Back in black (and white)

Holy crap. Are you seriously updating your blog?!

Yes. After almost a year, I'm back to post some photos. What have I been doing this whole time? Well, mostly nothing (if you don't count getting married, changing houses, getting a dog, working full-time, and other, less interesting things). But I have been working on a few projects.

Firstly, I've got a new camera. It's a 40D to replace the old 10D, which I still have but almost never use. Sure, I ranted about how you don't need to have a big expensive camera to shoot good photos, and it's still true. But let me justify my purchase: the 10D has a real problem shooting at ISO 800 (or any time there's low light). That's because the sensor just isn't that good. Additionally: I started seeing the shutter on some of my 10D's photos, and the processor is really slow, so some DIY stuff got to be a bit frustrating.

Also, that camera was made in 2003. So now I've got an upgrade. Boo ya.

OK, so I know it's a little late, but here's what I've been working on lately:

Remember this? It's a home-made tilt-shift lens that I put together with a medium format lens, a hollowed out body cap and a piece of fabric. But now it's got an upgrade: cardboard and dryer tube (which keep the fabric out of the way). And on the new camera, it's much easier to avoid the graininess the old images had.

To recap, the basic idea of a tilt-shift is to change the way the plane of focus works. On a normal lens, the plane is always perpendicular to the camera, so you'll have a plane in focus, and then beyond that, things out of focus.

But with a tilt-shift, that plane isn't necessarily perpendicular to the camera -- now, you can move it diagonally in three dimensions so that something in the foreground can be in focus at the same time as something in the background, and then nothing else. Check out this photo for an idea:



Now that I've got the increased sensor awesomeness of the 40D, I can shoot these images without the grain, making it a relatively good substitute for an actual tilt-shift (which would be hilariously out of my price range).

I've got several new photos along this same line that I'll be showing at Vintage 21's First Friday this week (that's June 4, for those without a calendar). That also happens to be my dad's birthday, so it's like a double-whammy of great stuff happening.

Come out if you can: I will be showing more stuff than just the tilt-shift. And I'll be back up here to show some more projects that I've been too lazy to update about until now.