Happy Friday the 13th everyone! A bad day for Templar Knights. A worse day for drugged up oversexed camp counselors. Probably going to be a pretty bad day for me too. But it is also free sandwich day at Jimmy’s Barbecue!! Don’t forget to get yours! Unless you are the type that isn’t easily motivated by free food and if you aren’t, are we really even friends?
Time for another collection of images from my 3rd trip to the Iowa State Fair. This collection starts in the midway in the morning, but then ends after Logan had completed competing in the barbecue contest and started our tour of the Iowa State Fair.
Here is the collection of pictures:
If you can’t tell… after the barbecue contest, our first stops were the DNR Building, the Family Learning Center, and then the Agriculture Building. All some of my favorites!
These are great – love the turtles!
You can tell they are somewhat used to the people. A turtle in the wild would have already been underwater. Someday I want to bring my long telephoto lens to the State Fair and photograph the DNR building, but it ways a ton and I don’t want to carry it around. I need more photo assistants. I mean, I need a photo assistant. Not really an assistant. I need a mule. I wonder if they would let me bring a mule into the State Fair.
Your answer is probably no, but you have to admit it would be way less annoying than double strollers, wagons, and scooters. Granted some people need those things. Then some people are just extremely lazy.
But as I’ve pointed out before. The DNR building is one of my favorite buildings at the Fair.
You’re so right – I don’t have a great telephoto lens, but even my lens that is just longer weighs a ton. It is crazy to me how heavy that glass gets – and I love my new mirrorless camera, but somehow it doesn’t feel substantial enough for longer lenses, I don’t know if you have that problem?
Things on wheels at the Fair are excrutiating, although absolutely I understand and respect that some need them. But you’re right, some are just lazy and feel it’s fine to inconvenience others.
I honestly don’t know that we’ve been to the DNR building – we’ll have to make it this year! I hope that dropoff went well this weekend, despite it sounding like it not being that well run. I got a delivery notification on my photos when I mailed them, but I really don’t ever want to mail them in again.
My longest telephoto lens is a hoss for sure. It wouldn’t even fit in my “travel camera bag” which is the one I use when I’m going to do any extended walking. So really 9 out of 10 times. It is fairly new and by far the most I’ve spent on a camera bag and I’m not even sure I like it or not.
But glad you are in the mirrorless world. Not that you had a choice. Nobody is developing for DSLR any longer. You should have made the change to the good guys and joined Team Sony though. Just kidding… mostly. As long as you are with the Big 3 you will be okay.
It wasn’t that the drop-off was poorly ran. It just wasn’t a well-oiled machine. You friend wasn’t there and maybe that was the problem. But there really only was one backup and that was the people putting stickers on the back of the pictures. The guy who was doing it on my side… I’m not sure he has ever seen a sticker before. He was really struggling with the concept and the line was backed up all the way to the people that… not really sure what they do… they look at the pictures and then tell you what line to go to.
Plus the woman in front of me was a sweetheart, but she told ever single stop in the line… every single stop… about how these weren’t her pictures… she was dropping off for a friend… and she had never done this before and she was super impressed with how well it was ran. Which was…. super sweet, but I heard this FOUR TIMES! And every time, it held up the line. And I already told you big a problem the sticker guy was having. And if I don’t get any pictures in this year, it is because of the bad karma I’ve accrued by being annoyed by this. Not because I entered subpar photos.
One thing I noticed in the small little sample size of entries while I was there, was that there were a lot of people entering panoramic images.
The DNR building is one of my favorites because of the lunkers inside. The gates were made by one of my neighbors. Guy is from the Ogden area originally. I’m sure you know him. Williamson is his name. Then outside of the building is a little pond with ducks and turtles. There used to be more birds, but stupid bird flu, now they limit the number of birds they have out there. There used to be a little walkway out there to that was surrounded by bushes, but they’ve mowed that down and made more use of the space. It is definitely worth going to for the lunkers alone.
