Tony Urban Photography – Senior Photo Art, Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer – Somerset, Johnstown, Greensburg

This afternoon the UPS delivery driver brought me my newest toy – my very first true wide angle lens. Last week I ordered the Sigma 10-20mm zoom. Before that, my widest lens was a 28-70 zoom and I never really thought I needed anything wider for wedding and portrait work. But, I’m going on a short vacation in April and I thought having a wider lens would come in handy for some of the shooting I planned to do then.

I had done some research before and felt the Sigma was the best wide angle lens for my needs. Sure, the Nikkor 12-24 gets tons of raves but I’m quite fond of my Sigma glass (I also use their 28-70 and 70-200 zooms) so I didn’t have any reservations about buying their wide angle.

I really wanted to break it in shooting some landscapes or architecture, but it’s been snowing constantly since 2pm and I didn’t really feel like going out and shooting in that, so I decided to take some shots inside the house instead. As soon as I peered through the viewfinder, I was amazed. At 10mm the lens was so unbelievably wide that it was astonishing.

I can’t wait to put it to proper use, but for now here are some snapshots, starting off with photos of the actual lens.

Just to demonstrate the difference between a wide angle and a more standard lens (in this case my 50mm prime), I took some shots out of two different windows, standing at the same spots each time. The first photo of each “scene” is the 50mm and the second is the wide angle at 10mm.

After that I just took some pics of random objects (and my dog). Shooting close objects at 10mm leads to some neat distortion.

For the past week I haven’t been able to send email to people using Yahoo.com as their email provider. Yahoo has blocked a huge number of IP addresses from emailing their servers in an effort to prevent spam. As a result, thousands of people are no longer able to send email to Yahoo.com email users. My domain host is one of the servers that has been blocked and there is no way for me to work around it. I’m having my domain host try to get their IP address removed from Yahoo’s “blacklist” but until then, I am unable to do anything about it and my server has apparently been trying to get this issue fixed with little help from Yahoo. I have also directly contacted Yahoo and their response basically amounts to “Be patient and the problem might go away.”

So if you use Yahoo.com for email, please know that Yahoo’s practices may be preventing you from receiving email, even from people you have written to. If you’re a Yahoo.com email user and want to get in touch with me, please provide me with a phone number or a non-Yahoo email address so I am able to respond. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

I feel like a total slacker. I haven’t had a good blog in weeks and still don’t have anything new to post. I had a few boudoir shoots recently and they went great. But, the clients have asked that the photos not be posted for privacy reasons. I’m fine with that, but it doesn’t make for an interesting blog entry.

The weather here has been pathetic. It varies from snow to freezing rain and I don’t feel like going outside to shoot in either. I’m getting cabin fever and can’t wait for nice weather. I have so many ideas I want to do for art photos but it’s impossible to plan on a shoot when you can suddenly have 6+ inches of snow on any given day.

I bought Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” to read when I have a chance. I have a few slideshows I’m almost finished with and then, if the weather doesn’t break, I’ll probably take the time to read it. I’d rather be working though.