Lens hack and the Toronto Zoo

Ever since reading an article about homemade tilt-shift lenses like this one, I've wanted to build one and try it out. I browsed through ebay for a while and eventually settled on a Xenar lens from an old Korelle SLR for about $75.

I kept my eye open for some sort of bellows and even researched building one. One day though, one of the guys at work had some rubber boots for car suspension struts lying around and he donated one to me. I found some time a couple weeks ago and hacked something together using electrical tape, cardboard, and the base of a busted teleconverter.

Here's what the monstrosity looks like:







I got a chance to try the thing out recently at the Toronto Zoo. Focusing was a little tricky and I was worried about it falling apart. It held up well with the snow and dampness. I used a roll of Kodak C-41 black and white film. The pictures turned out fairly nice for the most part. Here are some:







I really like this one though:


I really like the lens...there's some dirt in it too that adds to the antique soft focus look to the pictures. I used it again at the Toronto Autoshow last week too with a roll of colour film. I noticed that it started to fall apart after a while and probably let in some extra light so I don't know how well the pictures will turn out. In the meantime, I'll have to think of a more robust method of building the lens.

PBS e2 Documentary Series

I caught an episode of the e2 (e squared) PBS documentary series one night and found it intriguing. That particular episode dealt with renewable energy and how it can be implemented in different ways. I kept an eye out for it for a while but never managed to see it again. So I decided to buy the DVDs from the PBS store as a Christmas present to myself.

I've been watching the series over the last few weeks and its a really good documentary series. The first two seasons have mainly dealt with architecture and how to design sustainable buildings. It's a little surprising, but it turns out that buildings account for about 48% of greenhouse gas emissions. There are some neat ideas presented in each episode about managing water and solar energy in buildings.

A whole episode is even devoted to renewable energy efforts in China. One vision they shared was about bringing agriculture into urban areas through the use of rooftop farming. China definitely has bad environmental image on top of a bad image in terms of human rights. Dirty smog-filled urban areas come to mind. Even with this image though, one architect made the point that once a totalitarian regime gets hold of the idea of relying less on fossil fuels and implements more sustainable energy systems, the whole country can be transformed very quickly. They even built a test building that implements numerous ideas for sustainable design that developers and architects can visit, learn about these ideas, and put experiments into place. It's not all pleasant though; there are some alarming numbers about rural to urban migration and coal consumption. It'd be interesting to see how China develops in this regard.

India, Tibet, and Columbia are mentioned in addition to American cities. No Canadian content so far. It seems that we're lagging behind in innovation in the area of sustainable development even though the environment gets a lot of air time on the news here and politicians seem to talk about it a lot.

The only downside is that each episode starts with an ad by Autodesk. They sponsored the series so I guess it's not a bad thing. You can always fast forward through them.

Anyways, the e2 website has previews of episodes and worth going through. It's a fairly new series so most libraries probably don't have it yet. I'm definitely going to pass my copies around, but the DVDs are not expensive and definitely worth the money.

No Ads

I checked the Google Adsense account for this blog and found that no one had even clicked on anything...ever. I decided to remove the feature; thought it was a bit of an eyesore anyways.