Babes in to the Wood ... With Strange Lenses ..


I haven't posted anything on this Blog for a little while, mainly due to the summer being a very busy time of the year for me with the weddings season in full sling. But I do have lots of ideas for topics to post here ..... it is just time to do it ..... so for for those of you who requested tips on; on camera and off camera flash it will happen I promise .....!

What I thought I would do here is post a few more images shot with the Lensbaby. I realised that my Delamere Forest project was rather short of summer images so set off very early this morning to try and capture the colours of summer in a stretch of water I particularly like due to it being in a dip surrounded by trees, it is usually also very still resulting in excellent reflections being produced.The first shot at the top of this Blog clearly wasn't taken with the Lensbaby it was the only image I managed to get with decent light, so was captured digitally with a medium format camera at F32 and you will see that the image is sharp from front to back due to this great depth of field. (Tech Data: ISO 50, F32, 1.4 Secs).
What is however interesting is that the Lensbaby images below were taken hand held at F4 and even though the area of focus is much reduced to good effect the images are nevertheless sharp from front to back in the "sweat spot" area due to the focal plane being totally different from a conventional lens. In essence the Lensbaby is a "Tilt & Shift" lens,although as a good friend of mine pointed out "T&S" lenses aren't actually real T&S only a view camera with a flexible set of bellows can do this, the Lensbaby although cruder isn't that far off but it swings rather than shifts !! The images below are deliberately extreme to illustrate the effect and I tilted the lens downwards to move the focal plane more in a front to back direction and then also moved the plane further by also swinging it to one side. Obviously this lens with more subtle use willgive more pleasing images. The only real way to understand these lens is to have a good play with them, and I encourage you to give one a go.

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