Thomas Locke Hobbs

My mom makes these ceramic scultures which dot our house. Many are inspired by French Gothic sculture found on Cathedrals.

For one of her book clubs my mom read 'Line of Beauty' and put a purple post-it note on every page containing the word 'beauty' or 'beautiful'.

Tilt-Shift

Tricks with tilt-shift photography have been making their way around the blogosphere. On a bellows view camera the lens can move independently from the film. Architecture photographers can shift the lens to get the vertical lines in a building to line up, as in this photograph of Shanghai by Robert Polidori. But you can also twist the lens totally out of whack so that only a slice of the picture is in focus. This has the curious effect of making the scene look like Lego Land, especially if the picture is of distant buildings, shot from above. Olivo Barbieri in Metropolis Magazine had a whole spread of city scenes done in this style. Brazilian photographer Claudio Edinger has a whole book on Rio with this effect.

You don't need a large format camera to get this effect. Canon makes a $1000 tilt-shift lens that you can use on a DSLR. NYC Photoblogger Bluejake played with this lens on his blog a couple of years ago. There's a cheaper option called a Lensbaby which is a slinky-like lens where you use your fingers to push & pull the lens for weird focus effects. These photos of the Unisphere in Queens and a rainbow slinky were both taken with a lensbaby.

Now it comes out that there is a simple Photoshop tutorial to create this effect. I basically involves blurring out the side of the picture. The results can be convincing. There's now a flickr group dedicated to this hack. I particularly liked these photos of downtown Sao Paulo [always a favorite subject for me] and Niagara Falls.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006