Some guy bought some off-the-shelf parts and attached a Canon SLR lens to an iPhone, and without even releasing sample photos from his “iPhone DSLR prototype”, suckered several major sites into giving him traffic. The “tech bloggers” and most of the commenters are excited about the “potential” of this “cool idea”, going so far as to say that even if the initial results are low-quality, surely someone can refine it.

Optically speaking, this is precisely as cool as taping a 50-cent magnifying glass to your camera, just a lot more expensive and clumsy. It’s like putting on a pair of reading glasses: put a prime lens in front of another prime lens, and you get something that can only focus on nearby objects, with some amount of magnification.

Here, watch me turn my Blackberry into a large format view camera, with full movements!

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One of the first things I did when I got home with my shiny new Sony Alpha 850 camera was try to find out if it could honestly deliver on its 24 megapixel resolution. The image is 6048x4032, but does it actually resolve?

First off, is it physically possible? If you break out an optics textbook and do the math on a full-frame 24x36mm sensor, it is possible to keep the circle of confusion below the pixel size at apertures wider than about f/8. With a terrific lens. And a tripod. And a cable release. And mirror lockup. And no wind.

Mind you, the actual measured lines per inch matters far less to me than the fact that it’s a full-frame DSLR that takes all my old Minolta lenses; I’d have been perfectly happy with a 12-megapixel full-frame body, but since 24 is what’s available…

I didn’t feel like breaking out my big tripod or my good lights, so I settled for getting into the ballpark: a decent lens (Tamron 90/2.8 Macro) at 100% magnification, a sturdy table-top tripod, cable release, mirror lockup, indoors, available light. ISO 100, f/8, 6-second exposure. Developed from RAW using Sony’s app, resized and cropped in Photoshop with no other modifications.

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“Day three: still no sign of the bunnykin army, and my hay fever is killing me.”

See that crack in the rock that looks a bit like a tree? Click on the picture and take a closer look.

For some reason, none of the other balloon animals want to play with Prickly Sue…

After a visit to the Cactus Garden at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory, this is one of the plants I want to have growing in my yard. I don’t know what it is, or how moisture-tolerant it is, but wouldn’t a front yard full of these make for a wonderful Halloween trick-or-treat experience?

Sadly, the “factory tour” doesn’t necessarily include having the factory be operational; it appears that it’s currently a Monday through Thursday thing, so if you see it advertised as part of a Hoover Dam or Lake Mead package, understand that you may just see a shut-down food line, without oompa-loompas or chocolate rivers. Go anyway, if you have any interest in cacti or special prices on chocolates.

(the other must-have from the garden is what I can only refer to as a “balloon-animal cactus”)

Here’s the reason I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the view from our hotel window in Tokyo, and why it took so much work to make one of them look decent:

Yes, that’s the in-room television set that was bolted to a stand right by the window. I worked around it in later shots by covering it with my black jacket, but the correct solution would have been to put a rubber lens hood on the camera and press it right up against the glass (this also works with aquariums, if the glass isn’t curved).

There were three reasons I didn’t use the correct solution: first, I forgot to pack a rubber lens hood; second, it wouldn’t have helped anyway, because the hotel next door was lit up for most of the night, spilling light across the window that would have washed out any shots taken from that position; and third, because my little tabletop tripod wouldn’t have fit on the window sill.