New lens

Oh yes, the Canon EF 28 mm f/1.8 USM.

What an awesome, awesome lens. I ran around with it in Lausanne, yesterday evening. If you are not interested in photography, you may want to look at the picture I took below and skip the text, because I will be waxing poetic about it the next few paragraphs.

First of all, it is a fixed lens - no zooming. I actually quite like that, because it means I can concentrate on photography. There are some photos I can't take with it of course, but on the other hand I know (or will know, once I have worked with it for some time) it's frame, and can amble along framing potential pictures in my mind.

Next, it's USM, or UltraSonic Motor. That means it focusses fast, and you can grap the focal ring and manually override it if the autofocus gets it wrong . Brilliant.

It's 28mm, normally a wide-angle, but with my EOS 300D this works out to a 45mm equivalent, or a "normal" lens.

It's optically fast. f/1.8 means the aperture opens to 28/1.8 = 15.56 mm. That is 6 f-stops below my old lens, which means wide open I get 64 times the light! This in turn means hand-held photography in the night or in pubs or concerts...

Photo: Psychedelic Stairway. EOS 300D, EF 28mm, f/2.5, 1/40 s, ISO 800