Fireworks

The annual fireworks competition in Helsinki was fired off Hernesaari this year. Two sudden rain showers interrupted the show, and security had placed the fence quite a long way away from the fire and explosions - otherwise the event was nice. Taking pictures of fireworks is fairly easy with the right equipment, these are shot with a 40mm lens stopped down to F10 and exposing by hand via cable-release in bulb-mode for whatever seemed to be a suitable time/display. Bring a tripod.

The price of Canon lenses

I'll be visiting the US again in a month or so - a good opportunity to do some photography shopping. I've made a list of a subset of EF-lenses by Canon and looked up the prices at local webshop verkkokauppa.com, the German ac-foto.com, and compared these to bhphotovideo.com. The conclusion from the histogram below is something I sort of knew beforehand, but I'm still a bit shocked by how big the price difference is.

Compared to Finland, it's (10 +/- 7) % cheaper to buy your lenses from Germany. And it's a huge (38 +/- 9) % cheaper to get them from the US! (I've used the current dollar/euro rate of 1.3)

(click image above to download a pdf)

Check this out: EF-135 f/2.8 SoftFocus, 71% cheaper in the US, or look at the EF-28/2.8, 63 % cheaper!

disclaimer: this is not the complete set of EF-lenses, prices checked from the corresponding websites 26.1.2009, your mileage may vary.