important safety instructions

Keep your hands inside the fridge at all times. 

Avoid teeth. Even your own. Especially your own.

Sit down until it goes away. If it comes back, keep sitting, but try to sit more, if you take my meaning.

If you spot loose change on the sidewalk, check for cameras. Cameras are more valuable than loose change.

In all endeavours, try doing it the right way first. If the right way does not work, try the wrong way. If the wrong way doesn’t work, contact an electrician. They’re frequently very sexy.

Do not attempt to open your eyes in mid-sneeze. If you do, you may see the Presence. Most humans do not return from a Sighting.

Only put bling on your thing if the thing in question is your heart outside your chest as the result of congenital deformation.

There is no such thing as government-issued nunchuks. Taylor and Kyle are screwing with you.

Under no circumstances listen to Taylor or Kyle, but when you hang out with them it is crucial that you stop hitting yourself.

The Nut Man

The Nut Man has not come to the office.
The recessed-lit break room is empty.
Executives and assistants wander the halls, fingering useless bills.

He has not come and he will never come,
pushing his metal cart before him,
pushing his plastic drums of nuts,
his heat-sealed bags, creased and grease-smeared and reeking of smoke.

The Nut Man has not brought his candy, his brittle, his silted mix of seeds.
Today the Nut Man is in his garage, measuring out his goods,
Apportioning, closing off, smoothing labels down,
Saturating stink of ash and polyurethane creeping from every crease.
Nut Man, we miss you. You were some kind of solution.

it's the end of all guac as we know it

And I feel full.

pictures from way back yesterday

It’s my desperate belief understanding that you all enjoy my photographs. Because who doesn’t like a rectangle simply stuffed with pixels? I tell you, my rectangles got so many pixels, they’re almost bulging out at the sides. My pictures are the fat man of… pictures.

No copying my metaphors, you hear? Also, hands off my synecdoches. Or should I say fingertips? Which reminds me:

The next time some methed-out radio DJ hectors you to phone up the station and recite “the phrase the pays,” call in and sing that song. The DJ will be all like “Argh you again” but he won’t hang up, because “[A]ny action that directly or indirectly effects a cessation of any performance of Fingertips is considered high treason and is punishable by fines of $5 and/or death.” The law is only applicable to residents of the Republic of Cool Ranch Doritos. But that’s where you live.

Hmm, pictures.

I did some more freelensing over coffee at Tangerine Food Bar, which produced some good results with the autumn-themed centerpieces. 

Freelensing, as you may recall from yesterdays’ blog entry, is the practice of removing the lens from the camera and shooting with the lens held just off the mount. The result is shallow depth of field, a dramatically reduced focal distance (from one foot to a couple of inches) and lots of weird blur and light leaks. For example, the eye of Schmutzie: 

Later that evening the spirit of creative photography seized ahold of me like a Wendigo and gnawed at my soul. So I stuck a blender jar on the end of my lens and went around taking photos of things until something interesting happened. 

And that’s yesterday. No daring street photography, no stray image that told a story. But not every day has to produce something like that. Some days you’re lucky to squeeze in one beautiful thing.

freelensing around the home: a how-to

Last night I tried freelensing, which sounds like an extreme sport or spectacularly dangerous sexual practice, but it’s actually relatively safe. Unless you’re doing it in the midst of a basejump. While having sex with someone. And trying to freelens at the same time. What, do you have extra arms or something?

Because freelensing requires both arms, and sexy basejumping is difficult enough already.

Anyway. Freelensing is pretty much what you imagine: removing your lens and shooting with the lens held just a fraction of an inch from the camera. You have leave to wiggle the lens around.

Why would you do this? Because you can get some strange and beautiful shots, and you’ll discover that your lens can do things you never imagined.

With Desmond the Duck (so named by the woman who brought him home) volunteering but not looking very happy about it, I was able to get an extremely shallow depth of field with some strange distorted blur around his breast and bill (pints on special at the Breast & Bill!). And there’s some nice elongated bokeh in the background. Bokeh is probably the greatest word to come out of photography, and it refers to the quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas of your image. There are all kinds of ideas on what makes for good bokeh and bad bokeh, but the main thing to take away from this is that the word bokeh sounds like someone got punched in the gut in the midst of a talk on floral arrangements.

Here’s Lula, who’s all like, “Why are you wiggling that black cylinder around? Is it something I should smell? I’m going to smell that cylinder, just to make sure.”

So what is going on here? What’s with all the blurriness and why isn’t it just doing what a camera and lens should normally do? Why isn’t the answer just something like “You can’t take photographs, Aidan - that’s what’s going on here.”

The non-ego-destroying answer, which is probably interesting to some, involves the phrase plane of focus. Or maybe focal plane, if you like fewer words in your jargon. Manufacturers spend a lot of time making sure that the plane of focus, like an invisible wall of sharpness, runs perfectly perpendicular to the lens. Which, under normal circumstances, is perfectly parallel to the camera body. Insert diagram below!

That’s actually the first result in Google image search for ‘diagram’. So don’t look at it. But when you tilt your lens back and forth, you’re changing the plane of focus and putting the focus in weird areas of the image. You also get all kinds of blobs, smears and leaks that rough up your image.

That horrifically blurry image is me taking a photo in the bathroom mirror with my bizarre puffy clown hands smothering the camera. But I’d prefer to direct your attention to that purple ring of light. To coax that ring into existence, I just used Photoshop tilted the lens down a bit to let the overhead light hit the camera sensor.

One thing you’ll notice when you start freelensing is that your portrait lens suddenly becomes a macro lens, or macroesque. You can take shots from just a few inches away. Move your lens farther out and you get that tilt-shift effect that all the photographers loved so much in 2007. Yes, these are some cutting-edge tips. 

At this point you’ve probably figured out that what we’re doing is the bargain basement, warranty-voiding cousin of tilt-shift photography. Companies like Lensbaby and others actually make equipment to get similar effects. Tilt-shift lenses do a host of other cool things as well, like make it possible to take a photo of a room with a mirror without having your reflection show up in the shot. But with freelensing, you’re paying nothing, and you get much wider apertures for better depth of field effects. And it’s just sort of fun. I took a whole bunch of pictures of a shriveled piece of ginger root, but I didn’t upload them to Flickr. Because then people would know that I spend my winter nights photographing ginger root and not doing sexy basejumping like a proper man.

There are dangers to freelensing, mostly involving dirt and dust. Most cameras have sensor cleaning mechanisms, but if you let signifcant bits of dust or cat hair into the camera body, you’ve got a problem. If you have a mirrorless camera then you should be particularly careful, because the sensors are completely exposed when you remove the lens. If you have a Leica, I just hate you. And nothing will assuage my furious hatred until you give me your Leica.

The other danger is dropping your lens. The best solution is not to drop it.

Anyway! These are my first attempts at doing freelensing, and also my first attempt at explaining why I thought it was such a great idea to muck around with expensive equipment. Photojojo and B&H Photo have really good tutorials on the subject with frankly much better examples than mine. Go there! Then go out and break some stuff.

Just out of curiosity: what do you do with your camera that messes with the rules a bit? Do you freelens? Tape it to the side of a building? Film yourself doing a sexy basejump? Careful with that one.