Two new lenses in the bag!

To be updated nowadays is a hard work, every day a better gear is available, and I can't stay behind. Today I got two of the newest lens from Canon, the EF 11-24mm f/4L USM ultra wide-angle zoom lens, with the widest angle of view (126º05’ diagonal) ever achieved for a rectilinear full-frame Digital SLR lens and the new Canon 16-35mm f4L ultra wide-angle zoom lens features newly developed, high quality Canon optics that incorporate three GMo (Glass-Molded) aspheric lens elements, including a large-diameter aspheric lens, which help improve image quality by correcting aberrations.

Barbican Architecture | Coming up soon.

Brutalism is an architectural movement that has always fascinated me, especially once I moved to the UK where I had the opportunity to personally contemplate a variety of buildings resulting from this movement. I have always had a strong desire to photograph “béton brut” projects, given the monochrome colours and the prolific use of geometric shapes. Unfortunately, there is almost no demand from my typical client base of architects and property investors for photographs of such projects. In fact, many of the projects have already been earmarked to be demolished to make space for modern architecture. Given these facts, I decided to hurry and turn this desire to portray this architectural movement into a personal project.

I chose two great iconic projects of Brutalist architecture in London, the Barbican Estate by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon and the Balfron Tower + Carradale House complex by Ernő Goldfinger. When portraying the Barbican, my eye searched for the details, the structure, rather than attempting to photograph the estate as a whole. The absence of colour sharpens my eyes to capture even more, the design, the texture of the raw concrete, the graphism created by not only by the design itself but for the curious shadows that such design creates once it is reached by the sun light, changing the landscape at all times. My first series, about the Barbican Estate, was completed recently. Here you can see a selection of 40 carefully selected images that illustrate, in all its splendour, the most beautiful part of this movement. My Balfron Tower + Carradale House photo series is underway and will be completed very soon.

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New Canon 24mm TS-E II arrived!

I just received my new Canon 24mm TS-E f/3.5 lens, after many years of hard work I'm now retiring my old one! The new one comes with a superb optical quality, totally redesigned, been the first lens (together with the 17mm TS-E) to have an independent rotation of the tilt and shift axes relative to the camera and to each other! 

Previously the tilt axis was set as standard at 90º to the shift axis, and the lenses could be modified to set them both in the same axis if the user desired. This restriction has now been discarded, making the lens movements, and therefore creative options, much more flexible. The tilt and shift mechanism rotates +/-90°, allowing shift in any direction, and in addition the tilt mechanism independently rotates +/-90°, allowing tilt in any direction relative to the shift. This functionality enables me to maximize depth of field in their images without stopping down as far as they would otherwise need - essential when wishing to squeeze every last pixel of detail from the latest 20+ Mp DSLRs while avoiding the deleterious effects of diffraction.

Canon has also gone to town on the the optical designs, including the use of high-precision aspherical front elements to keep distortion to a minimum, and multiple UD elements to reduce chromatic aberration. In the case of the TSE 24mm F3.5 L II, this means a considerably more complex formula than its predecessor - 16 elements in 11 groups, as compared to the 11 elements in 9 groups of the older design. According to Canon, the usable image circle is also much larger - 67.2mm as opposed to 58.6mm - which in principle allows a greater range of movements without vignetting. The lens also utilizes the company's new 'Sub-Wavelength Structure Coating', which is designed to reduce flare and ghosting dramatically in lenses that contain large curve-radius elements - most notably wideangles. Also included is the currently-fashionable circular aperture diaphragm, designed to give an appealing rendition to out-of-focus regions of the image.

Well, I can't wait to put this amazing lens in the field! You shall see the results soon!

Joas