Things on wheels is why I try to avoid the Fair on Saturdays. Yeah, they are there every day, but last year was the first time I went to the Fair on a Saturday in a long time and holy buckets… so many people. I think it is people that have only been to the Fair on Saturdays that hate the Fair. And if that is the case, I get it to some degree. Getting to the Fair early in the day on a week day is definitely the sweet spot.
You’ll have to tell me what travel camera bag you got! I got a Nomatic McKinnon Camera Sling 8L ( https://www.nomatic.com/collections/all-camera/products/mckinnon-camera-sling-8l ) after doing just SO much research – I like it, but there are some size limitations, it was bananas expensive, and it sort of fights being waterproof because I can’t find any rain covers that are sort of bike basket-shaped like it is. If I use even my sort-of long lens (nowhere near your big guns), it really doesn’t fit in there, either.
No, you’re right – it’s super limiting. But man, I had sunk a lot of money into my full-frame and its accompanying lenses for it. At first when I got the mirrorless, I used the little adaptor thing that you can use to reuse the old EF full-frame lenses, but they weren’t very crisp. (That’s why I bought a new lens for the mirrorless recently.) I didn’t get a full-frame mirrorless, though, because it costs more than a mortgage payment and I wanted to see how it worked for me first. Canon had taken a while to allow Tamron or… the other one whose name starts with an S? It sounds like an euphemism for something? Anyway – they wouldn’t let them develop lenses until fairly recently, so I’ve been limping along the past year. I still hear just the best thing about Sony sensors.
I feel like they always put either the oldest guys and/or the talkers at the sticker station. There were at least two dudes there just chit-chatting with everyone last year. I can put the stickers on myself if you just hand me all four (or however many photos one has). I think that there are definitely areas where you could improve the process a lot and make it more efficient/faster. But, to be fair, I suppose things like letting the entrant put on their own stickers implies that they are any better at putting on stickers than the older guys who do it now – which seems unlikely. That’s too bad my buddy wasn’t there!
I generally am sort of misanthropic secretly – and stuff like that where you are hearing the same thing over and over about which NOBODY CARES drives me absolutely nuts. I would have been annoyed, too – in fact, I may even somehow be annoyed for you? Which is weird, but true. I can’t wait to see what you picked! And I’m also already anxious for the yellow cards. I have no patience, I know that they likely haven’t even started going through photos yet.
That’s shocking that there were a large number of panoramic photos – usually that’s one of the smallest categories. (Grumble grumble they didn’t like my pickle photo.) I wonder if people were trying to play the odds there? I definitely did not submit a pano.
Oh! David Williamson, I bet? His son Chaz was in our grade, and Dave was an artist. He did a big speech one year at the Young Writers Conference that they held at ISU Center each year. He was a really good artist, if a bit of his own fan. I’ll have to try and find where the DNR building even is – last year was the first year we went on a Thursday and it was by FAR the best Fair trip we’ve ever had. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that this year, it will depend on a public official conference I applied for in DC. So many fewer wheels, I think it was nice out weather-wise, and we were able to take our time in places like the building with Shannon’s beekeeper stand that I can’t remember the name of. (I have a fantastic memory for everything except names…) I didn’t even know the word lunker before today!
I didn’t even think about the bird flu affecting items. I wonder if there will be an issue with the cow barn this year, I saw today that the first case of cow flu (or whatever its name is – the one from the Asian tick) was found in Iowa?
Ahhh… you got kind of a sling camera bag. I’m just not comfortable with those physically. I need a camera backpack. I also searched a long time for a travel backpack. It had to meet certain criteria. It had to be small enough to fit under a airplane seat. It had to be hold a camera and the big 3 lenses and at least one more, depending on what I am going out to photograph. Either the 35mm or the macro or one of the too many LensBaby lenses. Which that was easy enough to find. What was difficulty to find was a bag that was small enough and yet big enough for that AND the laptop compartment had to be big enough to fit my laptop. Now I don’t have a huge laptop, but apparently just big enough that it doesn’t fit into the ‘smaller’ camera backpack bags. And I was looking for the smaller backpack because I already have a monstrosity backpack that can hold like 6 lenses, 2 cameras and my laptop. But it also weighs a ton, so I don’t take it unless it is absolutely necessary. So I ended up on the 20L Peak Design Backpack:
https://www.peakdesign.com/products/everyday-backpack?Size=20L&Color=Midnight
I stores every thing I need. It is comfortable. It has a key clip which is super convenient. It looks nice. It can hold a water bottle. It is easy to access. It is easy to adjust. But the con is an important one. I have yet to find the compartment configuration that I love. But I know it is there. The standard seems just a touch too small for the width of some of my lenses. But it is customizable and I can take some pieces out or buy more pieces. I just haven’t solved the puzzle yet. Another negative is that I have already lost one sternum strap. It comes off, which I like, but apparently in can come off too easily and you can lose it on an airplane flight to Philadelphia. But it wasn’t too expensive to replace. Like $10.
