timeimmortal

The effect of the Lensbaby is fully visible in this shot. And yes, I decided it was fully appropriate to use the heart-shaped aperture for a wedding.

Here’s another shot from Richard and Ginny’s wedding, kept deliberately out of focus so as to take full advantage of the Lensbaby’s heart-shaped aperture plate. One can still identify the piano in the scene, but the flames of the candles set atop it have become something very different, and yet remain relevant to the theme of a wedding.

Here is a shot from the wedding of our friend Eamon to his fiancé, Heather. While I could say more about how the reception turned out, I did manage to at least get a few good Lensbaby shots off. The heart-shaped aperture seemed a natural choice for this sort of event.

Time for another Lensbaby picture.

At work a while back, we had a Guitar Hero/Rock Band party — the social committee rented an Xbox 360 and the games in question, and a bunch of folks hung out on a Friday evening after work playing fake instruments for a few hours. I’m no good at such games for the most part (I do okay on vocals), so I contented myself with taking pictures of the event.

This was one picture I was particularly pleased with when I found it on the flash card after all was said and done.

I love the exuberance on the kid’s face, the arrested action (he had just finished a drum solo, if memory serves), and (of course) the flaring that the Lensbaby causes on the left side of the frame. This is also one case where the camera’s tendency to overexpose Lensbaby shots worked in my favour, giving the background some interesting highlights (star-shaped, of course, thanks to the aperture plate I was using).

Of course, it was a high ISO shot and so required lots of noise reduction, but overall I’m really happy with this picture. Ah, to be a kid again.

This picture ranks, I think, as my current favourite Lensbaby picture, and for good reason. In addition to the fact that it’s an amazing winter scene, with a sunset filtering through the trees, the full effect of the star-shaped aperture plate is on display in all of the bordering blur. Everything in the shot seems to be hinting at its transformation into a star-shaped out-of-focus point.

The Den sits on a plateau overlooking Wabumun Lake, and so affords a commanding view of the sunset. Even through the trees, the sunsets look really good, probably because the forests in the area are primarily comprised of deciduous trees (i.e. trees that lose their leaves in the winter). The thinner trunks mean that even when one is several hundred metres from the edge of the plateau, and separated from it by a patch of forest, one can still see and appreciate the sunlight.

And certainly that was the case here.

If memory serves, to compose this shot, I adjusted the focal point of the Lensbaby ever so slightly, and then set the light metering on the EOS 350D to the “spot metering” equivalent (I honestly don’t remember the technical name for the setting, but it’s the one that meters light from a middle-of-frame circle covering approximately 9% of the image area). That resulted in light being metered for the sunlight in the background rather than the foreground snow and forest (thus preventing harsh overexposure).

In Lightroom, I then boosted the exposure and fill light to restore foreground detail, and did a bit of noise reduction as well to clean the resultant grain up. The result was the shot you see here, O Reader — one I’m really proud of.

The flag of the Rover Scouts is the Cross of St. George, reflecting the Britannic heritage of the Scouting movement. The Rover Crew proudly displays our not-quite-to-spec St. George’s Cross pretty much wherever we go, and we proudly fly it off the balcony of the Den whenever we’re out there.

This doesn’t really look the part, but it is another Lensbaby picture. Since much of the shot is devoted to areas of relatively flat colour, and then without much detail, the blurring effect isn’t as apparent. I had to wait a few minutes for the wind to kick the flag up enough that I could get a more-or-less complete picture of it, but fortunately it wasn’t all that cold outside. I really like how the blue of the sky came through in the shot — what you see here, O Reader, is what the camera returned to me; I don’t recall doing any major saturation adjustments to this shot in Lightroom.

Nor was I using a polarizer that day.

I think what probably happened is that I had the exposure dialed back due to the fact that I was using the Lensbaby — since, when I’m shooting the EOS 350D in aperture-priority mode, the Lensbaby tends to overexpose a bit, I usually compensate by knocking the exposure down by about 2/3 eV. That certainly served to keep the white on the front facade of the Den from blowing out, and I’d guess that’s what darkened the sky to such an attractive hue.

