For as long as I have been playing tennis I have always bought the cheapest strings. If it cost more than $10 total to get a racquet strung then I was going to shop elsewhere. Anything more I considered superfluous - really how big a difference is it going make?
The local tennis shop closed recently which has forced me to get my racquets strung at my club. The club has a weird stringing pricing structure that results in the cheapest string being about $3 cheaper than the most expensive string. The first couples of times I opted to use their services I asked for the cheapest more durable stuff they had - it ended up lasting about a month for my two racquets and was barely cheaper then their most expensive stuff.
This time I went with the string that a lot of pros use - Luxilon Big Banger ALU Power 16L. This was the string of choice for Agassi and is still used by the majority of pros on tour. From the first strike I could feel the difference. I had assumed that given the name this string was all about generating power - which isn’t something I care about as I hit with a relatively heavy racquet and am more than capable of generating my own pace. This string actually does the opposite -it’s all about control. The more control you have the freer you are to use your own power.
Towards the end of my last string job’s life I was definitely getting angry with how little control it had. In general the tighter you string your racquets the more control you have. So since these strings were about a month old they didn’t offer much in the way of control. It felt like whenever I connected with the ball I would have to guide and baby it over the net. With the Luxilon the only thing I had to concentrate on was to make sure that I was hitting well balanced shots. If I did that then the ball went where I was aiming. Once I realized that then I was free to hit the ball with as much pace as I could muster.
I have only had one hitting session with these new strings and I haven’t played any matches with them yet - but consider me sold. The world of quality strings has opened to me.
update (9/4/08):
I bumped into the guy who does my strings at the club yesterday and he informed me that they were in fact out of the Luxilon strings that I had requested. So instead he strung my racquets with Gamma Zo at a discount.
Overall I am still very impressed. I find myself hitting the ball with more pace and control than ever before and if anything I am more curious than ever as to what better strings can do.
I recently upgraded my flickr to a pro account which has inspired me to backup all the old photos I took with my Canon S3IS. While doing so I stumbled across some panoramas I took during my vacation last year but never stitched together so I decided to try and find a way to develop them.
When I first saw them I had forgotten that they were part of a panorama, because by themselves the shots weren’t very remarkable. When I tried to manually stitch them together in photoshop I found them to be misaligned. Thankfully CS3 has a feature that automates the merging of pictures. You basically give it a list of photos and it will try to create a panorama out of them.
Here are results:
I also used the opportunity to learn how to do some PP in Lightroom. You can do surprisingly a lot even with jpegs in Lightroom. Most of the shots had over exposed skies, but I was able to recover the details. These turned out to be some of my favorite shots from my vacation and I wasn’t even aware I had taken them.
Ever since I settled on the idea that I was definitely going to get a DSLR I have been doing loads of research into the type of camera that I wanted along with what kind of lenses. When it became apparent that I spent more time in Nikon photography forums and researching Nikon lenses then I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger.
So what did I get?
- Nikon D40 6.1 Megapixel Digital SLR Camera w/18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED II AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor Lens
I was tempted to get the body only and go with the VR lens. But based on my experience with a super-zoom p&s I knew I would most often find myself towards the end of the focal range. Instead of getting the 18-55mm VR lens I decided to put that money towards the next lens.
- Nikon Zoom Normal-Telephoto 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED AF-S VR DX Zoom-Nikkor Autofocus Lens
This lens is super popular and considered a great deal. This combined with the kit lens will give me a focal range of 18-200mm. In the future I may consider investing in the 18-200mm VR, but for now I don’t mind changing lenses.
- Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor Lens
This lens was a bit of a surprise. Up until the last week I hadn’t even considered such a lens. It is a prime lens so unlike what I am used to using I can not zoom in on subjects. Instead I have to move around. Additionally due to the limitations of the D40/D40x/D60 bodies the lens won’t autofocus. So instead I have to manual focus everything. The more I thought about this the more it excited me. The 50mm f/1.8D is one of the cheapest lenses you can buy yet it is known for producing exceptionally sharp images. It is also a very quick lens and functions very well low lighting conditions compared to the two zoom lenses I got. I am really looking forward to learning how to manually focus shots.
I saw some really good deals on XTIs but the Canon body didn’t feel as good in my hands as the d40 did. The same goes for Pentax’s cameras.
I was really tempted to get a D80 due to its built in autofocus mechnics, but I ended up spending all together less for D40+3 lenses than I would have spent if I had gotten the D80 body alone. Also I really liked how much lighter and smaller the D40 is in comparison.
The D60 also came out at the end of the last month. It is currently selling about $70 less than the original MSRP. Still at that price I couldn’t justify paying so much more on a body for features I don’t really need.