The Evil Eyebrow

Dragon*Con Prep

Written by

Bill Ruhsam

in

Today is the last day pre-Dragon*Con which means there is plenty to do to get ready:

Sleep – Won’t be doing much of that at the Con. I maintain about a 4 AM to 8 AM unconsciousness schedule

Charge – We’re geeks, so we have a lot of electronic toys which need to be charged up, and their spare batteries also filled with electrons. I am once again renting a lens from Professional Photo Resources, the Canon f/2.8 L 70-200 IS. The “L” makes it awesome and the “IS” makes it an energy hog, so camera batteries need to be charged.

Pack – That’s easy, but there are several options for party wear to bring, and it all has to fit in the car.

Play – We have friends staying with us tonight, so we’ll be playing games and watching Mythbusters bust the Moon Hoax Myth.

We’re looking forward to tomorrow and the weekend! Downtown Atlanta will be interesting, with 30,000 Dragon*Con attendees and the Alabama/Clemson game at the Georgia Dome with god knows how many fans and tailgaters.

Comments

2 responses to “Dragon*Con Prep”

  1. James Cronen Avatar
    James Cronen

    Why does the “IS” make it an energy hog? How does the lens use power?

  2. Bill Avatar
    Bill

    All of the Canon lenses that I’m aware of draw power from the camera battery to do autofocus and other operations. In the case of the IS (“Image Stabilization”) the lens is shaking several lens elements in ways that directly counteract the camera shake you’re inducing with your hands. The IS is supposed to get you about 3 f/stops worth of shutter speed or aperture (shutter speed = 1/aperture) but in my experience I think it’s about 2.5.

    Of course, one of the problems with depending on the IS to get low-light photography is that you are still using a slow shutter speed, which meaas that motion isn’t stopped. If you look at some of the D*C pictures I took this year and last year, you’ll see that the background elements are sharp, but the people are blurry. ( Damn people, moving around while I’m trying to take pictures)

    So, ultimately, the lower the f/stop on the lens the better (and this lens has a pretty low one to begin with) if you’re taking pictures of moving things. IS helps a lot, you just need to be aware of what it does, or doesn’t do.

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