Plaza Lights

So last Saturday I went with Digital Labrador to a "photo safari" on the Plaza. In my 10 years in KC, I have never really taken pictures of the lights so I thought this would be a fun learning experience. There were a couple pros stationed around the Plaza with fun equipment to use and tips/tricks to share. They had a Canon 5D Mark II that was amazing! I didn't use it but I saw some of the images it was producing and it's truly a fabulous piece of equipment. If I had an extra $2700 laying around I would buy one.

It was FREEZING that night but I managed to hang in there and shoot for 3 hours straight. It was hard to shoot with numb fingers but I got a few shots I was happy with. I was hand holding everything because I couldn't find my tripod- which was fine because I hate lugging that huge thing around anyway.

My favorites:

Jake

Just wanted to post some pics for the grandparents!









Trixie has kept any tree damage to a minimum, Simon is obsessed with chasing the reflections of the lights and Jake just wants to eat the branches. Every so often there will be an incident involving Simon trying to "get" Trixie behind the tree, but so far nobody has been hurt. And I don't know if it's the weather, the season or the fact that my cat Gabby is losing her mind, but she has been coming out into the living room a lot these days! This is the cat who practically lives in the bedroom, only to leave for the next room where the litter box is (if we're lucky).

We are looking forward to our first Christmas with a child- I get teary just thinking about it! I can't wait to see him get excited about Christmas morning and watch his eyes light up as he see's what Santa has left him. Of course, it will be a couple years before this happens...it's still fun to think about!

Fun with a tilt/shift lens

A photographer friend of mine sent this video to me a while back and I came across it again today. I love it! It looks like a scene of miniatures but it's really a time lapse "video" shot with a dSLR using a tilt/shift lens. I believe it's all stills put together to look like a movie. SO COOL! I'm diggin' the song too...


Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
From this blog.

*About tilt/shift lenses:
A tilt shift lens looks like a complicated little piece of equipment with movable parts, but it's pretty simple to use. I've never used one on a dSLR but I played around with one at KCAI on a 4x5 camera. The tilt controls the position of the plane of focus which results in a very shallow depth of field, so most of the image is out of focus except for a small area that is in focus. The plane of focus can be adjusted to make a large scene appear much smaller, as the shallow depth of field is similar to that achieved by a macro lens on miniature. You can't get this effect using a large aperture on a regular macro lens. Shift controls perspective, and this can result in some cool effects. Shifting is used a lot in architectural photography so that there is little to no distortion of lines. You can shift the lens to be parallel to the subject, instead of tilting the camera back to be perpendicular...catch my drift? Shifting lenses have a much wider field of vision than a standard lens of the same focal length. These lenses come with a pretty large price tag- around $1100 and up.