Fun with SLR lens nicknames

Some bit of equipment fun here.

A lot of lenses have nicknames in the photography world. Here’s a bunch that I compiled:

Nifty-fifty/Fantastic Plastic:

50mm 1.8 (for Canon, not sure if Nikon version is made of plastic as well), name given for the bang-for-buck level of this lens: for P4,000 it’s very sharp, opens wide and is relatively cheap.

The Beast:

I’ve seen a handful of Nikon lenses given this nickname, but seems that this mainly refers to the 28-70mm f/2.8. Any Nikonian care to clarify?

The Brick:

Canon’s EF 24-70 f/2.8L. Good for bashing zombies, and gives good image quality too!

The Nikon Trinity (from clubsnap.org):

AFS 70-200mm F2.8 Vr… the (holy) angel and the Virgin Mary

AFS 28-70mm F2.8 ….. the father

AFS 17-35mm F2.8 ….. the son
 

The Canon Holy Trinity (from Photography-on-the.net):

EF 35mm f/1.4L

EF 85mm f/1.2L

EF 135mm f/2L

Chosen because of “Nearly legendary image quality in the right hands” according to the site.

The Four Riders of the Apocalypse (also from POTN):

EF 200mm f/1.8L

EF 300mm f/2.8L

EF 400mm f/2.8L
EF 600mm f/4L

Also known as the white bazooka/nuclear missile prime lenses of Canon.

Wigma:

The Wide Sigma. A 10-22 ultra wide lens. A good choice for cropped bodies.

Bigma:

The Big Sigma. 50-500mm lens. Enough said.

Super Bad Brad! (a.k.a. Grungy Gaye)

Found this on one of my usual haunts on the jinternet.  

Man… this is just pure jinternet idol AWESOMA!

Talk about non-sequiturs in appearance and performance.

Hamilton gets stuffed.

Into the tirewall at the Nurburgring in the third session of Qualifying for the European GP!

Replays show an apparent right front tire failure, Lewis Hamilton losing control and veering right and off track and into the tirewall. Looks like he was a bit shaken by it.

This doesn’t bode well for a continued podium streak at the race tomorrow, but knowing Hamilton’s aggressiveness he will certainly give it a go.

Edit: He was carried off the track on a stretcher with what looks like an IV bag, but he was giving a thumbs up sign and waving. Not sure if he’s racing tomorrow. Dang.

107 Geeky T-Shirts That Don’t Suck (and then some)

Out of the 107 listed at Internet Duct Tape, I’d like to have these fancy threads:

Caffeine Molecule from ThinkGeek

Vintage Optimus Prime by Coreano from Etsy

There’s no place like 127.0.0.1 from ThinkGeek

CTRL+Z from Threadless

What would MacGyver do? from Threadless 

 

Sith Abandon Ship by Simon Noynay from Oddica

 

Some other personal favorites not in the list:

Exploded Boombox by Troy Paiva from Oddica. 

Contra Eternal (The Konami Code) from 80s Tees.com

Why aren’t there shirts like that in my part of the world?

Yo Mama got Jinternets!

And a lot of it too.

40Gbps of it, in fact. To you and me, that’s the capability to download a full-length movie from the internet in 2 seconds.

Sigbritt Lothberg of Sweden, 75, arguably has the fastest residential broadband connection in the world.

The connection requires at least USD100,000 worth of Cisco equipment (including a Cisco CRS-1 and OC768 DWDMPOS linecard, for the initiated/nerds/geeks), but I think she ran out of rackspace in her home’s datacenter and has had to put said expensive hardware in the garage:

More pics found here.

And what does she do with it? Read online news sites.

Before any of you gearheads start raising hell about the waste of bandwidth and equipment, just remember that this is a technology demonstrator to show that it’s possible to have high-bandwidth connections over long distances (up to more than 1,000 miles apart) between two network routers.  Or at least Sigbritt’s son claims.

Super Aguri F1 Team Merchandise

I’ve received quite a few questions on where to get Super Aguri F1 (SAF1) team merchandise.

They’re quite hard to get, it seems. I was asking for SAF1 stuff at the Sepang F1 racetrack merchandise booths earlier this year and was met with blank, if pretty, stares from the ladies manning the counters.

 This unabashed fan of Takuma Sato and SAF1 has done quite some bit of rummaging around the jinternets and did find Bosco Moto, perhaps the only place you can see decent Super Aguri merchandise. They certainly have pretty stuff.

The Super Aguri F1 Cap

The obligatory Super Aguri F1 Polo / Pit Shirt

A cool-looking, if a bit impractical, Super Aguri F1 Backpack

 

Or… The All-You-Can-Eat Super Aguri F1 Team merchandise set (approx. JPY73,500/USD600), complete with several shirts, backpack, caps, trolleybag, neckstraps, beltbag, stickers and a brolly (umbrella to us US-English folks, for those rainy British GPs)!

That said, I haven’t tried ordering anything from them as I really don’t have the extra cash for an SAF1 shirt. Plus the fact that there’s no option to order online. Anyone from Japan want to send a pit/polo shirt over? I think my size is Medium.

I’ve also seen them being sold on Ebay.

