The fine people at Lensbaby were kind enough to loan some of their new line to us during the months of September and October. I know I walked around with the 4/3 Composer for a few weeks and if you trundle over to our YouTube channel, you’ll see me fumbling with Derek’s E3, a Composer, and swappable optics.
More about the babies, and some pics, after the jump…
read more
After a couple of weeks off we’ll be out again! Check the photo-calendar to confirm that yes, we’ll be going to the West Side Park in Greenwood, Indiana to start shooting Casey Monaghan in the leaves… I will finally be bringing along a lensbaby Composer in 3 mounts -4/3, Canon, and Nikon.
Next week we’re looking to hold a night shoot someplace creepy so we all can work on goosebumpy shots.
So, while researching exactly what f/177 is, stopwise, I found this nifty darn PDF file with a list of the most common (and quite a few uncommon) stops, what their actual value is (instead of the nice, friendly rounded off ones we all use), and it tells you what the different shutters and apertures are typical of and used for, too. Very nice.
Check it out here, throw a copy in your camera bag, never hurts to have around.
A Friday special, from the dark corners of our footage folder, the Lensbaby Composer! Representing the newest of Lensbaby’s optical solutions the Composer features a ball-joint method for orienting the “sweet spot” and a true barrel-focus system, along with their new swappable optics (which we move to call ‘swaptics,’ you can have that off us, Lensbaby) which let you choose how much toy camera effect you want your Lensbaby to yield.
Click Image to Visit Oranje
OK, tomorrow night is this year’s Oranje. Oranje, for those who (like me until last month) don’t know, is apparently a big art gala, with local artist of all types (painters, chefs, photographers, DJs, bands, etc) come and sell their stuff and do their thing and play on six stages in a 2 story warehouse all night.
So of course we encourage you to be a part of the art community and go to it. Former Roberts’ desk girl and all-around-fabulous photographer Jennifer Parker will be manning (er, womanning?) a booth there, among all the other festivities.
Tickets are 20 bucks, you can nab them at the door. Click the image for full details. Go there, find Nick and I (we’ll be there with our girlfriends and our good buddy Max), check out the local photogs, be inspired, come back to us and get some gear to go out there and unleash your artistic vision.
Like, for example, a Lensbaby Composer, maybe?
Once again we photo-walked this week, and once again if you weren’t there you really missed out. DJ Jared was great to work with (and we thank him for giving us his time, if you were out there and had shots get them to me so we can share them with him in thanks). We had an Elinchrom Ranger pack and an A head with a softbox and some bounce reflectors, so we were able to shoot mixed strobe and ambient on location. We also had some of the new Lensbaby products out with us, showing off the Composer and the swappable optics system (which I hereby propose we call “swaptics”).
And, it was a good mash-up out there. Nick and I were shooting our trademark Olympus cams, Dawn brought her Nikon D40, one gent used Panasonic’s LX3 point-and-shoot, another the original 5D, and Tony showed up with a medium-format view camera. Film, people! Film! Craziness.
It was a lot of fun. There was shooting, strobing, and later, a motorcycle. Check out the pictures in the gallery below, and make sure to find your way out to next week’s walk so that you to can start padding your portfolio with awesome shots.
We run a Flickr group dedicated to showing off pics from the various photowalks, and you can find that over at http://www.flickr.com/groups/nick-and-dereks-walkabout/. You have to join, just so we can keep it strictly to photowalks and not get a lot of the vaguely tangentially-related chaffe that you get with Flickr groups, but don’t let that turn you off. We want to see what you got out there.
It’s like fishing stories, but for photographers.
“One time, I had this awesome shot. Stellar. Change your life. There was this chick–and she was hot–and there was this explosion and a cow tap dancing.”
“Wow, that’s amazing. Can I see it?”
“Ah, no. It got away. I forgot I had my camera set to ‘FAIL’ priority…”
I was downstairs playing with some new equipment while waiting for the next batch of Raw Footage clips to render, and I caught this shot of our own Jody Grober. It was shot with our display D90, newest of the Nikon digital SLR cameras in the prosumer tier. But, it wasn’t shot with any of our usual selection of Nikon lenses, instead I used our new Lensbaby Composer to catch this.
I talked about these waaaay back when they were announced, excited about the interchangeable optics and the simplified functionallity over my own Lensbaby 3G. The Composer uses a simplified ball-joint system with a traditional focus ring. It was pretty easy to use on the D90, with the usual Lensbaby caveat that if you point it too far off axis you can never achieve true focus. Within range, however, the Lensbaby doesn’t exhibit bad focus wide open (and I mean f2 wide open here). You can see a crop below taken handheld at 1/100 at f2, focused using live view magnification to assure the best focus I could get. I’ve pulled out a detail of the shot to show the focal point.
As you can see, the Lensbaby won’t win any awards for tack sharp focus wide open, but it’s certainly not bad and a little post sharpening helps it a lot. But, that creamy out of focus background is hard to imitate, look at the phone (maybe 8″ away) dissolve as it extends out of the frame. And, as you’d expect, stopping the lens down a bit will help improve sharpness across the board, and you can stop down to f22 using the provided aperture discs.
So, make sure to check out the Lensbaby, one of my favorite digital camera accessories and one of the most fun and challenging lenses to use. It’ll make you see differently. Check out all our Lensbabies here. If you shoot Olympus digital cameras, or are looking to buy Sony Alpha cameras instead of Canon or Nikon call us up, we can get you a ‘baby in the mount you need.
OK, so, as you might’ve noticed, we (read “me”) at Out of Focus are a bit fascinated with the screwier bits of photography. So, it’ll probably come as no surprise to anyone that my favorite announcement from Photokina so far has been about the new Lensbabies.
Switch To Mobile Site