Walking toward the Unitarian church on Pierrepont Street.
Looking up at the church.
Looking out from my balcony, over the playground, into New York Harbor.
February 12, 2008
The walk home in the snow.
I've got my new fisheye lens. Just outside the law school, in downtown Brooklyn:
Walking toward the Unitarian church on Pierrepont Street.
Looking up at the church.
Looking out from my balcony, over the playground, into New York Harbor.
Walking toward the Unitarian church on Pierrepont Street.
Looking up at the church.
Looking out from my balcony, over the playground, into New York Harbor.
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21 comments:
Nice fish eye!
What is lovelier than an angular urban landscape softened by snow?
the last one is pretty cool.
I love the lighting of the first and last photo.
Eerie.
Nice pix. Now you don't need to buy that expensive mirror.
Woo to the pics. Everything is bendy.
Buy the mirror anyway.
Yesterday, after a bento box, my legs got so cold they stopped working.
Oh, cool, the 10.5mm is the 180-degree view one.
The appeal unfortunately wears out after a while, but short of using a specialty "panoramic" camera, nothing captures ultra-wide perspectives as neat as a fisheye does.
Try some real low, near the ground perspectives next; when done right, it can be real cool (and when done wrong, it's a whole lotta boring sidwalk and street, but part of the trick is to get it right, right?).
Thank You.
Asleep or awake it's all a dream
Be it nightmare or a fairy tale:
Dickensian, the streets by children seen,
Who, now adults, repeat the tale.
Um, when does this Blog go into Valentine's mode?
You are going to switch to an all-Valentine's format, any time now, right?
C'mon, the celebration's in full swing. Don't be such a stick .
Happy Valentine's Day !
Love,
Maxine
A good lens for juxtaposing near and far, as it exaggerates perspective. Don't forget to manage your depth of field, though.
The purplish blues in the shots, especially the church shot, are lovely.
You need to road trip to Boston to take a picture of this with your new lens :)
"Don't forget to manage your depth of field, though."
Feel free to give me advice on how to do that. I keep reading, then forgetting the technical things.
I'd be curious to know what he means by "manage your depth of field". With a 10mm lens it's pretty difficult to not have everything in focus.
Depth of Field wiki article.
When you're focused on something, every lens has a range in front of and behind that object where things will be in focus. That range changes depending on a wide variety of things, but without getting too technical, the bottom line is this: When you want to include the most you can, you "stop down" as much as you can (example: You choose F5.6 or F8, or even higher, rather than F2.8 on the aperture ring) to the point where you use a shutter speed high enough to avoid natural "shaking" blur from you holding the camera. You don't want to select too short a shutter speed; generally, people cannot hold a camera steady enough to avoid motion blur at any shutter speeds slower than 1/60th of a second. And on really caffeinated days, I sometimes wonder if even 1/125th is enough :) .
In short: Highest "F-stop" and lowest shutter speed you can manage gives you the greatest depth of field.
But, sometimes you deliberately want some things out of focus. At that point, you manipulate your settings. F8 at 1/60th gives you too big a depth of field? Okay, change to F4 or 2.8, then up your shutter speed to 1/250th or 1/500th.
Keep in mind that just about all cameras nowadays can automaticallly adjust one setting in reaction to you changing another, so all you really have to do is change your apeture to affect DoF, and your camera will take care of the shutter speed on it's own.
Keep in mind, too, that a wide angle lens - and the fisheye is the epitome of a wide angle lens - normally has a really large DoF, so most of the time if you're just snapshooting at things farther than, say, 5 feet away, you don't have much to worry about. It's the long lenses - like I used to use back when I was shooting sports for school - that require really active DoF management. Wide angles tend to almost take care of themselves (Almost... You still need to pay attention)
That all make sense?
Yes, Rick Lee is correct. My last line - about needing to pay attention to DoF - is a general warning, not really applicable to your lens. Paying attention to DoF with a fisheye is like wondering if you'll get wet in a swimming pool. That 10.5mm lens you have has an obscenely large DoF. An older version I looked up says that even at the widest apeture - F2.8 - your DoF is from 100 centimeters to infinity. That is huge. With that specific lens, you generally don't have to worry about having everything in focus, you sort of get it by default.
Wide angle lenses do have an incredible depth of field, but it's not infinite. And even if you've found two objects (near and far) you wish to have in focus, you'll still need to focus to a specific distance somewhere in between the two, and stop down the lens a certain amount, in order to get both of them in focus.
And for that, you'll need a DOF (or Hyperfocal) chart for the lens (I use software on my Treo). It helps to also have a tape measure.
I have the focus on automatic. If I'm pointing it at the sky or something, I take the precaution of pre-aiming it at what I most want in focus, but I'm not doing those things. I'm usually using automatic for the other settings too.
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