Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys released a new CD, SteamShipKillers (BandCamp link) Friday night. Jaggery, who had just recently released a Double-Single, opened. Two of my favorite Boston-based bands in one place? Bliss.

 

 

 


 

There’s more in the full gallery, including one with a mostly naked girl. Bet that got your attention, eh?

I keep shooting these guys because they and their live shows are Made of Utter Awesome; they’re on a mini-tour in the northeastern US as I type. Dates are on the front page of their website!

The tilting mechanism was what I was most interested in, and was also the weirdest thing about the lens. The plane of focus does *not* stay parallel to the lens as you tilt it. It also moves as you focus the lens in addition to as you tilt it. It’s still usable hand-held but when it’s absolutely critical you nail the plane of focus, a tripod is in your future. A good explanation of how tilt works can be found here from Northlight Images.

When you abuse the tilt, you can blur the heck out of an image like so:

More careful use though results in a depth of field as deep as your heart desires. I don’t have any great examples of it, but this will do. I didn’t nail the entirety of the front sign, but the bottom of it is in focus as is the far sign:

Assuming you can focus well and hold it steady, the lens is also sharp and I love the colors and ‘pop’ I got out of it with so little effort:

Ultimately though, I wouldn’t buy the lens for myself. I already have a very excellent f/2.8 lens of about that focal length in the form of the 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro, and I think the tilting and shifting would be much more useful for me in a wider focal length.

  
  

And for lack of a better place to put them post them, a couple of shots on the way to/in the North End:

 
 

On an equipment related note I picked up the battery grip for my camera a little while ago – while it makes it a lot more bulky it fits my hands and handles much more nicely. It also makes my camera bag quite cramped, I might need a bigger one soon (any suggestions are welcome). I’ll also be renting the 90mm T/S-E lens this week, so expect to see some experimentation from that in the near future!

Since I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going I elected to leave the tripod at home. On one hand this was a good idea — I ended up walking about 6 miles last night — but I wasn’t entirely happy with the pictures I was getting handheld. So I put the camera into movie mode, parked the camera on my shoulder, and enjoyed the show through my eyes.

So while I don’t have a bajillion photos to sort, now I have to figure out what to do with a few gigs of video. Have a screen cap:

Somerville is having its own fireworks show on the 9th (originally planned for the 2nd but rained out) and I’m planning on being there, this time with a tripod!