70mm

70mm allows me to bring in my favorite lens .. the 70-200 F/4. As a L lens, I expected it to walk away with it, but the 28-135 acquits itself very well.

To me theres no clear winner in the close up, but I do prefer the background blur effect of the L glass. Still, not bad at all.

50mm

Ok so 48-50mm, seriously there's got to be a way to see focal length on the LCD. Gotta check the manual again.

So this is the good old 18-55 Kit lens vs. the 28-135, vs. the ever popular Canon 50mm "nifty fifty"

I'm too lazy to photoshop this into a series of three side by side, so for all of these I did the 18-55 vs. the 28-135, and then had the "winner" go against the fifty. Embiggen to see metadata.

Edit: Ok so Blogger is broken and won't make the photos bigger. Trust me, the 28-135 wins. The second set of photos is still visible.

The 28-135 finally wins one! So it goes against the 50mm prime 1.8.

And wins that one too!

Ok honestly, the non-scientificness of my testing comes out here. Everyone knows the 1.8 50mm is tack sharp, and most likely it focused a quarter inch forward or behind - it's famously sharp, but also famously janky. Whatever, either way the 28-135 wins this round.

Edge of the frame shots - not much different.

28mm

A new contender! The Tamron bows out at 24mm, and in comes the Canon 28-135 f/3.5-5.6.

It's EF - kit lens vs. EF-S kit lens in the ultimate sharpness battle.

I should mention, I did indeed remember to turn off IS on these lenses while using the tripod.

The 18-55 kit kind of blows the 28-135 away, in both tests.

And yes, once again I was off on the zoom amounts.

24mm

Click to embiggen

Canon kit lens wins again - though I suspect I jostled the Tamron slightly in the first shot, it's way softer at the edge of the frame, and somewhat on the kitty.

I was somewhat inexact with my exact zoom (24vs 23mm).. it's actually really hard to be exact with nothing but the lens markings to go on. I don't claim that these are scientific tests; in fact, the lab bunnies may be responsable for jostling the tripod in the first place.

18mm

Click images for larger, and metadata.

All images shot on Canon Rebel T1i

18mm - 18-55 (Canon kit Lens) vs a Tamron ultrawide 10-24.

The first set is from the side of the frame. The Tamron shows a little more sharpness, but shows a lot of chromatic aberration where the kit lens has none.

The second set is from the center of the image. Neither are particularly good, but again the kit lens outperforms the Tamron. The full size image also shows significantly more distortion on the Tammy. I still like the lens, this kind of shooting isn't its strength though.

Rattlesnake !

I was fortunate enough to be able to help out with, and partake of the 2009 Spectacular food day. Among the most noteworthy (and spectacular) dishes was a rattlesnake grilled with a honey marinade. This isn't my dish or my recipe, but worthy of a couple of pictures

Uncooked, in Marinade:



The finished product:




The verdict: Kind of like dry chicken. Very little meat wedged in between lots of bones. Tasty enough, but I won't be craving a rattlesnake burger any time soon.

Chocolate Stout Cake

I've been cooking with beer and wine a lot, so this cake instantly caught my attention when I first saw it on the King Arthur Flour website. I've always enjoyed the combination of beer and chocolate, nothing goes better with a stout or porter than some nice dark chocolate - the bitter and the sweet flavors are naturally complementarity.
Now this is not your run of the mill chocolate cake, in fact, you can pretty much guarantee any recipe that starts off "add 16 oz of Guinness to 2 cups of melted butter" is going to be a heavy, intense special-occasion type cake.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups (16 oz) stout or dark beer, such as Guinness
• 2 cups (4 sticks) unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 (4 1/2 oz) cups Dutch-process cocoa
• 4 (17 oz) cups unbleached all purpose flour.
  
• 4 (1 lb. 12 oz) cups sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 4 large eggs
• 3/4 (6oz) cup sour cream

For the frosting:

• 1 pound bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

A few notes:

A scale REALLY helps with this recipe, actually it helps with all baking, but this one especially because you can more accurately split the batter between the two cake pans.

Dutch Process cocoa can be bought online, or from Lunds or Byerly's locally, but it's expensive - like $10 for an 8oz box. You can also substitute for Dutch process using this ratio: Add 1/8th teaspoon of baking soda per 3 tablespoons of regular unsweetened cocoa. This is important because the pH. levels are different between the two, and it can affect the rise of the cake if you don't use the right one.



Melt butter over low heat, add beer and mix.

Add cocoa to mixture and whisk until smooth. Let cool.


Weigh and mix your dry ingredients.

In another bowl mix up the eggs and sour cream...

...and then add the cooled beer mixture to the egg mixture. Stir.


Add dry ingredients to wet, and stir until smooth.

Split batter between two 9" cake pans, make sure they're at least 2" deep.. cake pans with false bottoms will make your life a lot easier if you have them. Each pan should have 3 lbs (!) of batter in it. Again a scale helps here, along with an awesome rigged up weighing system.

Put in to bake for 45-50 minutes in a preheated 350 degree oven. Check that it's cooked through with a toothpick in the centre of the cake, when it comes out clean, it's all done. After done, let cool for 20 minutes or so.

When done, carefully remove from cake pans and place bottom layer on parchment paper. Top will be domed, so you're going to need to cut off the dome to level off the top of the cake. If you don't do this the cake will rest unevenly, and will probably crack.

Frost the bottom layer, level off the second layer, and carefully slide on top. This can be done fairly easily by sliding it off a cutting board on to the bottom layer. The frosting will allow a bit of sliding, so you can line up the two layers.

Frost the rest as best you can. My frosting skills leave much to be desired, so I'm not going to give you any advice here.


Add sprinkles. Preferably animal shaped. I've chosen to go with the gorilla vs. sharks motif, but feel free to substitute elephants, dolphins or what have you.

Frosting:

I didn't take any pictures of this but it's fairly simple.
1. Heat cream until small bubbles rise up along side of sauce pan.

2. Chop chocolate, and when cream is heated pour it over chocolate in a heat proof bowl. Add vanilla and mix thoroughly. Don't overheat or boil the cream.

3. Place bowl in refrigerator, and let cool mixing every 20 minutes until the frosting is spreadable.

This cake weighs something like 7.5 lbs when fully assembled, and a little bit goes a long way. You could make this a 3 layer cake without changing the recipe by using 3x 8" cake pans instead of the 9" that I used.

Enjoy!