After I posted about my disappointment with the Sigma DG 70-300 1:4-5.6 Auto Focus Macro lens not once but twice The Wife decided she would put a stop to my whining by returning the lens and getting a different one.
I told her they wouldn't take it back because I tore up the instructions. (Who needs 12 translations of a single page manual?) But that didn't stop her.
The Wife has a talent on the phone. It's amazing. My favorite example was back when my mother was in a hospital emergency room. I called and asked to talk to someone who could tell me my mother's condition. No one would talk to me. My mother's privacy was more important than her son's filial concern.
Then The Wife -- the daughter in law -- called and spent 15 minutes chatting at length with the nurse in charge about not only my mother's condition, but the doctor's speculations about prognosis and other details I had never known.
So when The Wife set about to convince a salesman to take back the lens despite the specific requirement that every piece of paper, wrapping and box insert be returned, I figured there was always a chance. It could happen.
The Wife called the salesman in New Jersey while she rode the train to work. Then she called me.
"He asked whether you changed some knob to macro," she said. "Did you?"
I told The Wife I had set the lens from telephoto to macro and she suggested I talk to the salesman just to clarify.
With my experience with the nurse in mind, I called The Wife's salesman.
"Did you set the camera to macro mode?" he asked.
"I set the lens to macro mode," I said.
"The mode wheel on the top of the camera body. Did you set the mode to macro?" he asked.
Doh!
I admitted to the salesman that, well, maybe, this really was an operator error and not actually a problem with the lens.
"I'll get back to you," I said and hung up.
So I set about this morning taking photos with the macro.
This wire and bead art hangs in my office window. The Wife bought it at the New Visions Gallery at Country Club Mall.
This is a discarded guitar string that I ran through Photoshop's extrude pyramids and a couple of other filters.
This is Zipper, our lone female cat. This photo is full frame.
And this is the image at the actual pixel resolution. Click on the image to see the actual size. The sharpness of that image is just breathtaking. I'm sure there are better lenses out there, but this is more than adequate for my purposes.I take back all of the bad things I said about the lens.
Eating humble pie on Day 12 of 365.
I mentioned the other day that Blogger is down-sampling the images from my preferred 1920x1080 full HD size to 1600x900. I've decided to keep a full resolution copy of each photo in a gallery I've installed on my work server. I've also redone some early images so that they fit into the 1920x1080 proportions.
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