Last month my brother, his wife, and their child Sienna came to visit me in New York. It was an adorable trip and we hung out and danced and played and ate and ventured through the city without a care in the world. I also took a bunch of photos. Surprise surprise!!

Here are some of the best of the set.

Here’s the whole gallery!

Mikey, Leah, and Sienna visit New York Gallery – 10/11/2009

And even better, a bonus video!

For these photos I took out my much maligned 50mm prime, the unbelievably cheap piece of glass I got with my first camera. I thought, then, that it would be a great tool for learning, but I ended up using my Tamron 28-75 much much more. However, the Tamron is long gone and replaced by a superior lens I use more and more rarely, and the 50mm is still sitting in my drawer. I never really liked using the lens; it felt clunky and inelegant compared to the zoom I was used to shooting with. It didn’t behave like I wanted it to, and I had a hard time achieving pleasing results.

But that was then, and this is now. Now, I have much more experience shooting with primes, so I thought maybe I ought to give the little 50 a second chance. I am glad I did because, for such a cheap shit lens, it is capable of making quite good photographs. I used it a lot in this set since it’s super light and we were wandering all over the place and I didn’t want to carry around a bunch of heavy shit.

I am still not entirely satisfied with the clunky auto-focus, but that’s about it. Sure it’s soft wide open, but what isn’t? I kind of like that. Having everything in super sharp focus is for illustration and technical photographs. Life’s not in focus all the time, so why should my photos be? Right. I can definitely see upgrading to the slightly more expensive 50mm f/1.4 in the future just to have the more advanced auto-focus mechanism. There’s no reason to go L for a half-stop difference, though, especially with the fine high ISO performance of the 5D2. Stay tuned for further developments from the little lens that could.