☣ cUKi's photostream

First test outdoors with my new Arax tilt adapter and a heavy, first generation Flektogon 50/4 lens I got off Ebay (neither of them peanuts-cheap, but still way cheaper than any tilt-shift lens!). Even wide open, the tilted lens allowed me to get both the rippled water in the foreground and the distant clouds in focus.

Shot handheld at 1/60s, f/4, ISO 400. The shutter speed barely allowed me to shoot handheld and freeze the motion of the water. I was standing about 3m above the water level, so I tilted the lens down slightly less than 1° and focused (using LiveView) on the clouds above the horizon. The constructions and power towers on the opposite shore fell below the plane of focus and thus are bit blurry (or is it motion blur?). The clouds high in the frame are a bit out of focus as well - but that's hardly noticeable since they were rather fluffy anyway. What was important for me was the sky above the horizon and its reflection in the Humber - I think I got both sharp enough. I could've probably done better if I used the tripod and focused more carefully, but I was in a hurry.

Although tempting when shooting handheld, it's worth remembering it's not a good idea to focus and recompose with a tilted lens!

Oh, and sure, the sunset was magnificent, as usual :)

Photographers love to mention the Inverse Square Law when they're trying to scare an audience. It's admittedly very important, but in essence it's waaay too abstract to actually help the busy photographer take his pictures. Light falls off not with the distance, but the square of it - fair enough, but why think of the decay as quadratic when fall-off is such a visually obvious fact? (Continued...)

With such a lens (here, at f/5.6), it looks like the field of focus is a paraboloid, while on the PoF predicted by Scheimpflug only a small area is in focus. So try guessing where the hinge line/point is for the rest of the focus field. Never mind...

(plunging back into the wealth of insight found here and here, but also here)

Note (added mid February): Lensbaby just launched a new optic, Edge 80, with a planar field of focus and a sweet 12-blade, f/2.8-22 aperture. That's great news for the Scheimpflug junkies out there. But at $300 it's too expensive, and on a crop sensor it's too long. And it comes too late for me anyway - I've already bought a 8° tilt adapter and a Flektogon 50/4 by Zeiss, they're in the mail - for about half that price!

Halloween party in Spiders.

The key light was a camera-mounted flash (with a short snoot and CTO) bounced into a 80cm handheld reflector. Basically, for each shot I decided on a light direction and quality, then oriented the flash and at times adjusted its zoom. The flash was on E-TTL with no FEC, the ambient exposure was set on Manual. For each shot I held the reflector in position (with either the white or silver face up) in the left hand, and operated the camera with the right hand. A battery grip and a tight hand strap helped a lot. I took like this about 200 pictures in about two hours - with quite a good keeper ratio.

Halloween party in Spiders.

The key light was a camera-mounted flash (with a short snoot and CTO) bounced into a 80cm handheld reflector. Basically, for each shot I decided on a light direction and quality, then oriented the flash and at times adjusted its zoom. The flash was on E-TTL with no FEC, the ambient exposure was set on Manual. For each shot I held the reflector in position (with either the white or silver face up) in the left hand, and operated the camera with the right hand. A battery grip and a tight hand strap helped a lot. I took like this about 200 pictures in about two hours - with quite a good keeper ratio.