There are things I just buy.  I say “I want that” and I spend the money and feel giddy with indulgence.  Then, there are things that exceed my “just buy it” threshold and I torment myself for months trying to decide what to do.

I’ve been putting off making a decision for months now.  I do a lot of landscape photography whether that’s what I intend or not and I’m running up against the limits of my wide angle lens on my small-sensor (APS) camera.

At the same time, my current camera needs its sensor cleaned badly.  I have found one place to take my camera to have the sensor cleaned, but it will take two days.  So, I will try to do enough shooting this weekend to get me through until I get my camera back.

This is another argument for why my next purchase should be a full-frame camera instead of a super wide-angle lens for my current one–if I had a second camera, it wouldn’t be so bad to have my camera in the shop for a couple of days–a serious consideration now that my camera is several years old.

And this brings us to the crux of my debate:  an extra-wide angle lens for my current camera or a full-frame camera.  It’s a tough call.  The extra-wide angle lens will only work with small-sensor cameras, which means if I buy it and then decide to go full-frame later, it won’t work on my new camera.

It comes down to either potentially throwing away a smaller amount of money to get the wide angle I want or making a larger, long-term investment that will give me a second camera body.  The smaller sensor has the advantage that it gives an equivalent angle of view to the focal length times 1.6.  However, I’m a little confused about why this is better.  It seems like the subject is the same size in the image, but there’s less stuff around it.   In essence, the same image could be achieved in the full frame simply by cropping the photo.

In any case, after getting through an online class session on APS vs Full Frame sensors, I’m leaning towards getting a full frame camera to compliment my APS camera.  That said, I’m still not ready to spend that kind of money.  I will have to work around being camera-less for a couple of days while my sensor is being cleaned.  I wonder if Tisen will notice?

My photos today consist of part II of my “Going Vertical” experiment.  This group is from right along the river.  I really like the traditionally processed color photo of the bridge, sky, and grass.  I like the black and whites, too.  Still not sold on some of the more obvious HDR processing.

The video is a “time lapse” shoot of Tisen on the couch.  However, something went wrong in the conversion and it bounces around quite a bit.  I hope you aren’t prone to motion sickness!