Obie Fernandez

Which wide-angle lens should I buy for my Nikon D90?

I've gotten pretty good with cameras and photography over the years, and sometimes I'm asked for advice.

Hey man any thoughts on what I should get for group shots with my D90? I have this Nikkor 50mm f1.4  and love it for portraits but it's rough shooting groups of people or in close quarters. Would like to stay under $600 if I can.

It's a great question, because getting a decent wide-angle lens under $600 is a challenge. The best wide-angle choices from Nikkor are very expensive. For instance, one of my favorite lenses is this Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor Wide Angle Zoom Lens and Amazon currently has it (discounted) at over $1700. I don't take it out of my bag too often, but when I do the results are pretty damn cool.

Here's one of the first shots I ever did with it, on the Tokyo subway using my D200, which has a DX sensor. The zoom setting was at 15mm, which means this shot is at about 32mm:

My everyday lens is a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor Wide Angle Zoom Lens which is an extremely versatile piece of equipment on my D700. Since getting it, the 14-24mm only comes out to play on special occasions.

But back to the original question, which is how to get quality wide-angle shots under $600. The most cost effective Nikkor choice might be the 20mm 2.8, but it's still over 600 bux. (ouch)

All things considered, the right choice that won't break the bank is probably the Sigma 18-50 with a MSRP of $420, but available from Amazon for only $199 - Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8-4.5 SLD Aspherical DC Optical Stabilized (OS) Lens with Hyper Sonic Motor (HSM) for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras.

If you get that particular Sigma, I suspect it will become your default lens. The zoom range is super versatile and the 2.8 aperture when you have the lens at it's widest is fast enough for most purposes. You might even get away with using it for non-flash interior shots although I don't personally have experience with high-ISO performance on the D90. All my zoom lenses are f2.8 and they serve me well with the D700 at ISOs up to 3200.

Rails Up-and-Comers Contest Winners

Wow, did you all make it hard for me to choose winners! Over 60 entrants and almost everyone had a compelling story to share. I think the best thing about it all is seeing proof of the wonderful diversity and vibrance of our community. Everyone who entered is going to get a small token of appreciation from my publisher and I will announce that as soon as I get final confirmation. UPDATE: All contestants will receive complimentary access to the RoughCut of Russ Olsen's upcoming Eloquent Ruby title on Safari.

But without further ado, here are the winners:

Grand Prize

Jacob Richardson, a 19 year old developer from Des Moines, Iowa wins the top prize for his story about a successful project he started in high school and how he teaches Rails to high school students.

"About midway through the year Rails was so appealing to me that I decided to completely scratch the whole Skloop PHP product and rewrite it in Rails. This was a HUGE success! I was able to easily implement a group system that piggybacked on Twitter to use it as a delivery system. With our new system it allowed all students in the school to register for our product (via a web frontend) and allowed them to easily join teacher created groups to receive announcements and events.

Skloop is being heavily used in the high school today and is being hosted locally at the school. The product ended up being so useful that the school today, whenever the school is canceled due to weather or other events, will post the school closing on Skloop before ANY phone calls are made to anybody. Skloop was also presented at the Prometheus Awards to recognize outstanding contributions to technology in Iowa.

My contributions to Skloop, although I have graduated, have not ceased. Every week as a volunteer I will come to the club and teach the students about Ruby on Rails and how to improve the current Skloop product. I'm trying to become a better teacher and Rails expert so that I can impact these student's lives as much as I can to help them get their feet in the water. "

First Runner-up Prizes (2)

Josh Van Cleef was dealing with unemployment issues:

"Unfortunately, I was resoundingly unsuccessful at that and moved quickly down the scale from “self-employed” to “unemployed.” In the two years since then, I’ve applied for all manner of jobs, even crappy theme park jobs, with zero luck. I’ve tried my hand at some freelance sports writing (ok, blogging mainly), which did get me a press pass to a college bowl game, but no actual money.

Meanwhile, a good friend left his corporate job about the same time and started freelance web development in Rails. After about a year & a half of unemployment, it finally dawned on me to bug him about what he’s up to. He put me onto tryruby, and the rest is almost history."

Brandon Cordell has been a little overwhelmed at times:

Being new to Rails now that it's grown so big, is like being in the middle of a cave at night with 10,000 path surrounding you. It seems like everywhere you go in the Rails universe there are 5 different camps of people saying 5 different things, and they all claim they're right. Not that it's entirely a bad thing since it helps drive innovation, but as a newcomer it's easy to just run back to where you came from and vow to learn it later.

Second Runner Up Prizes (10)

The following entrants win a copy of the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book.

• Adrian Pomilio needed a break after lots of troubles.
• Imre Mehesz 
• Adil Muhammad found Rails after being impressed by 37signals in Saudi Arabia.
• Oliver Dodd
• Jason Carpenter is the oldest guy in the office and also an intern.
• Arun Srini
• Michael Haddox-Schatz
• John Glass considers The Rails 3 Way to be the Kama Sutra of programming.
• Dale Hamill
• Roy Osherove quit his job as a CTO for a .NET startup to become an intern in a Ruby Shop.

