A week ago (while on campus on the weekend to take some architectural photos for Wikipedia) I ran across this scene:

Fashion shoot at the School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine

I think that's a pretty good answer to my earlier question of what real cameras are good for nowadays; I couldn't have caught that (or the architecturals) on my cell phone.

I have to admit, though, that I'm getting pretty frustrated with the chromatic aberration on my 17-85/5.6IS. It can be corrected in postprocessing but at some cost in image quality. It would be nice to have something that wide (doesn't have to zoom) with better image quality at less than the $2K that the Canon L lenses cost.




Comments:

ext_646985: If reach is not a huge issue for you then 17-55/2.8IS is a pretty good choice.
2011-06-06T03:50:24Z

Amazon lists 1,120USD for it, so it is significantly below 2k, but has an L level IQ. Build quality is not up to L, but it is not bad either.

I now carry 17-55/2.8IS and 100/2.8 macro all the time. Last week in a conference (ICASSP), I added laptop also on top of that. Resulting in a combo that was a bit too heavy to lug around. :-)

The issue of point-n-shoot (or cell phone camares) vs DSLR, I think depends a lot on what you shoot. I mostly now shoot insects and lizards (both very common in Singapore), probably point-n-shoot would not work too well...

11011110: Re: If reach is not a huge issue for you then 17-55/2.8IS is a pretty good choice.
2011-06-06T04:08:00Z

Thanks for the suggestion. The other possibility I suppose is to use my 15mm fisheye more often and rely on software to straighten it when I want a rectilinear image; I think it's quite a bit sharper than my zoom.