The Tesla

My dad's friend recently bough a brand-spanking-new Tesla. We did a small shoot to celebrate the occasion, and then... he let me drive it.

If you're looking for more information about the shoot, you'll have to ask me. This post is about the car. It drove beautifully--beautifully, and silently. So silently and smoothly, it was almost eerie. Before getting behind the wheel, I didn't think it would be that different. I had driven a Prius before, and was intrigued by the silent start up and in awe that it only needed to be topped up with only 10 bucks of gas after doing 400 kilometres, but the Prius still felt like driving a car. Driving a Tesla was like driving a computer.

Driving a Tesla was like driving a really fast computer with acceleration that can thrust you back against your seat. It was awesome. It was a little strange to be accelerating so quickly with zero sound, and without the rumble of an engine I can usually feel under my feet. In fact, under the hood where you would usually find an engine, you find a "frunk". Yep, a frunk--a front trunk. Some other fun facts about the Tesla: the key/fob is shaped like a mini version of the car. If you want the trunk to open, you squeeze the trunk of the mini car in your pocket. Of course, if it's in your pocket, simply by approaching the car, the doors unlock and the door handles slide out of their retracted position to greet you. The console is a giant tablet that keeps GPS, performance data, satellite radio, a variety of apps, and a regular internet browser at your fingertips. When you take your foot of the gas--er, I mean accelerator--regenerative braking kicks in, and you don't have to even touch the brakes if you time it right. You can set your cruise control like you would normally in any car, or you can set it to follow the speed of the car in front of you. The Tesla was an absolute pleasure to drive, and maybe in another lifetime (or salary bracket), I could call one my own.

Black Bar of Death

I just returned from a great road trip and I can't wait to go through the photos. It was such a good thing for me to get out of the stock-shooting habit, and though I will still have plenty of images from the trip that I will add to my portfolio, they are refreshingly different from what I have been shooting, and on top of that, more personal.

However... half half way through the 5 week road trip, a big black shadow started appearing on the bottom of all of my frames. The black bar of death. I had seen this before, and knew what it meant: my shutter had reached its 150,000 click lifespan, and needed to be (expensively) replaced. The one thing that didn't fit with my dead-shutter diagnosis was that the bottom corners of the frame seemed to be getting a decent exposure, resulting in a not-quite-fully-solid black bar. I was only familiar with the solid black bar. It turns out my camera was experiencing the death of its mirror box--not its shutter.

I will post pictures from the road trip later on, but for now, I'm putting this out there in the hopes that it may one day help a fellow photographer in the same situation I was in, fervently digesting the information on every blog and forum I could find in the hopes of finding out what was wrong with my camera, how much it was going to cost me, and if there was a possible temporary solution that would last until the end of the road trip when I could finally take it into a repair shop. Some of the other symptoms of what I now know is a broken mirror box: black shadow in the bottom of each image, whose corners, if you look closely, are well-exposed. It occurred consistently zoom lenses, but only showed up every now and then while using a prime lens, and sometimes, just cast a low-opacity shadow on the bottom of the frame. Fixable by a local adjustment in a RAW processing software. I ended up shooting most of the trip with my 50mm lens.

The next lens I add to my collection will be a wide angle, and my need (want?) for that was very apparent on this trip. The landscapes were so expansive that I started taking several pictures of all the surroundings, with the plan to later piece and stitch them together to make the final images. In fact, that was also my temporary fix of the solid dark black shadow: shooting a lot of frames slightly up, slightly down, slightly left, slightly right, planning to stitch them together in post-production to be rid of that awful black bar of death.