I recently bought the Canon 55-250mm zoom lens because I was...

I recently bought the Canon 55-250mm zoom lens because I was finding myself missing the higher zooms since I switched to the T2i (from a compact superzoom). I didn't have super-high expectations, given it's a pretty inexpensive lens (<$200), but figured it would be serviceable. I have been quite pleased with the results.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mkgray/5821806196/in/photostream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49503153577@N01/5794784783

Brian Cullimore - 2011-07-04 16:18:23-0400

Pretty good.. I use a 55-200mm Sigma for my canon.

Jason “Pappy” Persampieri - 2011-07-04 21:41:23-0400

As someone with photography experience, do you have an opinion on SmugMug? Considering a job offer from them :)

Matthew Gray - 2011-07-04 22:26:38-0400 - Updated: 2011-07-05 21:12:07-0400

I find all of the major photo sharing sites flawed in one way or the other. I am currently using Flickr, somewhat unhappily, but haven't gotten over the flaws in Picasaweb or SmugMug sufficiently to make the switch. My issues with SmugMug, IIRC, were price and speed, but it's been a while since I looked. If you want to go work for them and make them better, sounds good. They are certainly one of the 3 I've considered.

G+ may convince me to switch over to Picasa, but the inability to have purely time indexed photos is a pretty severe flaw.

(edit: spelling)

Matthew Gray - 2011-07-05 11:33:25-0400

I mean I'd like to be able to quickly/easily find photos I took at an arbitrary time, eg "the week of July 4th in 2005". In Picasa (and maybe SmugMug, but don't recall for sure) photos are organized in "Albums", so I can start off by having date-labeled albums, which is annoying but tolerable, but as soon as I move things to an album with different permissions ("Company Offsite" shared with colleagues) or categorical albums "Animal Photos", those photos are "lost" to the date-based organization.

Jason “Pappy” Persampieri - 2011-07-05 20:41:08-0400

Thanks for the input.... if I go there, I'll see what I can fix.

Oh, and just so you know, one of my other offers is from the Google+ front-end team. Which is awfully tempting. :)

Matthew Gray - 2011-07-05 21:02:41-0400

Oh, you should come work for Google. Feel free to contact me directly if you have questions or want more specifics of my endorsement :)

Jason “Pappy” Persampieri - 2011-07-05 21:08:26-0400

Heh... thought you might say something like that. Which is why I asked about SmugMug first.

Mark Eichin - 2011-07-08 23:49:31-0400

I've been using that lens for pretty much all of my wildlife photography, it's great, even for birds-in-flight http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/5798971924/ - I rented a Canon L-glass 400mm once and got some amazing shots, but it's way too heavy to actually carry. Since I'm using the XSi, though, I don't have video (which I've only recently started to miss.)