Technical Difficulties

These are the fresias blooming on our patio and making the whole garden smell wonderful!

Photography Stuff
In the past three days, to support my new-found photography habit, I have acquired a 70-200mm Canon f/2.8L telephoto zoom lens, a 1.4 Canon extender, a Kata Digital Rucksack, a very expensive B+W circular polarizer, and a 250 GB portable external hard drive.  Ayeye.  I've also downloaded a trial version of Adope Photoshop Elements, which is so confusing to me that I am really glad I don't have enough money to buy the full Photoshop software right now.  

Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L telephoto zoom lens
Big thanks to MOM who contributed a big chunk toward this fabulous purchase!  It's a very serious-looking lens and I am so proud!  

For camera freaks out there, you might notice that this is NOT the IS version.  Of couse, I wanted the IS version, but right now, I don't exactly have an unlimited supply of money, and I read reviews for this lens (written by poor folks like myself, who only have $1200 to spend on a lens and not $1600) and those who have it are VERY satisfied with its performance.  With the caveat that if they had an extra $500 lying around, the would have gone for the IS version.

Canon 1.4x II extender
Again, the poor man's version (in a sense).  I didn't want to have to pay for a stronger telephoto, so I got this extender instead.  I opted for the 1.4 instead of the 2.0 because the 2.0 apparently degrades image quality noticeably and this is not what I wanted.  Also, it significantly multiples your minimum focal length, which is not good for me because I have the non-IS lens.  I need to maintain wide aperatures so I can keep the shutter speed up to account for any shake.  

B+W Circular Polarizer
This was basically the most expensive polarizer I could find.  But, it got great reviews, so knowing virtually nothing about polarizers, I decided to give it a try.  

Kata Digital Rucksack DR-467
Haven't tried to fit my new acquisitions into this bag yet (ironically, made here in Israel!), but am looking forward to it!

Technical Problem
I got a wonderful TINY external hard drive to support my photo habit, but it is totally slowing down my computer.  I think I made progress today toward getting things back in order (honestly, I think Photoshop was the problem).  Fingers crossed.

Anyway, my Easter weekend will be spent playing with my new toys.  The above photo was taken with the old lens (in full manual mode, and in RAW format -- hurray for me).  However, to upload it, I had to shrink the file size considerably, so it's not as good as the original.  Handy excuse:-)