christmas is coming

Seems to be sooner and sooner every year. But then everyone complains about that, so I'll stop right there. I really like shooting Christmas lights. Meaningless, pointless and fun. I have a hard time standing still and shooting or using a tripod. I seem to always end up waving the camera around, or shooting out of focus or running back and forth while taking the pictures. Long exposures, out of focus, lensbabies, zooming the lens or my feet. So many fun ways to shoot Christmas lights in a non-literal way. Even with a small point and shoot camera, you can get good results, zooming with your feet while exposing, or twisting and turning the camera through the exposure, weaving trails of lights on the sensor.

tree

Lensbaby, with star aperture. Felt the star was appropriate to jazz up the tree lights and put a star on the top of the tree. Focused set on the presents and locked on tripod, using a lensbaby 3G. 8 second exposure, painting with light to fill in the presents a bit as well. This sort of shot wouldn't be possible with the earlier lensbabies - probably the first time I've really used the locking features of the 3G.

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads; And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap, had just settled down for a long winter's nap, When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters and threw up the sash. The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below, When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer, With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick. More rapid than eagles his coursers they came, and he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name; "Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen! on, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen! To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall! now dash away! dash away! dash away all!" As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, So up to the house-top the coursers they flew, with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too. And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof the prancing and pawing of each little hoof. As I drew in my hand, and was turning around, down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound. He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; A bundle of toys he had flung on his back, and he looked like a peddler just opening his pack. His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, and the beard of his chin was as white as the snow; The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, and the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath; He had a broad face and a little round belly, that shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly. He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, and I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself; A wink of his eye and a twist of his head, soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread; He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, and filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk, And laying his finger aside of his nose, and giving a nod, up the chimney he rose; He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, and away they all flew like the down of a thistle. But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night."

amanda, tim & kate

Lensbaby, star aperture ring and some Christmas lights

christmas cactus

Merry Christmas from Texas! Took the lensbaby out this evening, with the star aperture and shot some Texan Christmas lights.

Craig Tanner's Light Diary

A friend of mine and a great photographer, Craig Tanner, has just launched a new photo blog. He's aiming to post five new images a week, along with a fortnightly podcast discussing this images. I think this one will be worth watching.

Craig has a great way with landscape photography but has more recently been focusing on portraiture and more creative styles of image making. He's also a big evangelist for the Lensbaby.

brian

This shot came from playing around with a lensbaby 3G, with the creative aperture kit. In particular, using the star aperture and going out of my way to find lots of point light sources.

I'd met up with some friends to have dinner at Chuy's on Barton Springs Rd. We then went out to shoot some of the interesting neon on the various restaurants along the road. I brought along my lensbaby 3G as I really haven't spent as much time as I'd like getting to know how it works. Also I've recently picked up the creative aperture kit and knew that all the point light sources would potentially give me cool effects. I'm still finding the 3G an interesting lens to get to grips with. There's definitely more potential for in focus shots than with the 2.0, but I still have to get my fingers in tune with the various knobs and switches on the 3G. I keep finding myself trying to focus but landing on the lock release knobs, rather than the focus knobs. The juice bar on Barton Springs Rd happened to have some brightly coloured spot lights, that I tried to use for effect in this shot. Brian is standing under a green spotlight and I then used the lights from the bars on the other side to frame him with the stars. I found that to get really good stars, the point light sources have to be quite a long way back from the point of focus. This makes sense - the more out of focus they are, the larger they appear. Getting the relative distances correct took a bit of playing around. I also shot maybe 30 frames here to get one close to being in focus. That in general seems to be a challenge with using the lensbaby, but particularly at night. It is just difficult to see through that small viewfinder in low light. I also think I might need to dial in the diopter adjustment on my camera, to suit my eyes. There is a car passing in the background that created an interesting star trail from the brake lights - something to play with more I think with these creative aperture disks. The stars, being symmetrical also don't suffer from the inversion that occurs with a heart shape aperture. With the heart, the out of focus bokeh inverts if the focus point is in front, or behind the light source that is creating the shape. You can see this if you look at a light ray diagram ( which I might get around to drawing soon). It can make it a bit fiddly trying to get the effect you want with the disks, but a symmetrical aperture doesn't have that same issue, as it is the same reflected on any axis. I worked on this image a bit in Lightroom, using the 'on image' colour adjustments. These are great - you can adjust hue & saturation directly on the image, clicking on a particular region you want to modify and dragging the mouse up or down to change the particular parameter you are working with. In this case I made the background regions more red by adjusting the hue. Working with this, along with a graphics tablet is even better than with a mouse - I just click with the pen, on the image and drag - it feels very intuitive. I'm looking forward to trying this out for black and white images too - I think it has a great deal of potential.

