Retiring Predisposition

As I may have mentioned before in these notes, I'm getting old. Sooner or later (let me be coy about the numbers) I'll be retiring. On April Fool's Day Chris and I flew (flew!) west to vet retirement venues. Better late than never, I took the advice of the guys who used to tell me, as I walked past their peepshows on Times Square, "Check it out, man, check it out." We spent three weeks checking out Northern New Mexico and Southern California.

We took two cameras, my Canon 20D and Chris's K100 Pentax, and two zooms each: for the Canon the 10-22 and 24-105; for the Pentax the 16-45 and 50-200. Since the K100 has image stabilization built into the body, and the 24-105 has Canon's IS, we did without tripods. Results were good, I think. You can see my photos at my April gallery, Chris's at hers. True, in my case what came out of the camera were mostly postcards; but I was there as a tourist, not a photo-Basho.

The K100 is Chris's only DSLR, but I have a Pentax K10 with a nice range of Limited lenses. Why didn't I take that kit instead of the older and in most ways less capable Canon 20D? Briefly, this wasn't a photo expedition. I felt I needed something that would give me good results with minimal tsuris, though not necessarily the kind of painfully-sharp, B&W-in-color look I've mentioned in connection with the K10. So I picked the DSLR I'd always pick if asked to do a routine job of work: the Canon with 24-105 f/4L IS zoom. I used that combination 90% of the time, only falling back on the very wide 10-22 for the occasional odd shot.

The 24-105 is a marvel. No kidding. It's not a heavy lens by Canon pro standards, but it's built like a brick shithouse, well sealed, smooth to zoom and focus, and sharp all over. There's a bit of barrel distortion at the wide end, and if you correct for that in Photoshop you lose a bit of the wideness, but that's acceptable to me. The bokeh isn't great, but I seldom use OOF backgrounds, so I can live with it. The f/4 limit sometimes had me shooting at ISO 1600, but with the 20D that was tolerable.

You can see what all those but's are adding up to: a literally professional package. Pros go out to get a good-enough picture, one they can sell. If they come back with something that's better than good, whoopee -- but they have to come back with something, and compromise is inevitable. Of course there were photos I'd rather have made with a Pentax Limited prime, and the less-mellifluous Pentax sensor, and a tripod, but those will have to wait till I'm well and truly retired.