Here’s another Lensbaby picture, demonstrating how the lens could potentially be used for portrait work.

Grace posed for this shot, and while I usually hate posed shots I have to admit that this one did turn out quite nicely. This was another shot taken while she and I were out viewing the lights at the Alberta Provincial Legislature with our friends Sharon and Dave, which is the primary reason that the colours are kind of…strange. The site lighting at the Legislature consists of several very bright, very harshly yellow-tinted lights that flood the area in a glow that, quite frankly, does unpleasant things to photographs. It’s virtually impossible, I’ve discovered, to use a white balance tool to correct colours in the image, and so the best option was to desaturate all the colours I didn’t need to bring out in the image.

Which is why Grace is a bit monochromatic in this image, although not in a bad way — indeed, the colours are, for the most part, true to life (although oranges and yellows have been heavily subdued).

This is just one of those fun shots — it looks great: Grace is pretty as ever and smiling, the background (thanks to the Lensbaby’s aperture plate) is full of stars, and there’s still a lot of exciting colour in the image. Edit-wise, this one needed a fair bit of noise reduction, but I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m happy with the settings I use in Lightroom to deal with ISO 1600.

Okay, let’s stick with the Lensbaby theme but switch locales.

This is a picture that I took to demonstrate the effect of the Lensbaby to…one of my relatives…at the post-Christmas dinner party that Grace and I threw at my parents’ house in late December of 2007. Someone had arrayed a set of wine glasses on the kitchen table, and the light sparkling through them proved to make for a very good test image.

And that test image turned out to be just a nice image in general. Oh, I know it’s mostly out of focus, but I also don’t care — I think that’s part of the reason I like the shot, to tell the truth. The wine glasses are pretty obvious for what they are, and the aperture plate in the Lensbaby makes every little point of light into a bit of a treat for the eyes.

One last picture of hoar frost, I think.

The Lensbaby really impressed me, overall, for how well it handled the outdoor shots. It allows for all the focus to be placed on one element of, say, a shrub or bush, while at the same time giving the background a very attractive blurring effect. And that aperture plate! I do love that effect.

And the contrast is excellent.

I’m actually really happy with how this shot turned out; unlike previous shots, the brightness here is just nice. For this shot, I set the “sweet spot” of the Lensbaby to be roughly center-frame, and the results were just brilliant. And the best part in all of this is that because I was shooting outdoors, I was able to use a low ISO setting — that really makes all the difference.

It’s time for another Lensbaby photo. I snapped this picture of Grace at her parents’ house, where we spent the Christmas weekend.

I love what the Lensbaby can do for pictures. Once again, Grace (always beautiful) is in focus in the foreground, while the Christmas tree in the background is a blurred maze of green and stars (yes, I was still using the star-shaped aperture plate). I particularly like how the garland and beads on the tree have become strings of stars.

Edit-wise, this picture was pretty easy to handle — the calibration preset and some saturation adjustments brought out all the right colours (and also subdued the skin tones). A bit of noise reduction (but not as much, because I could actually operate the camera at a lower ISO setting in the room we were in) rounded things out.

Here’s another Lensbaby image from the nurses’ Christmas party, this time using a vertical framing to give the tree a…”skirt” of stars. Note too how even the reflections in the window take on the shape of the aperture.

Setting the focus on the Lensbaby is still something I’m working with, and there’s very little of the shot that’s truly in focus (only a tiny part of the tree, in fact). On the plus side, the blurring does wonders to keep the noise down to acceptable levels, which made editing the shot fairly simple.

I’m beginning to notice that the Lensbaby does cause a bit of chromatic aberration, especially when I have the 0.6x de-magnifier attached, but there was very little of it evident in this picture — nothing needing cleanup, at any rate. The more I use the Lensbaby overall, especially with the addition of the aforementioned de-magnifier, the more I love it — it’s a powerful (and fun!) tool. And the fact that it’s effective focal length is 30 mm (50 mm native X 0.6), it also functions as a normal prime lens when it’s on the EOS 350D.

