Running from door to door, little fingers greedily clutching my feed bag. Already overflowing with sugary goodies, but still wanting more.

"Trick or treat, smell my feet,
Give me something good to eat!
Not too big, not too small,
Just the size of Montreal!"

You don't hear that one much anymore.

Pity.

My delicate sensibilities have been offended, therefore it must be stopped:

Tesco condemned for selling pole dancing toy

What about the children? Won't someone please think of the children?

Last week, I got a new lens for my camera. It was an impulse buy, although I had been wanting one of these for years. This is the Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L tilt-shift lens. If you arrived at this article through a search engine, wondering whether to take the tilt-shift plunge, you can stop reading right now -- just go and buy this lens. It will change your life!

What is tilt-shift, the rest of you ask? Normally, a camera lens is centred directly over the front of the camera, so you take a picture of whatever the camera is aimed at. Shifting the lens (moving it up and down, or left and right) lets you take a picture of something above, below, or off to the side without changing your perspective. This is useful when shooting through glass (so that your reflection does not appear in the picture). Shifting also lets you take pictures of tall buildings without having to point the camera upward -- this avoids the look of buildings leaning backward. Instead, parallel lines remain parallel in the image. Tilting the lens lets you change the depth of field so that the plane of focus is not parallel to the camera. For example, objects near you on the left and objects far from you on the right could be in focus simultaneously, without having to use a small aperture -- very useful when you don't want to use a long shutter speed (such as in windy conditions). Or tilt in the opposite direction, for selectively focusing on a small part of the image for a creative effect.

Canon makes three tilt-shift lenses: 24 mm, 45 mm, and 90 mm. I chose the 24 mm version because I anticipate using it primarily for architectural photography, rather than product shots. Besides, my Canon EOS 20D camera has a smaller-than-35-mm sensor, so 24 mm is really only a moderate wide angle on this camera.

With my new lens in hand, I went over to the University of Waterloo to snap some pics. It was fun! For this picture of the Math building and the Davis Centre, I wanted a low perspective (my camera was at ground level), which normally means that either there is lots of ground in the picture and the top of the building gets cut off, or I tilt the camera upward and all the vertical lines become crooked. Now that I have a shift lens, I pointed the camera straight forward (parallel to the ground), then shifted the lens up by 5 mm. The result is an interesting perspective with parallel vertical lines:



I used a similar technique for this picture of a bicycle against a tree with brilliant red leaves. The building in the background retains its straight vertical lines despite my low angle. The lens is capable of up to 11 mm of shift in any direction, but that's pretty extreme; for this picture, only 3 mm of upward shift was necessary. This is one of my favourite pictures that I have taken in a long time:



For this next picture in the Davis Centre Library, I chose a low angle again, this time to convey the mass of the receding stacks of books. Had I chosen a more conventional eye-level perspective, the bookshelves would not appear to be "towering" like they do. Again, shifting the lens up 4 mm made it possible to keep all the vertical lines parallel to each other.



Another benefit of shifting is that you can stitch panoramas together very easily: take the picture, shift the lens, take the next picture. The advantage of this over the usual approach of swiveling the camera on a tripod, and stitching the frames together in software, is that all the pixels line up perfectly because your perspective never changes. You can even stitch the pictures together using layers in Photoshop.

That's what I did for the picture below. Why not just use an even wider angle lens to begin with? Because I wanted to crop the image to square, which would mean only a 2336 by 2336 pixel image from my camera. Combining frames this way provided me with a much higher resolution image -- 3480 by 3480 pixels. In fact, before cropping the image to square, I had a 3480 x 5818 rectangular image -- that's 20.2 megapixels from my 8.2 megapixel camera!

I love how the final result turned out:



Finally, I decided to try the tilt function, which provides creative control over the plane of focus. Wide-angle lenses tend to keep everything in focus, near and far. Sometimes this is not desirable, as in the following picture where I wanted to emphasize the post. I tilted the lens 8 degrees to the right, which is as far as it would go, and kept the aperture open to f/3.5. I got exactly the effect I was hoping for, with the post sharp and everything else blurry. Keep in mind this is a straight shot -- no manipulation afterward in Photoshop! I could have obtained a similar effect by shooting from farther away with a telephoto lens, but then I would not have had as much of the background in the picture, and the result would have been less dramatic.



As you can probably tell, I'm pretty excited. I am just starting to learn the possibilities of what this lens can do. My only regret is having waited so many years to buy one!

