I missed the larger Central Park Meet-up some of the AnimeNext cosplayers setup a few weeks back because I had something else that prevented me from going to.  Being that I’m in NYC its not that hard to just show up at meets with cosplay planed to put in some needed practice time.  I’m still working on getting up to candid photo speed on the Lensbaby.  I can do set shots on a tripod because I can check focus and make minor adjustments but that doesn’t help in the field.  Maybe my vision is off and the diopter on my camera is set wrong because everything does look like it in focus.

Today’s meet-up was Hetalia: Axis Powers.  I found it on cosplay.com and they had a Live Journal event posted.  Pretty much the only thing I knew about it from running into it from AnimeNext was that its basically fan-girl fodder material with people name after countries or something like that..   So I went to put in some lens time.   I got a few photos done when they first met.  Left for a bit as half the group left and came back later to see if anyone else showed up. Not too many did show up in cosplay.

I tried a few Zone Plate shots.  Google Zone Plate for the technical about it.

Zone Plate

While most of the Lensbaby stuff can be mimicked in Photoshop.  There’s not fun in that photochopping away.  Reflections get a hard glowing ring because of the way light is focused through the plate.

And I almost got this picture right.   There was a group also in the part playing with this ring thing.

Bryant Park Girl In Ring

I almost got the focus right.   But you can see the selective focus effect where the center ring is the attempted focus.

Thats it for now and hopefully my lens comes back fixed in better shape than I’m used to.   As they have to a complete teardown I hope they replace the VR system as I’ve been reading they’ve been dying and clean the insides and it was getting a bit dirty inside.  And then I can finally use a recently calibrated lens to tell if my eyepiece is set right.