Funny. At the moment there are a lot of things that I’d have imagined easier. Let’s talk about this fisheye lens first.
I was very busy yesterday, basically editing SoFoBoMo images all day, but every once in a while, when I needed to get on my feet for some minutes, I took the camera and tried taking a picture.
Normally when I do that, I pretty much know what an image will or can look like compositionally, and that without even having used the viewfinder. This also works for more exotic lenses or when the intended depth of field is very shallow. It even works for the Lensbaby. They all are quite predictable. Take some images and you know how the lens works, know how the lens works, and you can predict any image. Easy.
Not so with this beast. Everything twists and turns, and so do you while trying to get your feet out of the image. Or your elbow.
At the moment I try using the lens for macro shots like with these roses (I suppose that’s what they are, some wild roses). And really, wide open, at f2.8, and going so near that the front lens almost touches the petals, there is even something like bokeh 🙂
SoFoBoMo editing is the other hard stuff. I did it all day yesterday, and at night there were still six or seven images missing, and so was the text. Still, I reckoned I would manage to get it ready by Sunday 11:00am.
The trouble is, that a sequence of images that were shot in varying conditions of light must be edited in a way that makes a continuous, smooth impression. Color temperature is such a thing. In normal image editing, e.g. for the Image of the Day, it is completely irrelevant whether the absolute temperature is “correct” or not. Sure, I could use a gray card, but what for? If it looks OK, it’s OK, if not, not.
Sequences work differently. The images must work together. Any abrupt color changes will get noticed, and the same is true for different styles of post-processing. And that’s my problem. Over the course of almost two weeks of editing I have changed styles, using different monitors, all calibrated but all with different limits, I have introduced color shifts. These things are often not visible when you see only one image at a time, but together the differences hurt the eye. More than a million years of evolution have trained us to see the most subtle differences.
And that’s why time slips away 🙂
The Song of the Day, “Funny How Time Slips Away”, is from the 1974 Bryan Ferry album “Another Time, Another Place”.