Last Thursday at the end of the Siggraph convention here in San Diego, I met a photographer named Rick who also happened to have recently hired on with my company (Adobe). He suggested we take our cameras out for a shoot along with his friend, local photographer Lisa Smith, so we headed off to Balboa Park for a night shoot.

Lisa is an advocate of the Lensbaby, a selective-focus SLR lens which allows you to selectively focus an area of the image by physically manipulating the lens (see their site for more details). This provides an entirely different level of creativity when composing a shot, allowing you to integrate selective focus, blur, and distortion in ways that you wouldn’t see with a normal lens. Here is a shot looking down El Prado, toward the tower at the Museum of Man, seen illuminated in green.

Notice the tower is clear, the sides are extremely blurry (this is not just depth of field), and there are worm-hole liking circular lines coming in from slightly left of center toward the tower (not sure what those are all about, but they’re cool!).

You can also see the rear reflectors of several bicycles who just passed by. They were dressed up in odd outfits and had been circling around the fountain behind where I took the shot. Unfortunately, I procrastinated in shooting them and missed my opportunity. I guess I was just having too much fun with the Lensbaby that Lisa let me borrow :) Thanks Lisa!

This weekend I’ll be back in Eden, UT hanging out with my aunt and uncle, and taking some shots of the local hot-air balloon festival. I’ll share images from that sometime next week!

Tai