Anyone who is me knows that I am an anagrammaniac, which is a real word (that I just made up) meaning that I am constantly rearranging letters in my head to come up with new words. This is exactly like playing Scrabble, only different.

The key to making a good anagram is to keep the result relevant to the original. For example, if you rearrange the letters in CARTOONS, you get NO ACTORS as well as ROOT SCAN. The first result is funny because there are indeed "no actors" in cartoons, but "root scan" doesn't really have anything to do with cartoons at all.

I have also found that most good anagrams are satirical. Hopefully, the targets of your anagrams will be thick-skinned, or at least good-natured. The successful anagrammist must lead by example, starting with their own name: if you rearrange the letters in SASSAN SANEI, you get INSANE AS ASS and AS SANE AS SIN.

Sometimes, anagrams can push the boundaries of good taste. Readers of this blog from SAVANNAH, GEORGIA would probably be annoyed to find out that those letters can be rearranged to spell ANGER A HO'S VAGINA. Hey, I don't make up the letters, I just rearrange them.

Going on vacation to a LAS VEGAS CASINO? Be careful with those slot machines, you don't want to embark on a COIN SLAVE'S SAGA. And is it really any wonder that in the SAN FERNANDO VALLEY (PORN LOCALE), the actors OPENLY FONDLE ORAL/ANAL CAVERNS. Oh baby, just like that!

Anyone catch DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES last night? This is the show WHERE SPOUSES DEVIATE. I wonder what the secret ingredient will be on IRON CHEF AMERICA this week? CHEER IF MACARONI! I might catch a THREE'S COMPANY rerun -- it's that episode with NO PARTY SCHEME. Then on HOW IT'S MADE, they will SHADOW ITEM through the assembly line. Later, it's NAPOLEON DYNAMITE where a bunch of high-school kids LAMPOON A NEEDY NIT. If action movies are more your taste, you can watch the criminals in PULP FICTION. That's right, FLIP IT UP, CON!

Does an ELECTRICAL ENGINEER exhibit more CAREER INTELLIGENCE? Not if they become a SOFTWARE DEVELOPER who writes buggy code with REPEATED OVERFLOWS. Does a BABY PHOTOGRAPHER have a GATHER-A-PROP HOBBY? And what's up with that GOURMET CHEF and his French cooking -- HE CUT ME FROG! It made me sick, so I went to my FAMILY DOCTOR who provides COMFORT DAILY. This is a general practitioner, not an OBSTETRICIAN/GYNECOLOGIST who TARGETS C-SECTION IN BIOLOGY. They will tell you that BABY NUMBER TWO means TUBBY WOMB NEAR.

Whew! All this blogging is making me hungry! I think I'll go for a WENDY'S HAMBURGER, but wait -- HEREBY WARMS DUNG. Maybe some KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN? Oh no, this drumstick is an INFECTED CHUNKY KICKER! I shouldn't eat all that fast food anyway, so I can LOSE WEIGHT FAST but only if WE FEAST SO LIGHT. And switch to DIET PEPSI, although I'D PEE SPIT. Maybe just a snack -- IS IT RUFFLES POTATO CHIPS? Careful, POUCH OF FAT; LIPS, RESIST IT! That's the problem with using a TOASTER OVEN -- you OVEREAT LOTS. Well, I'll definitely skip dessert, a POPSICLE, also known as ICE PLOPS!

I should publish all my anagrams in a book, but that would mean hiring a LITERARY AGENT, and they RETAIN GREATLY. I bet George Orwell didn't need one, though -- NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was such a great book on its own merit, as I read it I thought there was INGENUITY OFTEN HERE. Speaking of books, my favourite is SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN! which describes a MERRY, FOLKY GENIUS-MAN JOURNEY. I should read DAN BROWN'S THE DA VINCI CODE as it is supposed to be the SECOND WORD BEHIND VATICAN. Among the earliest English literary works are those of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, although it's hard to read through all the metaphors and I wish he would SPEAK REALISM A WHILE. Ah, maybe I should just read the newspaper, even though they can get political, especially the GLOBE AND MAIL which is often LOADING BLAME. Maybe I'll just visit their web site using the FIREFOX BROWSER in order to FIX ERRORS OF WEB.

Well, thanks for VISITING MY BLOG, I hope it did not induce any BIG SLY VOMITING!