Time Immortal

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.

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).