Camera

My camera is a digital SLR (single lens reflex) EOS camera by Canon, specifically the XSi (450d). I’ve had it since July 2008, it replaced my EOS Rebel (300d) and I’m very happy with it. I’m in pretty good company as evident by Flickr’s camera finder. As of May 25th 2009, there are 38 million images taken with this model on Flickr with an average of 5000 daily users. Its currently the 2nd most popular camera on Flickr (after the iPhone 3G, ugh).

Looking at the people I know, and what camera they use, I find myself somewhere in the middle (price wise) and very near the top (quality wise). Most of the people I know have point&shoot cameras, which are very convenient, fairly cheap, and horribly bad. The few people I know who shoot with DSLR cameras, usually have more expensive gear (cough cough my dad cough). My decision to remain with an entry-level DSLR camera was quite conscious, as I think the leap in quality from point&shoot to DSLR is much much smaller than the difference between my camera and the Canon EOS 5 mark II (god I want that camera). I’ll forgo the discussion on why DSLR cameras are so superior. For those interested I refer you to this very interesting blog – petavoxel

Lens

I prefer to spend my money on lenses. A good lens is worth its weight in gold, and it allows you to bring out the best in your camera. Lens can be categorized in several ways

• By quality – there are companies known for their quality lenses and some not so much. And even within the same company there are better series of lenses (Canon L lenses for example), and consumer oriented cheap lenses.
• By angle – ranging from ultra-wide (fisheye) to wide (capture as much as possible) to standard (more or less what you can normally see) to tele (what you’d use to photograph in a safari)
• By type – Zoom lenses cover a range of angles, some of them even covering from wide to tele. Zoom lenses are pretty convenient, but you’re usually giving up quality for convenience. As a rule of thumb, the more zoom you get, then either you get so-so photos, or you’ve paid a lot of money for your lens. The other type is prime lenses, where the angle is fixed. This usually allows for much better behavior aperture-wise. These lenses aren’t as convenient (you need to get off your ass), but I love them.

So what do I carry?

The first lens I bought for my XSi is the Canon 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM. Its a zoom camera obviously (17 which is pretty wide, to 85 which is not quite tele). It boasts pretty crappy apertures (4-5.6) which means I need decent light to take a photo, or carry a tripod. And finally its IS (image stabilizer) which means I can shoot in worse light than I otherwise could. I don’t use it that much, its ok, but I’ve grown addicted to my prime lenses.

I have two prime lenses. One is the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II which is super cheap (100$ or so), and is a bit too zoomed in for my taste (on a digital APS-C camera). Still, it was worth the price (I paid 60$), and is good for close-up portraits. My favorite lens though, is my Sigma 30mm f/1.4. It costs around 400$ and has seen a lot of use in the last two years. Its 1.4 aperture setting allows me to capture photos with a very shallow depth of field which creates great portraits, and allows me to shoot in very low light conditions. When you have kids, you tend to shoot a lot of photos inside (bad lighting conditions) with moving subjects. Having a fast lens is a must unless you want to blind your kids with a flash (which tends to uglify photos anyway).

Knick knacks

I have both a regular (cheap) tripod, and an SLR gorillapod to stabilize my camera when I take low-light, HDR or panoramic photographs. I have a micro-fiber cloth for cleaning my lens and camera (pretty important), and I have a bunch of very fast SDHC 4GB cards. I also own a Canon Speedlite EX580 II (external flash) which I don’t use enough.

Software

This probably deserves its own post, but I’ll just list what I use (legally of course!)

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 – best photo organizing software ever, a complete digital darkroom.
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 – For specific photo editing tasks.
• Topaz suite of plugins – I just recently bought this to help me denoise images, and apply special effects, its pretty nice.
• Photomatix – Combine several exposures to create a tone-mapped high-dynamic range (HDR) image
• Flickr – My online portfolio and backup solution

Whew, that’s it.

• My photos with the XSi

I do think the winning image I selected for our walk in Tel-Aviv is a very interesting portrait with a lot of emotion. I think the softness of the photo and the blurriness around the edges enhances it quite nicely.

Anyway, I’ve made pasta like 6-7 times so far and I’m steadily improving. I decided that the ranking of a true pasta-fu master should be measured by the thickness of the pasta. At first I could only reach level 3 before the pasta sheets got all sticky and crumply and much screaming was heard in Bloch street, Tel Aviv.

But now finally I am proud to say I am a level 5 master! The pasty, much like silk, flows through my hands, behaving like a well-behaved kitten, and producing the most angelic of pastas. Yesterday we made pasta (there would have been pictures but Shachar was a bit sick so I was rushed) and I dried it on our weird Israeli-style laundry drying device.

Huzzah!

Somehow I got to organize the Tel-Aviv walk, so far I have 20+ participants registered, and I hope to fill it (50) by the time of the walk. Our Tel-Aviv walk will take place in the afternoon, hopefully including the sunset, in the south of Tel-Aviv. I still don’t have a final route for the walk, its been hectic so I haven’t been able to tour the locales.

So go ahead and register, be supportive of photography, Tel-Aviv, yourself and me! Did I mention that you might stand to win some cool prizes?

However, and that leads me to today’s post subject, we have no control over the vegetables we get!? Yes indeed, a few days before each shipment we get a list, and then it just arrives. Most of the vegetables I know how to deal with (Tomatoes, Lettuce, Cucumbers, Carrots etc.) but sometimes you get the really weird ones and you have no idea what to do with them.

Moreover, when you get five pound of carrots (around 2kg) what are you going to do? Tzimes? You need to get creative! This has positive and negative aspects. On the bright side I get a chance to try stuff I would never buy otherwise (I’m looking at you turnips and kohlrabi). On the flipside sometimes you just don’t have the mental energy to find a recipe for some weird (or not) vegetable.

One of my more trust-worthy resource has turned out to be a cook book I bought almost on a whim - ‘How to cook everything vegetarian’. It’s not really my type of cookbook for several reasons (a) it has no photos (b) it’s vegetarian! (c) its so heavy I think my building is sinking 1 inch a year because of it. Nontheless when I need to cook a specific ingredient, that book is there for me, green and huge and solid, offering a few not-too-fancy options.

Examples? Got stuck with too much cabbage, did ‘Silky Qinoa with Cabbage’. Last time I got stuck with Cabbage, did a ‘Spicy Mexican Coleslaw’. Fennel? Did Fennel Chutney, you get the point… So that’s it, an ode to a cook book, not a killer cook book but a sturdy work horse.