Is this as low as it gets?

From my car this morning at 7:00.

Gold bug

A long time ago -- when I was a kid -- I came across a shiny golden beetle that was a little smaller than a lady bug.  What really astounded me was that this beetle began changing colors before my eyes.  It was so good at changing colors that it eventually escaped into the background, and I never saw anything like it ever again.  Rosebud!

The other day I was noodling around on the internet, and I came across this Wikipedia article about the Golden Tortoise beetle. 

Up until now, I honestly thought that the color-changing beetle from my childhood was either a pigment of my imagination or some rare mutant.

Now this has become one of my New Year's goals:  to find this beetle again and photograph it.   My chances are reasonable.  According to the Wikipedia article, this beetle is associated with morning glories  -- a plant that has become the scourge of my back yard.  Now that I know where to look, I think that it will only be a matter of time that I will acquire my Rosebud, and my sanity will no longer be in question.

That last part is pushing it, I guess.

Tilt-shift Paradigm

Creating a nice looking tilt-shift is deceptively difficult.  I went up on the 7th floor balcony at One Waterfront Place and took a handful of shots using differing tilt angles and focus.  Results are spectacularly mediocre.

Not exactly a model town

In the continuing adventures of tilt-shift photography, I took a stab at shooting from the 7th floor balcony of One Waterfront Place.  The subject matter and the technique are both in need of improvement:

At least this looks like a tilt-shift image.

Meh.

Morning Buzz

I'm still experimenting with the Lensbaby Composer.  The Lensbaby web site has macro converters available, but I discovered that Canon's EF25 extension tube works quite well.  Here's an unadjusted picture of  Buzz Lightyear taken through the extension tube:

I had to take the tube off to get more Buzz in the picture:

Lensbaby Part 2

Took my lunchtime walk along the rail trail with Lensbaby in hand.  It isn't the nicest of days for outdoor photography, and I don't have anything notable to show for the effort.  So with that caveat, here's my nicest shot.

This is looking up Decker's Creek under the bridge on University Avenue, near the Waterfront Park.  I took it from the railroad bridge of the rail trail.

Lensbaby

Got a new toy to play with.  It's a  commercial tilt-shift lens called a Lensbaby Composer.  This particular model has been discontinued in the U.S., being replaced by the much more expensive Composer Pro.

I'm quite happy with the plain old Composer, thank you.  I think it's more than adequate for my needs and ability.  It comes with an assortment of apertures that you drop into place on top of the lens.  They are held in place magnetically.  The wider the aperture, the more pronounced the blur.

You shoot this thing in aperture priority mode, and the camera more or less sets the speed to 1/60 sec.  Here's a sample shot at f 2.8, using the built-in flash.