Canon 10D, Lensbaby, iPad: Stir for instant fun

Like all the best, most serendipitous, most unexpectedly rewarding events, it began as a challenge – a bet between friends. I was photographing Chatuchak Market in Bangkok with Lesley Fisher when I had an idea to add a little extra spice to our photographic exploits.

“Let’s buy each other a gift before we leave the market but we can’t spend more than 250 baht (about £5) each“, I declared, somewhat cleverly in retrospect.

Well, I thought it was a good idea at the time but with 3 minutes remaining before we were due to meet, I was still clutching my 250 baht and had found nothing in the way of inspiration. I was on the verge of buying a cheap, Korean umbrella with anime cartoons on it when, from the corner of the tiny market stall, a far more appealing solution winked at me. A thing of rare, plastic beauty. Inside a waterproof (allegedly) casing, this handy-sized chunk of gorgeousness was priced at 239 baht. Brilliant! I’d still have enough change for an iced Sprite lolly!

It’s focus free (surprise, surprise), has a 28mm f/9 lens and takes 35mm film. I had to buy it. In fact, I had to buy two. The blue example below is the one that I kept for myself.

The “Plastic Fantastic”

I stocked up on two Kodak 400 ISO films, which cost about as much as the camera and, as soon as the rain began to fall, I ventured out onto the main Sukhumvit road in Bangkok to put this little plastic fantastic lady through her paces. It was fun sliding a 35mm film into place and hearing the ratchets click as I wound the film forward. Here’s my pocket review detailing the most important findings:

• The viewfinder offers a view that bears little relation to the image being captured but I shot from the hip mostly so it didn’t really matter
• Every time you wind on it feels like the film is being ripped and shredded
• I got only 10 usable images from a 36 exposure roll
• The images are grainy, wildly underexposed, horribly desaturated, blurry, with a heavy vignette and every frame shows huge scratch marks
• I absolutely love it

Shot from the pillion seat of a Bangkok motorcycle taxi. This image is model released and available for licensing

Canon EOS 10D with Lensbaby Composer

So, why, I hear you ask, is there a picture of a Canon EOS 10D on my blog? Well, inspired by the sense of fun that I’d found with the little waterproof Plastic Fantastic, but slightly frustrated by the lack of immediacy that I have become used to with digital, I hit upon the idea of a compromise. Here’s the ingredients for Gavin’s Fun Photography Recipe:

• A battered, second-hand, 6.3 megapixel Canon EOS 10D – Price: 6,000 baht (£115) from the lovely people at Fotofile
• A Lensbaby Composer and Optic Kit, courtesy of one of my sexiest sponsors, the gorgeous people at Lensbaby
• One of Apple’s luscious iPads
• An iPad Camera Connection Kit
• A copy of Filterstorm for iPad

Downloading to an iPad in a Bangkok street cafe

So here’s the deal, after you’ve found the firmware upgrade to install PictBridge to the 10D you will be able to connect it to an iPad via the USB Camera Connection Kit. The iPad immediately recognises the new images and offers to import them to the Photos application. I’d set up the 10D to shoot large JPEGs rather than my usual RAW files, not only to keep the file sizes down but also to more closely mimic the sense of using film. The idea is to reduce the amount of post-production with this 10D/Lensbaby setup. In a nutshell, it’s a way for me to enjoy the same freedom that shooting with a low-end, budget camera and lens brings whilst retaining the immediacy of digital. Voila!

Screenshot from iPad whilst importing

I was initially a little disappointed when the iPad was announced that it wasn’t the killer device for photographers that I’d been hoping for. I was looking for something with either massive storage or at least the capability to plug-in external hard drives. I wanted Lightroom and Photoshop – or at least cut-down versions of image cataloguing and manipulation software. I wanted a one-stop, portable device that would eliminate my need to travel with a laptop. The iPad isn’t those things but it’s a step in the right direction.

I managed to overcome my initial reticence when offered an iPad as a gift and have succeeded in finding plenty of uses for it since receiving it. One of the more appealing applications that I’ve found is Filterstorm, a surprisingly powerful image editing app. Filterstorm has tools to crop, rotate, straighten, scale and flip. It can add a vignette, reduce noise, sharpen, blur or convert an image to black and white. It can alter White Balance and Hue and contains a tone curve control. Better still, all of these effects can be applied with a variable brush or a gradient map. Whilst it’s not quite Photoshop for the iPad, it can do most of the things that I’d want to do when manipulating an image. Here are a couple of screenshots:

Filterstorm for iPad

Colour Balance controls

Tone curve

So where are the images that I took with my new, fun-packed kit? Well, scroll down, eager reader and you’ll find a small selection of the 200 plus images that I shot yesterday when out in Bangkok with my 10D and Lensbaby. I uploaded the JPEGs to my iPad whilst enjoying a coffee at a street-side cafe at the end of the day and processed all of these photos using Filterstorm from the back seat of a taxi on my way home last night.

Grafitti on a shop shutter

The ubiquitous Bangkok tuk-tuk

Bumrung Mueang, where Buddha statues are sold

Tai Chi in Rominart Park

Working in one of the city’s khlongs (canal)

The reclining Buddha statue at Wat Pho

Coincidentally, Chase Jarvis recently posted an article entitled For The Love Of Photography on his blog where he posed a series of questions for photographers. With Gavin’s Fun Photography project now in full-swing, I can confidentally answer Chase’s questions as follows: “It’s right here”. “See above”. Yes, I can”. “Yes, 200 actually”. “I do, I love it”. “Of course”. “Is there any other way”.

So, what’s your Fun Photography project?

Posted on Saturday, August 7th, 2010 at 2:17 pm. Filed under: Blog, My work, Technology Tags: bangkok, camera connection kit, canon 10d, filterstorm, ipad, lensbaby RSS 2.0 feed.