French fries

Again. Same deal. This was dinner.

The thing is, I had FoodSaver bags of frozen pre-cooked french fries prepared from that 10 LB. bag of potatoes from a party a few months ago. They sat and sat. This bag, I believe it's the last one, will make two servings as above.

Cooked in oil that's at least 50% lard. How's that for living dangerously? It makes the most excellent fries ever. No longer must I tolerate limp soggy fries due to vegetable oil even though they're prepared the dual-fry technique. I metaphorically flip the bird to the fat-police and do what I must to get what I want.

But I would rather extoll the virtues of this Nikor lens. It's the 50mm 1.4, Nikon's secret weapon for fast low-light shooting. I had been using the 18-200mm 3.5, which is also a wonderful lens but for different reasons. Although much more flexible, the 18-200mm is big, heavy, bulky, and much slower. Slower f-stop, not slower focusing or slower shutter action, those are all quite good. Its one flaw is the focal drift. If you tilt the camera after focusing the weight of the lens pulls it out of focus. Not a problem really if you keep your hand on it but it's one thing that drives professionals insane. It's a bad trait for tripod work. Because the widest aperture goes 3.5, I had to increase exposure in Photoshop for nearly everything even thought the photos display fine in the viewfinder. I suppose I could increase the ISO but I never think of that. The D-90 can go remarkably high without going grainy. But I forgot how amazing this 50mm, 1.4 is. This photo up there ↑ was re-sized and that's all. It is the JPG file straight out of the camera with no fiddling around. Is that awesome or what? The one set-back of the lens is its fixed focal length. Very limiting, but fine for what I'm doing here. When I look back at the old photos taken with the Kodak point-n-shoot I'm caused to wonder what I was thinking, and how I could even find them acceptable. They're so dark.