BTW, you might see “Samantha Kingz” plastered all over the merchandise, and even on the Super Aguri F1 SA007 racecar. That’s because Samantha Kingz is the men’s line of leading Japanese fashion house called Samantha Thavasa. Why they would be pouring a lot of money (judging by the size of their sponsorship logos on the cars and merchandise) into F1 is something beyond me. Hugo Boss does the same with McLaren, but they’re not as prominently displayed.

All-in-all, cool SAF1 stuff from Japan, but always be careful about ordering anything over the internet!

Formula One British GP 2007 (and other F1 snippets)

Okay, so I’m a bit late to this party (almost two weeks).

It was a good race, and finally everyone gets to see that Super Rookie Hamilton can (and will) make mistakes every now and then, like trying to pull off a quick pitstop getaway while the lollipop is still in front of him. Christijan Albers jumped the gun in the same way and took half of his refuelling rig along with him to retirement, and he’s since lost his job; well he lost his Spyker seat because of an alleged misunderstanding with one of his personal sponsors, but making your car look like it’s got some giant mutant bloodsucking worm on it in the French GP surely added salt to the wounds. Plus he’s been consistently outqualified by his Spyker team mate, Adrian Sutil.

Lewis miraculously pulled up a fast qualifying lap to bag final P1, even if he was slower during the Practice sessions and first two rounds of qualifying. He just didn’t have the pace during the race. Still he was in third place and his podium place streak continues.

And oh yeah, he’s got the flu. Must be a slow day in the F1 newsroom.

The British GP was overshadowed by Stepneygate, the scandal that rocked F1, but there were no signs that the drivers or the teams have been affected much at that race. Of course, a lot has happened in two weeks, with notable things being that Honda is involved in the F1 industrial espionage case, and that the sport’s governing body FIA has summoned McLaren for investigation.

In other news, Super Aguri didn’t do so well on this one.

On to other stuff… like the absence of the USGP next year. Seems like Indianapolis Motor Speedway boss Tony George and F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone couldn’t agree to the terms to keep the USGP in the 2008 race calendar. I think it’s purely monetary (i.e. Bernie wants more of it).

Too bad.

But for those of us who also like two-wheeled racing, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway will instead host a second US round of MotoGP, what is considered to be the Formula One of the motorcycle world. A bit of historical trivia here: The first ever race on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was a motorcycle race, and MotoGP World Championship motorcycles return there 99 years after that race. Preparations are now being done to refit the F1 track at Indy to be suitable for MotoGP racing.

Ironically, if F1 does return to Indy, they may have to use the MotoGP track configuration.

Transfomers Movie Sequel in 2009?

Reading the comments and reviews about the 2007 Transformers Movie by Michael Bay, there looks to be two camps appearing:

ZOMG, Awesoma!

or

It’s crap!

For whatever reason. Thankfully (for me at least), it’s more of the ZOMG, Awesoma kind rather than the smelly-filthy-pile kind. It also helps that it’s become a bona fide blockbuster for the summer. Which bodes well for a sequel. Which could be in the works as Transformers 2 at IMDB.

Do take that particular entry with a grain of salt. But if you’ve stayed long enough to see some of the epilogue scenes in the Transformers movie shortly after the end credits rolled, you’ll have an inkling of who might be playing a more visible role in the next one.

If this rumor is true then 2009 is going to be a looooooooooooong wait.

And Lewis Does It Again!

Amidst the brouhaha over the scandal that threatens to turn this F1 season upside-down, there is still that new-found excitement that we have come to expect every race weekend.

Lewis Hamilton shrugged off doubts over his ability to stake out the pole position in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, and pulled off a suspense-filled Q3 session yesterday be the first British driver get pole at his home race in 11-years.

This after everyone was looking at Kimi’s dominating practice times over the weekends, and Alonso’s very strong performance during the earlier Q1 and Q2 qualifying sessions. Alonso even tried to overtake Lewis coming out of the pitlane in Q3, but Hamilton wasn’t having any of it.

In other news, personal favorite Takuma Sato is second to the last on the grid, and his Super Aguri teammate, Anthony Davidson didn’t have a good day either with him running into the gravel and qualifying 19th.

Can’t wait for the 6 hours until the race!

iPod killed the Transformers Star.

Ever wondered what happened to Megatron’s ever-loyal-yet-blackmailing-soldier-slash-tapedeck, Soundwave? He didn’t get into the new movie, but apparently he’s been up to something after the 1986 Transformers movie. (Video contains cusswords and innuendos. Stay away, kiddies!)

“Kids don’t even know what cassettes are. Lots of them don’t even buy CDs anymore… They use iPo…” *Click*

Classic.

And just in case you DON’T KNOW what a tape CASSETTE is (there might be quite a few of you out there), it’s magnetic tape spooled around two reels in a plastic case, used to store analog audio and some data stuff long long ago. Like what you use in miniDV cameras and data archiving, expect that they’re prone to tape entanglement that frequently resulted in the user tearing apart the cassette and ripping out the tapes like entrails from an animal carcass.

An audio tape cassette containing the sounds of my life (make your own at Says-It.com!):

You play them on a “tapedeck” like the Sony Walkman below. Yessirree kids, the Walkman has been around since the dinosaurs ruled the planet, and the name didn’t start with the Sony MP3 player or the mobilephone gimmick of Sony and Ericsson.

Get the straightdope on Cassettes here, and on Soundwave here.