Camera stuff, finals, refocus

I'm looking to buy a new lens.  The 50mm 1.4 is my top choice right now.  It is a prime lens, which has some interesting qualities listed below:

1. "Prime" means that the magnification is unchangeable.  You can't zoom in, you can't zoom out.  This allows the manufacturer to make a lens which is really good at taking pictures at the one-and-only focal length.  It is easier for a manufacturer to make a lens work really well at a set focal length than it is for a designer to make a lens which works well throughout many focal lengths.  This means that there is less glass in the lens and the quality is improved.
2. Easier design and less moving parts means that these lenses are cheaper than their zoom-able counterparts.  The tradeoff is that you can't zoom.  So it may force me to be a better photographer and work with my tools more.  This isn't a bad tradeoff, in my opinion.
3. Without getting technical, prime lenses generally allow more light to pass through.  If you are curious, search for info on "aperture."  More light means that you can use faster shutter speeds, and you can take clear action photos.  It also means that you can do interesting effects such as focusing on a very small portion of the photo and blurring the other parts.

Natasha says I can buy the lens, but I'm going to mull it over.

On another topic, Tuesday is my first final test.  I feel pretty good in general, but I've never taken a class where the only score that mattered is the final test.  Please wish me luck over the coming weeks, I'd like as much help as I can get.

Just yesterday I spoke with Clint about blurry photos.  He mentioned that new computer programs can refocus an image.  That means that you can have shaky hands and the computer will play mathematical games to figure out what the original photo should have looked like.  I went to Google and found that a plugin exists for a popular image editing tool, meaning I can do this myself at home.  Now I can be the computer guy from CSI who says, "enlarge, sharpen, enlarge, sharpen," and get the villain's license plate reflected off the hero's sunglasses.

So I thought I would do just that.  This past summer, some idiot rear-ended me in stop-and-go rush hour traffic.  I got out of my car with a disposable camera and he drove off.  My photos of his truck were very poor quality and the shots were too blurry to be useful.

My plan was to run the blurry photos through the refocus tool and see if anything interesting came up.  Honestly, I expected nothing – the shots were taken with a truly horrible disposable camera with poor quality film.

In the end, it didn't matter.  After the insurance was worked out and my car was back on the road, I threw the photos out.  I didn't want to keep the photos.  All they did was make me angry.  But I had a hope that I had kept digital copies buried somewhere on my computer.  So I pored over the archives and searched high and low.  They are gone forever, so we'll never know who the truck belonged to.

I've surpassed my allotted time.  Back to the books!