If I can figure out the compartment situation, I might have to pop for the larger model ; 30L or 45L to replace the big backpack just, well no real reason. Someday the big backpack will need replaced.
I will tell you that my most recent camera cost 4X my mortgage payment. But I imagine your mortgage payment is much higher than mine. Living in a richie rich neighborhood with an HOA and all that noise. Also a much bigger house.
The 3rd party lens company you are thinking of is Sigma. And they are a fantastic line of lenses. They would be the notch just below the manufacturer lenses. And it is weird that Canon didn’t open their lineup up to 3rd party lenses for so long. I’m with Sony mostly because I started with Minolta for family reasons and they turned into Sony. But I have no complaints. They can run more expensive than Canon a tick. But they are on the cutting edge of new technology. Kind of like Android versus iPhone. Where Android will release a new phone feature and two years later it will come to iPhone, almost everything comes from Sony first and then slowly trickles down to Canon and Nikon. Sony invented the mirrorless cameras, so they definitely got the jump on the market, but the gap in new technology is definitely closing. But there is a reason Sony is the official camera of AP photographers. Although last I knew Canon still had Magnum. Maybe not Magnum. I’m not sure what I’m thinking of. And the ability to buy third party lenses does make things more affordable. For example to buy the Big 3 of Sony lenses is probably going to cost you in the ballpark of $6,000. Where you can get into Tamron or Sigma for more like $3,000. If you are going all in on new lenses.
But they definitely have their strengths. Canon’s autofocus is definitely better than Sony. At least I am told. And Nikon. Well Nikon will always have the 1980s. And Fuji, they are starting to own the youth hipster market with their strange line of film emulation cameras. But I suppose if you never shot film, it must be fascinating to pretend you are shooting film.
The DNR Building is on the east end of the Grand Concourse. It is the last building on the north side of the road. It isn’t very big. The building where Shannon sells awful lemonade (and I don’t like lemonade, but that lemonade is REALLY bad) is the Agriculture Building.
Maybe this will help you with Iowa State Fair buildings:
https://www.photography139.com/2024/08/state-fairin-best-new-food-field-work/
But probably not.
Yeah, the lady that did the same thing 4 times, I now recall it was actually 5 times because she also told me that while we were in line. I try not to be annoyed because she is probably lonely. But I’m only human. And not always humane.
If they let entrants put on their own stickers, there is no way they would get it right. Pretty much every year I see people in a corner redoing their entry tags on the back or even mounting them cause they didn’t put them on the right board. No way they are putting the stickers in the right order. Not related, but I wish they would bring back the Salon Reception. It was a cool little tradition. I think COVID killed it, but from an outsider’s perspective, I don’t know why they can’t bring it back.
Yep, that is him. I should send you a picture of the tree sculptures he has set up in their yard. His wife is on the City Council and I talk to her much more because she is always walking their dog Birdie.
Don’t worry about the animal flus. I’m sure RFK Jr. is on it!
I can TOTALLY imagine a sling would not be ideal for you – you have a ton broader shoulders than I do, so I bet it would ride super-high on your chest and also get under your arms a lot. It works well for me because 5’2″ gives me a lot more leeway. I have a crappy cheap-ish $50 Amazon backpack (in pink, because it was cheapest) that stores more at one time, but it doesn’t feel as padded and definitely isn’t at all water-resistant, which is constantly on my mind. Especially when we were going to England and Scotland, which are (in)famous for being rainy.