Lensbabies

I have a couple of lensbabies. Looking like the offspring of a vacuum cleaner and a camera lens, these fun little lenses let you create images with selective focus through the focal plane. There is a sweet region in focus that can be moved around by bending, pushing and pulling the lens. The lens aperture is controlled by dropping physical rings right into the lens, held in place by tiny magnets. There are several generations of lensbabies and I recently purchased the more robotic looking lensbaby 3G which allows finer focus control and repeatability - perfect for shooting on a tripod or with the need for more control. The 3G lensbaby also comes with aperture rings all the way down to f22, something I haven't yet played with.

There are a few features about the lensbaby that I really enjoy: First, the organic nature of shooting with it. Because you have to constantly manipulate the lens to change the focus point on the frame, pushing and pulling it to focus at different distances, bending and twisting the lens to move the sweet spot around the composition, it leads to a very tactile way of shooting. Often the question is asked Why can't you just do it in Photoshop? Partly this is because the final effect of the lensbaby would be hard to achieve, but mainly the difference is doing it in Photoshop, you'd just shoot normally and consciously add blur after the fact. With a lensbaby, you do it right then and there. Reacting to the scene through the camera, not thinking so much, there is less control which leads to maybe more happy accidents but also to you doing things you'd never try in Photoshop. The results for me are just totally different. Looking through a lensbaby changes how I'd compose the scene and how I would approach the subject - something that is lost if I try to do it later. The second thing I really like about a lensbaby is how it treats highlights in the out of focus areas. I'm used to round or at least regular bokeh, but if you push and bend a lensbaby enough you get elliptical bokeh which I just find fascinating, particularly on bright spots in the out of focus regions. You can see those elliptical effects in the statue image above. I'm intrigued by the idea of cutting custom aperture disks with stars or different shapes to further play with the OOF highlights. I've recently heard that Lensbaby are going to be selling custom aperture kits, star & heart shapes plus several blanks to cut your own. This effect is particularly attractive for city night photography - lots of point light sources that render the aperture shape when out of focus. Compositionally, I find a couple of good or common uses for the lensbaby The first ways it gets used is to control confusion. Many fans of the lens use it for street portraiture, where the backgrounds or edges of the frame might well be chaotic. The lensbaby helps here by throwing those regions out of focus and helps you pay attention to the subject. The build in focus vignetting allows the photographer to worry about the subject and expect everything else to just blur into the background. Something I'm finding even stronger is to use it when there are specific regions that have strong design elements that I want to throw out of focus. These aren't regions that are clutter or distracting, but just sections that will retain a strong compositional element when out of focus. Examples of this are the strongly coloured, stripped shirt or the person at the edge of the pool. In both cases, the selective focus doesn't diminish the contribution of those regions. The person is still recogniseable, the stripes and colours of the shirt are still part of the composition; but the softening of focus strengthens their contribution as elements of design. They become more abstract and act as powerful framing elements. The fish portrait of Amanda is another example of consciously using the lens blur to focus on her face; not to control any confusing elements from the fish but more to turn it into a stronger design element of the scene. The leading lines and colour becomes even more relevant with the selective focus, rather than being hidden or removed from the scene by the blur. One initial problem I had with the lensbaby was trying to shoot it wide open. The lens without any aperture rings is around f2.0 which gives a very narrow depth of field for this ~50mm focal length lens. When I started using f4 or f5.6 rings to practice I started getting more frames where something was in focus! It is also difficult with a second generation lensbaby to push the sweet spot too far to the edge of the frame. It is possible but you do start to get to a point where nothing is in focus at all. The 3G lensbaby is easier to distort even more in this respect, due to the fine focus controls and ability to fix the bend and then move the camera around. All of the shots on this page were taken with a 2G lensbaby. I'm just starting to explore the possibilities that the 3G provides. I can see it being usable for self portraits because of the fixable lens flex, usable for landscapes because of the smaller aperture disks, more usable for studio portraiture given the repeatability inherent in fixing the lens and perhaps also for HDR and other types of photography that require multiple exposures of the same scene. I've already shot a few self-portraits with the 3G lensbaby and tried some night photography. It isn't easy manually focusing in the near dark!