Thursday, September 29, 2011

Waiting...

It feels more like running after something you can't catch and never will. This how my week was. Traffic jams, anger bursts, and completely thrown off by mood swings and not able to manage anything, well, almost everything.
I was hoping that my shipment would arrive by the middle of this week to have some time to test them, but unfortunately, thanks to the customs and procedures, still the shipment is not released up to this moment so far. The shipment had been in the country since last Saturday.

My shipment consists of 3 items: a) Rokinon 8mm lens, b) Lateral extension for tripods, and c) adapter ring from Cokin (62mm). And yes, the 8mm lens is a fisheye lens; another one!

A. Rokinon 8mm Fisheye lens:

Rokinon 8mm Fisheye lens
Source B&H


According to the specs, this lens is specially designed to give a 180 degrees in the diagonal with cropped (APS-C type) camera; like my Canon EOS 7D. It is in fact designed specifically for Canon. This lens hopefully will give me more pace and speed when I work with panoramas (for the larger angle) and frankly, I'm not sure it will work completely fine but if I didn't try, I won't find out. Just to think of all the re-calibration for the VR-head to fit the new lens makes me shiver a bit. I was lucky with my Canon 15mm fisheye lens because the default setting of the VR-head was almost enough to reduce any parallax. But with this, I don't know how it will go. One of the biggest concerns for me now is the chromatic aberrations in hard light conditions.
My teacher in fact provided me with a new info, and that is, panoramas are usually taken with a 50mm lens (or normal lens) because this lens provides an angle of view almost identical to human's eye. Thinking about it, and with the crop factor in APS-C cameras, that means I would be needing something like 31mm lens to do a panorama (which is something I have in fact with my Canon EF-S 18-55mm). An idea for a new experiment with my lenses, but in what place and how, I don't know. Fisheye lenses though provide me with wide view and it is suitable to include full bodies within complete slides without the need to take 2 shots or more to include one body, just like I did previously with my work place panorama.

I'm Busy

I'm just noticing that the image is tilted a bit! Anyway, such inclusion of bodies in images would be hardly done on 30mm range because it will be zoomed in, unless of course the body is far away from the camera.

B. Lateral Extension:

Photek Tri-X-2500
Source B&H

I got the idea to purchase this extension after a little experiment with some of my prints. After thinking for a while I thought this might be helpful for me as well in taking a shot for the nadir point, providing that I get it elevated to the same level as the camera during the shooting process. This, however, is still debatable in my mind, because I will have to carry more tools with me, with the already stuffed bags and shoulders I'm already having. it would be awesome though to fit this on my monopod (which I didn't use for a while) and keep it ready with me so that after finishing the panorama, the nadir point would be the last to take in a quick manner.

Prints
The shot that made me think of a lateral extension.

C. Adapter Ring (62mm):

Cokin 62mm Adapter Ring
Source B&H

This adapter ring will be fitting my Tamron 70-300mm telephoto macro lens. Not sure how often I will be using my ND filters with my Tamron but to make things complete, and since I do have adapters for the rest of the lenses (except of the fisheye of course), so I thought I better complete the set with this ring as well. With Tamron's minimum aperture of f/45 or f/39 and some ND filters, this might enables me to put a new limit for long exposures experience with me!


I. Troublesome:
One of the problems that I've remained several days trying to fix is an old panorama that I've decided to re-do in a different view point. It's my home's panorama under the dust...


Being A Grain of Sand

This time though, it is about changing to WV form. The main problem was to eliminate the remains of the tripod and the VR-head, as usual. But here, the ground is unique and ordered, and there was no chance for random cloning. After spending days and days just looking at the ground and thinking, I seriously gave up. I've just cloned in a random way. Not a beautiful view, but no other way for me to do such a delicate work.

Under The Dust

I named it, by mistake, as well Under The Sand. Personally speaking, I'm not so fond of it like the older panorama. I've used Photo Filter adjustment layers and layer masks to make a contrast between yellow parts and the blue parts (boosting both). Well, the blue part specifically was not there originally but it had a tiny blue reflection on the car shade from the outside and gave me the idea of making it as you can see here.

II. Scribbles:
Back to the old habits a bit. I was given, for some reason which I don't know, a pack of soft papers, somehow like glossy papers but not glossy really. It's a small pack to be used in the office like stick-it-note but without the sticky part!
This type of paper is good for scanning in high resolution because it does not contain obvious pores. In previous times when I used to sketch randomly on normal papers, these pores would cause me troubles in scans and I would have to use excessive Median filter to eliminate these artifacts.
Anyway, I'm back to my random thoughts for some time now, and I seriously don't know what I'm doing...

17880

In case you are wondering why it's called 17880, just concentrate and you will know; maybe. After scanning, the sketch was copied 3 times and stuck together to form the shape above. In other words, my sketch was only a quarter of this design. I guess you can think of it as some... African art maybe? Anyway, I got problems saving such designs in vector format. I need to learn more about these files. Every time I upload the file I get an error from websites.

Now, I have to admit I've been lazy working with my Ayvarith recordings again but I need to pardon myself for now. It was really one heck of a week. Time to sit and wait for this shipment to be out from clearance...


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