[Canon 5DmkII, Lensbaby Composer]
April 6, 2011
April 3, 2011
April 2, 2011
February 26, 2011
Interior Design
I have been enjoying doing some interior design photos with my Lensbaby. These two are from our place.
September 9, 2010
Lensbaby at Middle Distances
Now a few images from further away than macro distances. I found it quite easy to accomplish what I intended when shooting macro subjects with the Lensbaby, but not quite as much ease when attempting to photograph middle distance subjects. So, out I went to see what could be done, and found some nice trees along the ditch of a quite back-road and went to work. I think the look of a macro image, with it’s inherent soft edges brought on by simply having very shallow depth of field, is very similar, although different, to what I can achieve with the Lensbaby. Moving a bit further away from my subjects, the out of focus areas start to look abnormal compared to your standard image. Sure they have a limited depth of field which all lenses do to some extent, but now I have also got to deal with a very small sweet spot of sharpness. I can move this point around by simply bending the lens in whatever direction I please. Now, that said, I was using an aperture of only f/4 and it comes with discs right up to f/22 in all the standard stops (2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22), but I really wanted to see what can be accomplished with what it ships with. By using a smaller aperture I could have achieved a larger sweet spot, but I don’t think I could have eliminated the out of focus areas as I could with a standard lens. I do quite like the look of the elongated and drawn out bokeh (out of focus areas of an image) which becomes most evident when bending the lens as opposed to shooting it straight out. It adds the illusion of motion to an image which otherwise might be lacking in the drama department.
[Canon 5dmkII, Lensbaby Composer]
September 4, 2010
Lensbaby
My first go with a Lensbaby Composer. What a unique optic!! Had a riot playing with this lens this past weekend. I can imagine this one will be in my arsenal real soon! This first image of the wheat is a crop from a horizontal image but otherwise pretty much as shot. It has a sweet spot of great sharpness that falls off quickly, but… you can move this sweet spot anywhere in the frame you like.
[Canon 5dmkII, Lensbaby Composer]
The sharpness starts out like you see being sharp in the middle, but then it changes into a donut shape of sharpness as you focus creating a very unique look to many images. The second image here of the text shows off the circle of sharpness nicely. I messed a bit with this image in Photoshop, adding more contrast and the vignette.
This lens can be made into a really great macro by purchasing the Macro Kit, which is really just a couple of close-up filters. One is a +4 and the other a +10 diopter. Here I stacked the two and am very impressed how sharp this lens is as a macro. I also changed the aperture, which are small magnetic discs that you manually remove and replace with a small magnetic tool – very unique – that word unique seems to be in this post a lot. The lens is shipped with the f/4 disc installed and I opted for a smidge more depth of field and put in the f/5.6 disc for this image. Image presented as shot.
Mmmm, smell the coffee. Makes me want to run to Second Cup for a Vanilla Bean Latte!! Another macro image with the two diopters installed. This is pretty much straight out of the camera.
This final image made in my front yard using the +4 diopter by itself on the Lensbaby. These macro shots at first appear just as ordinary macro images made with an normal macro lens with the very shallow depth of field, but on closer inspection I notice that the field of sharpness isn’t the same. It’s more a circle of sharpness and messes with my mind enough that it has an appealing difference from the ordinary macro images I am so used to. Again, virtually straight out of the camera.
Collin J Örthner - Photographer 