I looked at Peak Design and they were a top contender! I actually ordered a cover for their sling in hopes that it would fit my sling (which it didn’t due to the shapes, which I thought were closer than they are). I’d looked closely at their sling but it wasn’t as waterproof or hardshell as the one with which I ended up, nor did it fit as close to the body (because I am fairly vigilant about pickpockets on subways, too). If I were to get a backpack, theirs was on the list. You’re right, though – trying to find the right configuration is cumbersome, and I bet even more so with a 20L backpack. There’s just way more real estate and more items to finagle. One of my few hidden skills (there aren’t many) is that I’m fantastic at packing Tetris, but I even had trouble with configuring my mostly-crummy Amazon backpack that is much smaller than even your smaller 20L. I also would like to point out that I’m not super proud of the packing thing, but you just take joy where you can.
Sigma! Yes, I’ve got a couple of their lenses. I am trying to remember, as I’m in the office, but I think my longer lens from my full-frame is Sigma. I haven’t ever had a Tamron, I don’t think. I seriously debated getting a Sony when I went mirrorless; the only reason I didn’t was just that I could use my old EF lenses with an adaptor on the Canon. It was just being frugal. Canon does have a great AF, but I don’t feel like they handle high ISO as well – I get a lot of noise over 1000. I can mostly take care of that with the denoise features in Photoshop and/or Lightroom, but it would be nice if I didn’t have to do it. And you’re right, they’re much later to some of the new tech than Sony. I didn’t even look at Nikon – I don’t know that it’s on the forefront of anything.
Ames IS exorbitant compared to all of the other surrounding areas in terms of land price, and our neighborhood is sort of ridiculous – we were really lucky to get our loan while it was in the 2.5% range. So I’m sure our mortgage is a lot lower than most around us in our subdivision – and if I were to include a non-kit lens when I got the camera, it would definitely be some X number of times of our mortgage. I didn’t know Sony was the official camera of most AP photographers! I definitely get your comparison that Canon is sort of the Apple to Sony’s Android. I sort of stick with what I know for big purchases because I know all of the little tricks and tips of it, rather than venturing out entirely into the new. I also sometimes order the same items I know I enjoy and are safe at particular restaurants, there may be a correlation.
I also should clarify – with the exception of my newest lens purchase, I usually get used ones in excellent shape or above on B&H or KEH. I also got a used waterproof(-ish) camera on KEH this past month for when we go to Curacao with the kids in November, as I want to get snorkeling photos and photos of the kids underwater. If I can’t feel a camera/lens and see the results in real time like I can at Christian Photo, I am much more likely to get it used – at least for smaller cameras that aren’t my main one. Also, selling stuff back through them is bananas easy. I had bought a little point-and-shoot that was supposed to be good for some macro photography that I never used, so I ended up selling it back and being able to completely cover that waterproof camera.
Okay! I can find that – and that absolutely is helpful, now I know I’ve seen it! We’ll for sure have to go in there this year. Assuming I get into the Salon, which I do not want to assume. The Ag building, that’s it! I think Alice had the lemonade last year, but I didn’t try it – I do remember it being thrown away fairly full. I love that building because of the bonsai and there’s always a dude who sells taxidermied bugs. I’ve bought more than you’d think.
I know you’re right that they wouldn’t figure it out, although it’s too bad. I remember you saying people had no idea where to put their labels for the Pufferbilly contest. I’ve only been entering post-COVID, so I’ve never gotten to go to the reception – that sounds like a ton of fun, because you could actually talk shop and theory with people in person!
I honestly didn’t know that they were still in the area, that’s cool – is his wife named Linda, I think I remember? I remember she was at stuff for our class. I’d love to see the tree sculptures – I remember him being super-talented! I don’t know if you ever met Dehydra Dennis-Weiss, but her parents were also super-talented – it was unlikely that our little class of 70-ish had three full-time artists in it in super-conservative O-town.
UGHHHHHHH that guy. I don’t know who is the worst of Trump’s cabinet, but RFK Jr is up there.