The Pergear Lens Cometh

Sunday, June 19, 4:04 am:

Package being processed at carrier facility.

San Francisco Ca Distribution C,

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Photo Credit Peargear

t’s been sixteen days since I placed my order for this flat fisheye lens. Like a spirited long-distance romance, I wondered to myself, “Will the magic still be there? Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” Hard to say at this point. 

With a focal length of 10mm, this will be the widest prime lens I have. I didn't buy it because it was a fisheye, but rather in spite of it. It's all about the size. The lens is so flat that it comes in a shallow plastic box, one that could easily be stowed in almost any pocket. I saw myself carrying this lens as an emergency wide angle when I needed to get more coverage. I actually carry the compact Fuji 27mm lens as a backup lens in case my primary short zoom lens conks out. The Pergear will serve the same purpose, hopefully with a little more "edge."

Photo by Kiev photographer Oleg. Click here.

My Pancake Lens Fever is starting to recede as the first blush fades after using some of my other lenses. Granted, this lens will be more compact than those classified as pancake, or very compact, lenses. This Peargear fisheye will be my first "body cap" lens, one that sits nearly flush to the front face of the camera body. In addition, it has a focusing lever which suggests a minimum focusing distance of 0.3 meters. That caught my attention.

Photo by Iurii Zvonar. Read his post here.

As you can see, this lens is really flat, almost flush to the body. An while it's a fisheye, it produces a full framed APS sized image. I have a 10-17mm Tokina fisheye I used with my APS Nikon DSLRs, and found the image curvature minimal if I was careful to keep straight vertical and horizontal lines a far from the frame edges as possible. Used with care, the curvature at the image edges doesn't shout, but instead  merely stage whispers to the astute viewer. It also occurred to me that if I were to switch to a square format, most of the distortion would be cropped away.

Hopefully the Pergear will arrive early next week. The next images you'll be seeing will be from the new lens. How many of them totally depends on whether it becomes my new muse, or spends the  rest of its life on the Island of Misfit Toys.

Hillsborough Memorial Day Music Festival

At the last Pre- Pandemic Memorial Day Celebration, I made photos of the annual Hillsborough Parade, and I manage to capture a golf cart carrying the honored Veteran Of The Day while on route to the Music Festival. That photo was a nice contrast to the one of some youngsters planting flags at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno two days earlier. Those two photos ran as a pair on the front page, and summed up the spirits of both remembrance and celebration.

Now any photo that includes an army vehicle, a child, and a flag will always be a safe photo to submit. The top photo was one of the first I made at the festival itself, and it combined all of the key components, plus the tiniest hint of a smile on my young subject's face as he accepts the small flag. The shot is overexposed, but otherwise reasonably composed. 

With that shot "in the can", I decided to try to make a photo that emphasized some of the other activities enjoyed by the guests. I went looking for something different, and found that one of the local high schools had a robotics club, and they sent along their creations for a "show and tell".

My young friend can be seen controlling a small robotic rover using the smart pad he's holding. It's a fun shot, but in retrospect, doesn't have any Memorial Day context to help the shot along. I actually thought that this photo would be selected by my editor to run as the Parade Photo. It was ultimately rejected. Incidentally, the small rover is small enough to fit in the palm of an adult's hand.

The robotics club also brought out a rover that could scoop up two balls that were rolled to it, and would then randomly launch them in the direction of the crowd. I put the camera in burst mode, and was able to capture a sequence of shots of the ball (or balls) being caught.

If the photo was printed large, there would be lots of recognizable subjects that could potentially please a lot of families. This photo was the second rejected photo, most likely because it failed to bring the Memorial Day theme forward. Fun yes, relevance no. For the record these two photos were forwarded to the Robotics Club for their use, a good tactic for getting cooperation from those people who could actually do things to  help the process along.

I'm glad the first shot was made, as it gave me a "money shot" that I could always submit if nothing better came along. I still wince a bit at the exposure, but the photo told the Memorial Day story, loud and clear.