悽悽慘慘戚戚

(Trying to clean sand off from the camera at White Sands)

The pics from NM are all processed... guess what? They all turned out bad!!

So here's the story:
I got a new polarizer for my lens, and I put on the hood that came with the lens. Since this is a wide angle lens I checked it "carefully" when I purchased the polarizer making sure that the hood won't appear in the picture.

But I forgot one important thing: check with the smallest aperture.

The hood and the polarizer work great when I'm using f11 or below... but I was shooting with f16 for all pictures, and this is when the hood came appearing on the picture.

Why wasn't I able to catch it when I'm shooting? Coz I'm only using the focusing magnifier that only provides a good view of the center of the picture. Besides it was too bright so I wasn't able to see the picture under the hood...

Anyways, so much for execuses.

I learend a lot... in a hard way. Will definitely use a prism, even though it adds another pound or two...

Fortunately, my friends got a lot of good pics--using their 3.7oz point and shoot :-)