Tilt Shift Picnic

Time has flown by, but back in August, I got my hands on a Canon 24mm tilt shift lens ($1149 from Amazon and more info here) and played with it at a picnic/barbecue at my house with some friends and coworkers.

The tilt shift lens is very tricky to use. For the non-photographers out there: basically it gives you the ability to manipulate your plane of focus on an x, y, and z axis instead of just the normal x axis. So you can throw certain areas of the image out of focus. The problem is that the more you manipulate the plane of focus, the more bouncing around inside the lens the light has to do and therefore, the more difficult it is to accurately asses the needed exposure settings. Add to this that this is a very wide angle lens and has a tendency to distort the image at times and you get a situation where it takes a lot of practice to use this lens well.

Anyway, below is a flickr slideshow of some of the more successful images I got that night. If there is no slideshow showing up, try clicking here. Also, 3 of these shots were actually taken with my 50mm prime, but I’ll let you try to figure out which ones!

I’m interested to hear what you (the reader), think about using these slideshows on my blog versus what I usually do, which is just load up all the images one after the other down the column.