Pablo Averbuj

Dorkier I Go

I’ve finally infiltrated the ranks of the SLR dorks. It’s not a small club, by any means, but I just didn’t realize how dorky it was until we were getting our engagement pictures taken recently and another SLR dork came to ask our photographer what lens she was using (it was the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens) and inside I was a little ashamed. I mean, I *thought* about asking her what lens she was using, but I could tell that a) I couldn’t afford it, and b) it’s like asking a football player what brand of shoes he uses. I mean, where do you take the conversation from there? “Really? I use Adidas….”

At any rate, I had subscribed to the “good photographers take good pictures regardless of equipment” philosophy and obviously I’m not a good photographer, but I immediately noticed better pictures using the SLR vs my aged “prosumer” camera. Here’s one example. Both images were taken at ISO200 (the D50 does 200-1600, the G2 does 50-400), f/4 from the same physical distance (I zoomed the G2 to get a similar composition). The picture on the left is the G2 taken at 1/60 sec with “17mm” focal length, which is definately not 35mm equivalent. The picture on the right is with the D50 taken with a 50mm lens at 1/25 sec. You can tell even in the thumbnail that the D50 isolates the subject better than the G2. I mean those trees are FAR, and in the G2 they’re fairly identifiable. If you look at the full size images you can see some graininess in the G2 image, but I can forgive it that, it sucks at anything other than the suggested ISO50. Even still, the difference to me seems like night and day.

A Different Kind of Techonology

Dentistry seems such an odd field to me: it’s half Spanish-inqusition and half quantum leap. Today I had my teeth whitened/bleached/lasered I don’t know. They did the bi-annual cleaning procedure, except instead of polishing with tasty fruit-flavored paste, I got bland grit in my teeth (the hygenist actually called it pumice) because the tasty stuff interferes with the whitening magic. Then they inserted (effectively) a vice into my mouth covered all the soft tissue with gauze, painted my teeth with “bleach” and pointed a very bright light (presumably “laser”) at me. It’s such an odd juxtaposition of technology.

The vice and gauze process takes a while, maybe 30 minutes. They also use a nifty gel on your gum tissue that hardens when exposed to their spaceman UV light (I’m assuming you’ve seen their UV guns, they are, in fact, very jetsons-inspired).

The process then consists of three 20-minute exposures to the light, replacing the bleach in between. One well known, and well disclaimed side-effect is teeth sensitivity, and I mean REALLY sensitive, which is the part I didn’t quite grasp. They kept asking me during the first two cycles if I was sensitive yet, and I kept looking at them with a puzzled “sensitive how?” look. During the third cycle I found out. Random shooting pains in my teeth, so that’s what they meant! Sensitive indeed, just breathing through my mouth cause me shooting pains, which is complicated by the fact that I’ve had some cold/allergy related stuffiness in the last several days. I took a sick day at work because the shooting pains made it very hard to concentrate on anything for more than a minute or two.

Earlier they did the X-Rays with the newer digital (filmless) technology, which I think is pretty cool as well.