Sorry. About that.

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Soon I will have saved up enough gift certificates to get a 18-200 DX Nikkor lens, which'll be pretty nice. People who know a whole bunch more about lenses than I do will tell me all the bad things about it, but it's a $700-$750 lens that I'll be paying hardly anything for in the end. So.

I've started trying some really long exposures, with the bulb shutter setting and the shutter remote. That's pretty fun, isn't it. You just click the shutter open, go inside and fold laundry or something, come back out, click it closed again. Or if I'm somewhere not at home, click the shutter open, stand there with my iPod and listen to Inagaddadavida or something, click it closed again. A stopwatch would be nice though.

I'm getting kind of sick of doing HDRs, to tell the truth. The biggest problem I have with it is that it has such a tendency to try and turn shadows and highlights into midtones. It does such an annoying job at light smoothing that I have to spend forever dodging the highlights back in and smudging out the noise that shows up in the shadows (just let them be black, Photomatix!) to get the image looking normal again. I know I can take the "strength" slider back to make it not look as bad, but at that point it looks like an image I might have been able to put together with Camera Raw and Photoshop.

A while ago I took 3 exposures of the same night scene and tried combining them myself, using layer masks and brushes with different opacities and stuff. It was tricky but it worked out pretty well and I felt like I had more control over it that way, even if it didn't look as cool as a perfect HDR would have. So I'll probably keep trying to do that, whenever possible.

I see nothing wrong with people doing HDRs, I think they do some great ones. Anyone who says HDR is cheating is pretty much wrong, I decided. They usually take a lot longer to fix up than "normal" images do. But I've become so much of a control freak with the pictures I take that I don't like the unpredictability of doing it that way. Some people really do like it though, and that's fine. I'm just the kind of person that, when I shoot with a Holga for instance, I feel like I have to crop or dodge out the vignette on the corners of the print, instead of just leaving it alone like most people like to do because to them it's a fun part of the process.

I'll prob'ly keep doing HDRs, but not at night anymore, and not to the extent that it's immediately obvious. Just enough to bring out some texture detail that I couldn't normally do myself, or whatever. You know what!? I don't think I actually know what I'm talking about in fact.

GARFIELD PEED IN THE POPCORN BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK

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