Well, that’s something of a milestone, isn’t it? Five hundred pictures, the first of them posted on September 21st of 2006.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the 500th Pic of the Day also features, for the first time, a new lens — the Lensbaby that Grace bought me as a wedding gift.

The Lensbaby is what is called a “selective focus lens“, meaning that only a part of the whole frame is actually in focus; the rest of it blurs away in a warped sort of way. I gather that the creator of the Lensbaby was inspired to try and re-create, with benefit of high-quality optics, some of the strange photographic effects one could achieve with a Holga.

A bendable mid-section to the lens assembly allows me to move the point of focus around the image frame. As an added bonus, the aperture diameter is controlled not through the camera body, nor through a dial on the lens itself, but through a series of interchangeable plates. The advantage of this is that not only the diameter can change — the shape of the aperture itself can change as well.

If the Reader takes note, there are a few starry shapes visible in the blurry sections of the picture. That’s deliberate, and a direct result of the aperture plate I had in the Lensbaby at the time this picture was taken; an approximately F/4.0 star-shaped aperture.

This was one of my first pictures taken with the Lensbaby, and admittedly it isn’t the best. Even now, I’m still getting the hang of getting the manual focusing just right (there’s no autofocus on a Lensbaby), and sometimes I misjudge where that setting needs to be. Still, this is kind of an interesting shot to me, and I thought I’d post it — to me, at least, it has a slightly magical feel to it, as though Grace’s sister were suddenly appearing in a swirl of arcane energy from the left side of the frame, or as though there’s some shock-wave through which she is passing.

Lensbaby shots are actually pretty easy to edit, overall. As noted, the glass elements are of a pretty high quality, and chromatic aberration is kept to a minimum except in situations of extremely high contrast. Noise, even at high ISO settings, tends to be less than on my 17-85 mm lens (in part due to the blurring).

The one thing I note is that I usually have to either stop the camera’s exposure down to around -2/3 eV, or else use Lightroom to adjust the exposure on the shot after the fact by about the same amount. With settings left at normal, the Lensbaby tends to overexpose (probably because the lens isn’t communicating an aperture setting to the camera body, and so is leaving the camera to guess. I suppose I could mitigate this problem by shooting in full manual mode, but even that’s only a 50% solution, because there’s no way to know exactly what to set the aperture to (especially when it’s a star shape, and therefore has variable diameter depending on which points one takes the measurement from).

Not strictly the best picture I’ve ever taken of a laptop.

Where was this taken?

But there is an interesting effect I want to draw your attention to, all the same. You see, I took this shot at an aperture value of f29 — a very small opening, which gives me a very large depth of field as a result (I wanted most/all of the keyboard, as well as the monitor, to be in focus).

Of course, that makes for a much longer shutter speed as a result. More than ten seconds, in fact.

And interestingly, in that time, the camera catches a very clear glimpse of the pixels on the LCD display. Ignore the swirling appearance of the zoomed-out photo — that’s just some moire effect resulting from the scaling. Up close, the grid pattern of the pixels is intact.

And kinda neat to look at.

And yes…now you all get a look at what my Powerbook’s Dock looks like, and what applications I have “at my fingertips” on a regular basis.

Every so often, graffiti is kind of funny.

Where was this taken?

This was in a stairwell in the Education Building on the U of A campus. It made me chuckle…toss in some cinnamon, nutmeg, 6 eggs, a couple cups of flour, and some shaved carrot you’ve got a handy recipe for carrot cake!

The shot is also an interesting study in what a large aperture (f1.8 in this shot) does to the focus in an image; you can almost see the vertical strip in the middle of the shot that’s in focus, compared to the completely out-of-focus foreground and deep background. Even the ‘1′ is kind of blurry.