Lucy And The Lens

Category: Landscape and Architectural Photography

  • Petzval 85mm Lomography Lens

    Last Thursday I went on a photo walk to Crosby and as I had already been before and I knew I was going to get exactly the same shots I took a gamble. Rather than my telephoto zoom lens I took the Petzval 85mm Lens which is a Lomography / art lens. This lens is made for portraits but I challenged myself to test out the lens with a landscape.

    This lens comes in black and brass so of course I bought the brass lens cause who doesn’t want a gold lens and I’ve nicknamed it the bond lens. I first saw the Petzval on Emily Soto’s (A Fashion Photographers) Instagram page and I fell in love with it the moment I saw it and I knew at some point I was going to have to buy it.

    QMEH9116

     

    This lens comes with fixed aperture plates that you slot into it and when the light reflects of a subject or object it creates a bokeh effect. According to the lens manual a “bokeh” is the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens. Boke is a Japanese word meaning “blur” or haze.

    When you shoot with a wide depth of field such as an aperture of f 2.2 you get something called “A swirly bokeh effect” where the out of focus areas in your image will be encased in a blurred swirl so that you can see your subject more clearly. However today as I was shooting a landscape I used an aperture of f11 because I wanted the entire landscape to be in focus and to get a subtle bokeh effect where the light reflects of my subject.

    This lens is a reinvention of Joseph Petzvals’ 1840 lens as upon discovering that f15 was the fastest aperture that a portrait lens could manage he designed a lens that would go to an aperture of f3.6 and portraiture lenses are now based on his original invention. So that is how the Petzval 85mm lomography lens was born.

    Below are my first shots taken on the Petzval 85mm lens and there will be many more to come:

    If you enjoyed this post keep reading for more lomography and other types of photography.

  • Skippool Creek Photowalk

    On Thursday I went on a photo walk with Preston Photographic Society to Skippool Creek, which was a little bit different than usual because it was a members choice rather than our photo walk organiser, Nancy’s and we were photographing rusty old boats.

    This time I took one of my cousins who is also interested in photography with me and although we were both wearing inappropriate shoes the walk was thoroughly enjoyable.

    The boats looked like they had been abandoned for many years and were starting to rot and decay which added a new dimension and character to the boats. According to derelictplaces.co.uk Skippool creek went from being a busy port used for smuggling goods and transporting produce to an abandoned port in the 1840s when they started to open bigger ports and railways.

    My favourite photo from this walk was a side view of a beach hut, which was taken just as the sun was starting to set and anyone who knows me knows I can’t, resist a sunset photo.

    What I like to do is keep photographing whenever and wherever I can, and stepping outside my comfort zone is the best thing ever as I’m broadening my photographic horizons. It also gets me to experience a vast array of new things and look for beauty in unexpected places.

    Below are a selection of my favourite images from the walk shot on my NikonD3200 with both my 18-55mm Lens and My Telephoto Zoom Lens:

     

  • Graves At Heysham Photowalk

    So last Thursday I went on a photo walk with Preston Photographic Society to Graves at Heysham near Morecambe. Photography is not just about taking pictures it is about capturing the essence and history of a place.

    For those of you who don’t know what graves at Heysham is, I didn’t but after reading the plaque and looking at several websites (National Trust, Time Travel Britain, Blogs) I did manage to find a little bit of information about it.

    At Graves at Heysham there is an old ruined chapel that stands on top of a cliff and it is up there that you see the famed stone graves used to bury high status individuals. These Graves appear on the front cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘The Best Of Black Sabbath’.

    Legend states that St Patrick was shipwrecked here after crossing from Ireland and established the chapel but in fact the chapel was built as a memory of his life 300 years after his death.

    St Peters church at the bottom of the cliff near the village is a still functioning Anglican church but we couldn’t go inside but when on these photo walks I like to think outside the box. I am always looking for that obscure shot and today my shot was taken from the outside looking in to capture the window and the pews at the other side.

    A great thing about going out with other more experienced photographers is that they give you ideas so we spent a little while capturing the sun flares through the archway of the ruined St Peters Chapel.

    All in All it is always good to go out and do some photography even if it means the subject is outside of your comfort zone because photography is something you learn by going out and practicing. Although I prefer shooting people I will not say no to an opportunity to shoot something different so don’t just read about different types of photography, go out and practice them.