So I Tried One Of Those Cheap Lens Kits For Your Phone...

Ever since I realized my iPhone 6 can rival my Canon 7D in picture quality, I've been leaving the Canon home more and more. And since I lurrrve fish-eye photos, I decided to try one of those snap-on lens kits for your phone:

This is the set I bought about 6 months ago, though my clips look different - I guess they've already updated them? Anyway, it's less than $15 over on Amazon. Like I said: CHEAP. It has 3 lenses: fisheye, wide-angle, and a macro, but for me the fisheye is the fun one.

Embarrassingly enough, I actually have a nice fisheye lens for my real camera, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. The settings are hard, all my compositions feel wrong, and overall I just felt like an idiot with it, so I gave up.

But a phone is easy. No settings to worry about, easy to experiment with, and for less than $15, why not, right?

So I've been putting this dinky little fisheye through its paces out at Disney and Universal over the past few months, and having a blast. Here's a sampling of some of my favorite shots, all taken with the lens on my iPhone:

It doesn't have the extreme fisheye distortion you can get with a "real" lens, but this is still enough to give the same feel. For best results, get your phone right on top of something in the foreground, to really warp and stretch the composition.

If you stand back, you'll get something more like this:

Which is really more of a wide-angle, very little distortion.

That can be awesome sometimes, though, like with the dragon:

Thanks to the fisheye I can get the buildings leaning into frame, which looks awesome!

You can also get so much more of these incredible ceilings in the shot:

Happy New Year! I'm In Love With A Chicken.

Happy 2017, everyone!

For New Year's Eve John and I got wild and crazy and had some garlicy white pizza (Blaze at Disney Springs. SO GOOD.) followed by a vastly overdue viewing of Moana at our local theater. And oh. Migosh. You guys. YOU GUYS.

Believe the hype. If you haven't seen this movie yet, RUN to your nearest theater and see it immediately. Just be sure to bring Kleenex for the buckets of happy tears. (Yep, not a single tear for Rogue One, but I produced a two-hour rainstorm for Moana. Not because it's sad, but because it's just so beautiful.)

Seriously, Moana's animation is off-the-charts gorgeous, but you almost don't notice because the story is so relentlessly fantastic. Original, hilarious, touching, multiple strong female characters... ah! I can't wait to see it again. I could have stayed in the theater then and there for a second showing.

But here's the thing:

I LOVE THIS CHICKEN.

Well, he's a rooster. Named Heihei, which is pronounced, "Hey Hey."

If you're like me, and enjoy CGI slapstick done by a bug-eyed rooster, then you, too, will fall beak-over-tail for Heihei. And when you learn Alan Tudyk is the voice behind all of Heihei's chicken sounds, your love will only grow.

I feel deep in my soul that I must possess a Heihei of my very own, so I've been looking at all the Heihei merch out there. Then my friend Steph found the most AMAZING THING EVER:

This is Gladzy Kei Art & Cosplay and her hand-sculpted Heihei.

Behold his magnificence!!

Gladzy made him using Apoxie Sculpt and Worbla - a brilliant choice for those feathers. Her paint job is what really drops my jaw, though. Those color fades! And the metallics! Ah! I'm making involuntary "gimmie" hands in-between typing right now.

I also want to drop everything and buy some Worbla and try sculpting my own Heihei. Maybe with his head tilted to the side? I don't know that I could ever match Gladzy's amazingness, but dang, it seems fun to try!

Anyway, here's to trying lots of fun new things in 2017. Thanks for sticking around with me, geeking out with me, and for being my tribe. You guys rock. Sending you ALL the hugs and rooster pecks.