A dumb thing I did today. I've been trying to improve my DIY Selective Focus lens -- the Plunger Baby(TM) -- and tried gluing the bellows to a mounting ring. Well, the glue I chose was not the best because in this warm weather it melted and seeped onto my camera and so while the Plunger Baby(TM) itself separated from the mount, the glue managed to seal the mount to my 30D. I managed to pry it off but now I have gunk on my body and tonight while watching the Canucks play the Blues in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs I get to carefully scrape ugly sticky yellow glue off my main camera.

After posting my Cookie Gun diagram and related pics to Flickr it's quickly become among my most popular pics. Thanks to everyone for the nice comments and suggestions. I expect to see lots of better designs and interesting photos to come.

Update: my cookie gun lens fell off its mount. So to all of you out there who are just using tape to hold the mount in, obviously not a good idea. The lens is okay but I've made it a bit more permanent by using Gorilla Glue on it.

Cookied Me
copyright 2007 Keith Loh
Last night I created what is called (or what I call) a cookie gun. This is a zoom lens mounted on the front of a strobe (flash) with a slide or other transparency design stuck between the lens and the flash. This creates a projection of that slide (called "a cookie" or "kookie") onto whatever surface the flash falls on, creating the image you see above. This isn't a new invention and there are lots of variations on it. If the diagram below isn't clear to you, I will tell you how to make it.

Dark Alley beside the Wosk Building
I became more practiced with my tilt-shifter when I went for lunch yesterday. My buddy Dylan got the technique down. Shoot with both hands on the bellows and work it like an accordion.

I got into a discussion with other people who have created basically the same tilt-shifter using incompatible lenses and home-made bellows.

Sarah at the Prince of Wales -- taken with the Plunger-Baby(TM)

I had to drop by the Dunne and Rundle store which takes care of most of my photo accessory needs and show off my toilet-plunger tilt-shift contraption. One of the employees went: "what is THAT?" and when he learned what it was immediately dubbed it the Plunger-Baby(TM). They sell the Lens Babies after all and after I told them what it took to make the Plunger Baby(TM) it was clear that there was no competition. After all, not many people want to hack apart a toilet plunger and tape on a medium format lens.

Super ghetto contraption

Yesterday, I created my own Lens Baby. First of all, what is a Lens Baby? A Lens Baby is a series of popular tilt-shift lenses in which the front element is attached to a flexible tube. This enables the photographer to twist and turn the lens while keeping the camera body stable. In a shallow depth of field (DOF) shot you can then keep the focus on one part of the picture while keeping the rest of the composition out of focus. For example, in a portrait shot you might want the model's eye to be in focus but the rest of the body or face out of focus.