Life’s an ocean with too much commotion

A week ago, I decided to extend my photography material with a new lens and a new flashlight:

• Tamron 17-50mm F/2.8: A friend advised me this lens. It can be compared with the Nikkor 17-55mm F/2.8. The difference is that the Nikkor lens is three times more expensive than the Tamron. The feedback from the Tamron lens is also very positive. The image is overall sharper and colors are more real life than the Nikon alternative. I’ll use this lens as my new main kit-lens, replacing my former Nikkor 18-70mm F/3.5-4.5. The picture displayed below has been taken with this Tamron lens, during my recent visit to the Bourgoyen (Mariakerke, Ghent, Belgium).
• Nikon Speedlight SB-900: I didn’t have a flashlight yet and I’m getting more and more interested in taking pictures with managed light. I chose the SB-900 because it’s of course the best and I could use it as a master to trigger other flashlights (e.g. SB-600’s or so), and as a slave that can be triggered from my camera built-in flash. I’m planning to take some pictures with this flash later.

I shot this picture below with my Sigma macro lens, while drinking a Gin Tonic. The distortion in the left lower corner is coming from the glas, with the reflection of objects behind it. There’s also a DOF in the bubbles. I like it

It seems that Adobe is supporting various modes of GPU acceleration in their new pre-release of linux flash player 10. With previous releases, I found watching Flash movies (e.g. Youtube) very CPU intensive in Linux. My first impression with the new version is that this is slightly better.
On the Penguin SWF blog, you can more details about this pre-release.