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NOTE: This post seems very commercial, but I mean every word of it and I am not getting paid for any of this.

I’m almost to a point where I have everything I really need in photography gear. I got a sweet LX kit lined up with 3 lenses from 3 great makers. The Tamron 17mm, the Carl Zeiss 28mm, and the Voigtlander 58mm. This makes a killer set on film.

The Tamron is an excellent performer and have only seen great things from this ultra-wide. People have reported seeing variances in it’s image quality but not enough for me to want to test mine for sharpness. Next is the CZ 28 Distagon. Oh man. This lens is a hunk of great elements. Zeiss lenses have this special formula to produce micro-contrasty images. This fast wide angle lens is my favorite focal length. Not really wide enough to get out of control but wide enough to make a 35mm not necessary. And finally the Nokton 58 which is an ode to the other Noktons. Longer then 50 and fast @ f/1.4, this lens makes nice bokeh that I find pleasing to the eye. The 9 aperture blades ensure this and it is one of the best manual focusing slr lenses that I have used; light and quick and damped well.

I just sent off 5 rolls of film to North Coast Photographic Services (NCPS) because of their great reviews on photo dev. and scanning. I can’t wait to see the results. I’m also on the look out for another Pentax LX, my favorite film SLR.

Now, on my digital side, I have pretty much the same thing, but at faster speeds. With the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, I don’t think I’ll be upgrading anytime soon, unless a Mark III comes out, which it won’t. The HD movies, soon with 24p, and decent high iso shots is all I need for now. Plus, the ability to adapt almost any lens mount is just a plus for this full frame beast. The focal range I have is the Tokina 17 (yea, I know), 24LII and the 50L.

Ok, so the 50L has a lot of talk about focus shift, softness wide open, high price, blah blah blah. Show me another AF 50/1.2. Actually, show me a better AF 50/1.4! For it’s price, you getting a 50/1.2 that has AF and is sealed. Yea, it is bigger then the rest, but that is the price you pay for some electronics to focus for you. And the manual focus override is nice for when the AF gets it wrong, which is like, 1/10 for me. The images this lens has produce for me have justified it’s price tag. I am happy with this lens and I enjoy reading naysayers comments about it. Then there is the 24. I have had this lens for about a week or so, haven’t been out shooting it as much as I want, but man. This lens truly is the best lens I’ve used ever. Just looking at a few test shots I took with it, I’m wowed every time I gaze at it. Fast wides like this don’t come around often. I think only Nikon, Canon and Lecia have produced such fast wides. This lens is going to be so fun to use. And yea, the Tokina. What can I say? I like cheap AF 17mm. Wide open, ok. Stopped down, good. It isn’t the best in the bunch, but so far it has been good to me.

This set satisfies my needs for right now. And I can only say good things about these lenses. I’m 100% sure they’ll continue to serve me through out my adventures and mis-adventures.

TNX isn’t giving me money for this or even a referral link for this (lame, I know). So you can tell this is from the heart. But I have to say their services have helped me a lot when it comes to my advertising revenue.

The ease of creating a website that generates traffic then to slap ads on their depending on the number of pages index and their page rank is great. I have other projects on auto pilot but nothing has worked as fast as this and as legit as this. With my generators working a little slower, and my pages staying in the SERPS a bit longer, the pay-off by having them manually approved by the TNX staff isn’t such a big deal.

Given the ratio of variable time with how much work I put in, I gain about 200% from my work with TNX. If you have a few pages that are just hanging around in the SERPS with some rank on them, give them to TNX and watch the money flow.

I redesigned my fybix.net domain to be sort of my homepage for my crappy photography. I am using lightbox2 for the effects and I am quite happy the way it turned out. I like it even to the point that I am considering some sort of prototype photoblog that I was working on awhile ago. Awhile ago being like 4 or 5 years ago. I save all my code from since I started writing code. I still have some old VB crap my friends and I were working on. It feels great to look back at all that ambition and energy we had to put into projects and then I feel sad because we never got a chance to finish them.

Well, that is neither here nor there. Just know I updated the homepage and I might be coming out with an update to some old code with a photoblog.

An old friend of mine from South Korea showed up. We meet when I was attached to his unit for a few months. We lived on a small base known as Camp Mujuk. I was away from my newborn son and my wife so I kind of hated that fact, but I am a Marine so I dealt with it. With such a small number of Marines in such a small and relaxed environment, we quickly bonded.

Our live rotated around a daily rut and we kept to our rut to keep our sanity from the horrors of dealing with funny and simple issues that came at us during the day. I love that. When everyone knows their role and how to play it. We had lots of fun out there. I can’t go into details of the stuff we do, but just imagine Marines doing what they do best. I was quite sad the day I left because I knew I was leaving a good bunch of friends. Deep inside, I knew they were irreplaceable. They were a fun bunch.

Well, my friend, Sgt Kim, was in town for some training and he came down to pay me a quick visit. We quickly went into our smoke and joke zone and laughed. We reminisced about the good ‘ol days back on Mujuk. And wow, I missed it a lot more then I thought. To have that sense of freedom and youth again, I’d go back for another stint. Hey Kim, I miss ya man; and if you are reading, Elwood, Kelly, Lee! (ROKMC! Doing push-ups in the snow!) We were the original Bad News Bears, The S4, I really miss ya’ll!