive. £1441, £1991 on amazon. Although there seems to be another model at £999 ish. Still too expensive.

All these lenses have something in common: they leave me without the zoom range from 55mm to 70mm (or 120mm in the case of the expensive Sigma). 55-70mm isn't too large a gap, and isn't a range I use much anyway. On the other hand, 55-120mm is quite a large gap, which covers quite a lot of range I do use. It's a wishlist lens anyway.

I know I need to get myself to a brick-and-mortar and play around with the various lenses to see what I can do with them, and whether I actually like the way they go. Still, it looks as though I'll be shelling out around £200-350, depending on which lens I go for and from whom I purchase. Of course, these are also all new lens prices; I've yet to investigate secondhand prices, which is of course the next step. Along with finding reputable sellers in the UK. Then again, I'm really tempted by having a lens with a warranty. Also, I probably need to get a UV filter and hood for whatever it is I get.

Is there anything I haven't considered? Have I missed a really good candidate? Got tips for where to buy (and try) any of these in London?

Should my blog grow up?

I realise I have fairly small readership as blogs go. This doesn't really bother me, but I don't know. Should I try to increase my audience? Is there really a point to doing so? Obviously, if I went down that path I'd probably have to have more consistent thematic input, and possibly even improve my writing somewhat. I'd have to actually do something resembling graphic design for it, and maybe commit to writing a 'real' post once or twice a week, about things that people find interesting. I'd have to standardise my tagging system somewhat, and possibly my titling system as well.

As for focus - well, currently I write the occasional ramble, book reviews now and again, sometimes I post about food that I've made, show off a few photographs, and I have the semi-daily achievements updates. That last I'd probably have to turn into actual writing instead of dot points, perhaps. The rest ... well, I suppose they're all there, but a less awkward format for the cooking and photographic stuff might be a good idea. Focus seems to be all over the place at present, and aside from starting a new blog with single-focus content, I'm not sure how to unify it - or even if it would be a good idea, or possible.

Sounds like an awful lot of work to me. It is something to consider doing. Not as the basis for a living, I don't think I could take the stress. More as a project to see If I Can.

Maybe. Thoughts? I'm thinking about it.

Management issues

Also known as - so now that I'm taking real photos, how the hell do I manage them?

The downside of having a real camera and lens is that all of a sudden, I'm taking a lot of very bad photos - and I can't tell this until after I've uploaded them to my computer.

What I've been doing up until this point is uploading everything to my photo manager on my machine (f-spot) and then uploading everything to whatever gallery it belongs in on SmugMug. I've been keeping my taken photos on my phone, as a backup. With larger files - this process is going to become unworkable. It will just take too long to import the photos to my machine. Not to mention running out of harddrive space, and laptop harddrives aren't that cheap to upgrade, either. I do have a network 2tb drive that can be used for backup purposes.

I guess this post has three major questions:
- How do I streamline the process of getting my photos off my camera and in the appropriate gallery on SmugMug?
- How do I set up automatic backup for good and mediocre photos (but not the really bad ones) from my not-always-on ubuntu laptop to my smb store? Clearly this relies on me sorting the photos first. That, or synchronisation of deletion of useless images. Either would suit.
- How do I make posting my 365project photo easier?

A few points:
- I like having my photos organised by year/month/date on my filesystem. It makes it a lot easier to figure out what I have and haven't uploaded, and also much easier to locate a particular photo, usually. I have many more days than I have subjects, you see. Also, it happens automatically - subjective sorting takes time, and whilst I do that for SmugMug, doing it twice would suck.
- I don't like manually organising files into folders. It is annoying, time wasting, and bugs me. This also explains the current state of my music collection.
- I don't mind tagging photos. It's simple enough to do in f-spot, although does not seem to be preserved on upload to SmugMug, which is annoying. Tagging things twice bugs me, although it may be useful metadata for a backup solution.
- I have limited HDD space, and living in .au, limited upload capacity. Aside from taking lower quality photos (which I am considering), how do I automate post-processing into a smaller size for upload, as well as keeping the larger size for backup in the network store?
- How do I streamline all this, especially with respect to my 365project? In an ideal world, I'd run a script with the path to the photo, and the following things would occur:
- the photo would be tagged '365project' on my laptop and SmugMug;
- the photo filename would be added to a spreadsheet (or other tracker) of days and dates for my 365project;
- the photo would be added to my project on 365project.com
- the sharelink for medium size embeddable from smugmug would be output.
- Extra bonus points: the blogger post would be entirely constructed and posted - possibly including a file of title, bonus surrounding text, and hashtags as a commandline parameter.
- And this would probably be a good time to trigger the photo backup, as I'll have been through the photos to pick one out, and there will probably be fresh photos on the system.
- Some notes here: blogger, 365project can both get posts via email; the tracker spreadsheet should ideally live in my dropbox.
- It would also be nice to have some form of easier method of uploading to SmugMug in general - the built-in in f-spot doesn't appear to work. Any tips on getting that working would be great.

Okay, power's about to get cut here; energex is upgrading some cables. I'll post this, and think some more.