Cal-Sag Canal Diptych
Tag: Canon 85mm f/1.2L II
Sources of Inspiration
Last weekend, I traveled from Missouri to Iowa to visit my Alma mater and some of the people who were crucially influential for the beginning of my career in photography. (My dad is the most influential of all, but it was in college where I found people who urged me to take my photography in the direction that it has traveled since my graduation in 2006.) When I return to campus next year both for my five-year reunion and to peddle the re-print of my book, I hope to use these images as the basis for a series of portraits of people who mean so much to me.
I’ll just have to make a note to myself to reserve the 85mm f/1.2L II from Canon Professional Services so that there will be some consistency among the images. It may just be the most beautiful lens in Canon’s line-up. . .
More selects from the Cal-Sag Channel
As I go through my take from Thursday, I find a new image I like each sweep. It’s interesting to me how different my editing process is with storytelling photographs than with my more traditional nature and architectural fare, where I am far more ruthless in the initial sweeps of the takes. I suppose it’s part of learning…
Scenes from the Cal-Sag Channel
An old lens updated…and enlarged?
Lens envy is something every photographer experiences, and sometimes it’s made worse when a lens you love is replaced with a newer, more expensive version. I suppose this is what people who have iPhone’s go through every June.
About five years ago I purchased a Canon 24mm f/3.5L TS-E lens for its ability to control perspective…that is, I wanted to get a view looking “up” at a building without the lines converging. And it was a small, albeit dense, lens, so it was pretty easy to slip into a camera bag and take it along just in case a landscape or architectural situation demanded it. But it had its flaws, chief among them being that the tilt (also known as swing) movement comes from the factory 90 degrees from the shift (rise and fall) movement. That means that if you want to use shift to get a higher perspective, but also tilt the lens downward, then you’re out of luck unless you send the lens in to Canon to be altered so that they’re on the same plane.
