Pancake lens

I just took delivery of a very neat little toy from Loreo today. Essentially, it’s a lens small enough that you can use it as a body cap for your camera. It doesn’t have autofocus (or any focus, in fact) – it’s just fixed at infinity, but you can select apertures between f/5.6 and f/64, making it quite functional as both a normal 35mm lens and as a pinhole lens.

The image quality isn’t great – in particular, the flare is horrible – but it’s so light that it’s worth having just because you’ll never grudge carrying it. You always take better pictures with the lens you’re actually carrying than the one you left at home.

Anyway, here’s some sample shots if you’re curious.

Edit:PS. I forgot to mention, the lens only costs $15. Seriously cheap for what you get.

Panoramas from a fisheye

I’ve been trying out generating proper panoramas from pictures taken with a Sigma 8mm fisheye lens lately, and I’m quite pleased with the results. This example is taken from a group of six shots I took while in Ronda in southern Spain; I stitched them together using Hugin, asked Hugin to convert the output to equirectangular format, and ran it through the (trial version of) Pano2VR. Much to my surprise the output’s really pretty decent; the original images look somewhat squished, but the actual output quality’s really pretty reasonable.

A single fisheye shot actually produces not a bad result on its own; this example is another shot taken in Ronda but with just a single image imported into Hugin. However, I found that if you’re stitching at all, you need to use at least three or four shots or Hugin will not have enough information to figure out the appropriate orientation for the second shot. That causes you to end up with a really messed up stitched output. If you know for sure that your horizons are straight, you can probably get around that by restricting it so that it can’t change the image roll, but I can’t see it being a reliable way to get decent output.

Below are some of the source images for anyone who’s curious.

Tiny Mammoth

I just finished building up a tiny mammoth kit I got from kfarrell on etsy. It’s only about 20mm high! These kits are lovely, but they’re awfully fiddly. Make sure you’ve got some tweezers before you start trying to make one; I didn’t have any and it was more than a little tricky!

iBlogger

I’m playing with a little app called iBLogger on the iPhone just now. While mostly it’s nothing special, it can insert links like the one below automatically, which is neat.

Edit: Google latitude actually does this nicer; see my experiments page if you want a look.

Canon 35-350

I just acquired a Canon EF35-350 f/3.5-5.6L USM. Truly, ’tis a shiny thing.

Don’t blame the lens for the grubby spots or the motion blur; I really need to clean the sensor on my 5D, and in my excitement to play with a new lens I had it set up completely inappropriately for what I was shooting at first!