Leica is about to announce a 50mm f/0.95 prime for their M mount bodies and it will set you back a whopping $11,000 USD. This may be the fastest commercially available lens ever made. Read about it here.

Now I know $11k isn’t all that outrageous for a lens, after all serious nature/sports shooters routinely carry around 600mm f/4 glass that retails in the $8-$10k range.  But we’re not talking about some exotic, 11lb, super-tele f/4 here, this is 50mm of pocket friendly f/0.95 goodness.  That’s a full stop faster than your pokey 50mm f/1.4, this is handheld candlelit photos at base ISO territory.  Imagine the razor thin depth of field with this lens wide open… I’m imagining eyelashes in focus/pupils are soft and blurry.

…eyeing the piggy-bank and thinking ‘where did I put that hammer?’…

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I thought it would all be restored last night but… My Vista restore went fine but Time Machine doesn’t want to restore the Leopard drives, so it’s looking like I’ll have to do to a clean install of OSX. So much for Apples ‘just working’
And don’t get me started on the 2.0 iPhone software. Between the crashing and lock ups it took 20mins to write and publish this post.

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I’ve had some computer problems for the last few days that resulted in the total failure of my System drive.  The screen above (taken w/D3 and 24-70 ISO 800) is my last effort at recovering the bad sectors of this drive before I replace with a new one.  Thanks to my background as a software engineer I follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy (3 copies – in 2 locations – 1 of which is offsite) and since I back up at after each shoot and at least once a week I’m pretty well protected.  Tonight will be a long night of restoring backup images to my new drives and tomorrow we will return to our regularly scheduled program.

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