Honorable Mentions

Even though they won't receive a book hard copy, I'm going to do my best to send the following entrants a special something for their great stories. (Wish I had more books to distribute!)

• Tony Wok
• Christian Mutesa
• Juan Capistran
• Samnang Chhun
• Nithin Bekal
• Michaël Sokol
• Ashish Dixit
• Axel Graff
• Dan Carper
• Daniel Lopes
• Neal Sales-Griffin
• Brian Pearce
• Jeffry Degrande
• Eduardo Mourao

If you're one of the winners, please keep an eye on your email this week for details on how to receive your prize. Thanks again to everyone who participated.

The Rails Up-And-Comers Contest

As the Series Editor of the Professional Ruby Series by Addison-Wesley, I am pleased to announce a contest specially for Rails up-and-comers. The idea is to support folks that are working hard towards entering the Rails job market, which as you might know, is currently suffering from severe talent shortages!

UPDATE: Thanks to a generous donation by Chad Fowler, his essential title: The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development will be awarded to the top three winners!

The Fabulous Prize Packs

One (1) grand prize winner will receive the full stack of Pro Ruby Series books (pictured above), worth over $250, plus The Passionate Programmer:

• Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example
• Rails 3 Way, The (2nd Edition)
• Rails AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring
• Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails
• Distributed Programming with Ruby
• The Merb Way
• The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development

Two (2) first runner-up prize packs will be awarded, consisting of:

• Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example
• Rails 3 Way, The (2nd Edition)
• Rails AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring
• The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development

Ten (10) second runner-up winners will receive a free copy of the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book.

Contest Entry

I love hearing personal stories, especially from people that are working hard to succeed. The first and main part of your entry submission to the contest is the story of how you're working to succeed as a "Rails up-and-comer." Tell us who you are, where you come from and what you're about. Tell us why you picked Ruby and Rails over a myriad of other options and why you think you'll succeed. You may enter your story directly as a comment here or link to an entry on your own blog or elsewhere on the web.

The second part of the entry is based on what some people call an "honors system"; it's a promise that you'll write an honest Amazon review for at least one of the books (if you win). This point of this contest is most definitely not about drumming up reviews, but I figure that it is a good opportunity to get some so it'd be dumb to pass it up.

Deadline / Dates

You have until midnight EST on Sunday, January 23rd to enter your submission. I'll announce the winners sometime late on Monday, January 24th.

Judging

I'll be the sole judge of this contest and will rank the competitors subjectively at my discretion based on how much I like their story. I don't expect nor want a full biography, but if you're going to enter please do make it compelling reading. Hint: focus on obstacles overcome and aspects of your story that are unique to your personal context.

GOOD LUCK -- I can't wait to read your stories!

The Fine Print

I will announce the winners via an update to this blog post. This is not an official Addison-Wesley contest. The books I'm awarding are from my personal Series Editor stash and I'm paying for shipping the prizes myself, from my own personal funds. You should enter the contest from outside the USA only if you are willing and able to PayPal me the additional cost of shipping books to you if you win. (The cost in excess of 10USD). Obviously I don't know where you are so I have no idea what it will cost beforehand. Please don't email me asking for an estimate of shipping costs. I'll work on getting something of value for all contestants that don't win an official prize, but no promises until I see how many contestants participate.

MSA Series: Bizconf MSA and SOW Workshop

With the publication of this video, my MSA Series comes to a close.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In this presentation, co-presented with my friend Jose Gonzalez at Bizconf 2010, we describe the entire contents of a Master Services Agreement and talk about how to negotiate such documents along with their attached Statements of Work. This information is essential knowledge for owners of web design and development companies.

UPDATE: BUY THE ANNOTATED MSA+SOW DOCUMENT TEMPLATE BUNDLE!

The documents discussed in this video are now available from me for only $99. Click here to learn more.

Google Probably Knows What Crap Results Are

A post by Jeff Atwood bemoaning the state of Google's ranking system caught my attention this morning. I have had similar feelings about a decline in the quality of Google's search results. Jeff and others are wondering if the failure to give priority ranking to primary content sources is due to limitations of Google's search algorithms. I suspect that Google has at least some idea of good versus bad results, based on observations of their Alerts system.

For obvious reasons, I've had an alert set on the phrase "The Rails 3 Way" for months. Less than 2 weeks ago, I noticed that there was an option for Google Alerts for receiving All results vs. Only the best results. Out of curiosity, I changed over to All Results.

What a difference! Instead of a few interesting alerts per week, I started getting up to dozens per day, almost all of which were some variation on

Google knows that stuff like this is crap, otherwise it wouldn't have an option in Alerts to filter it out. So the question is: Are they not taking greater action against spammers because it would hurt their bottom line? And, if so, is that evil?

I'm curious whether Jeff has any similar and/or relevant observations using Google Alerts, because the phenomenon I'm describing here is not exactly the same as what he's complaining about. And to be fair, I went ahead and did a search for The Rails 3 Way pdf and the book's official source is #1, with fileshare services not starting until #3.