I found myself in a camera store the other day and stumbled upon a new Canon camera sporting a 35x zoom. Yes, you read that right, a 35x zoom. A general rule with cameras and lenses is that the greater the zoom the poorer the quality, there are certain optical sacrifices that need to be made in order to accommodate the convenience of a zoom, to this end I’m totally fascinated to see how this camera goes with image quality, because for $550 this would be hard to beat for an amateur photographer not ready to step into the world of the SLR. Don’t worry, this is going somewhere…
On Friday night just passed I popped over to Sydney for a weekend. The best deals on flights are with budget carriers who charge extra for checked in luggage, so I decided to pack light and fit everything into a single bit of carry-on luggage. Usually my carry-on allowance is used up entirely (exceeded normally!) with camera equipment, but because space was at a premium and I had no desire to carry a heavy backpack round the streets of Sydney all weekend I packed super in the camera department. All I took was 1 camera (my Canon 5D mk 2) and a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens I borrowed off my mate Matt (I leant him my 70-200 for the weekend – I’m looking forward to seeing how he went with it!). Basically a prime lens is the opposite of a zoom, instead of having 35x zoom it has 0x zoom. If you want to zoom in you move your feet. The trade off for this lack of zoom is super sharp, bright images, great low light shooting and the ability to throw out the background into a creamy blur at the drop of a hat.
I experimented with another whacky technique as well, but before I get to that here’s a few samples of what I came up with.
I followed a link on Twitter last week to a blog post about Freelensing. I’d never heard of this before but in a nutshell what you do is to physically take your lens off the camera and manually hold it up to the body, experimenting with different angles and what not while taking photos. Sound vague? Well, you know about as much about it as I did before Saturday so why not go out and give it a crack? Here’s what I came up with, they’re probably not for everyone but I think I can safely call myself a transnational experimental visual artist who doesn’t play by society’s rules from now on.
The shot on the left is freelensing. The shot on the right is an idea for a new show I’m pitching to channel 10.
I was pretty stoked with how the photos turned out and am wondering whether I should sell all my lenses and replace them with this $390 wonder lens, an iPad a new car! What do you think about the freelensing? Or shooting with no zoom? Hit or miss?
