Lucy And The Lens

Category: Unconventional Shoots

  • 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:

     

  • UCLAN Colour Run

    UCLAN Colour Run

    This weekend was one of the most exciting but unconventional shoots I have ever done. I was at UCLAN Sports Arena shooting a colour run with Preston Photographic Society, which people of all ages participated in to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Charity.

    What’s a colour run you ask? It’s a new craze where people run a 5K and get coloured powder thrown over them throughout the race and it’s brilliant to photograph. The key to taking a great image at this event is trying to press the shutter as the volunteer throws coloured powder at the runner and then either boosting up the contrast or saturation on photoshop to enhance the colour burst effect.

    Now to the race its self, before the race starts the runners each have a bag of coloured powder to throw up into the air for dramatic effect and to give us photographers a chance to set the scene of the event. For this throw I managed to acquire a nice position on the stage, which gave me the ability to see all the runners but to only focus on a few as, I was using my 55-200mm Zoom Lens. What I loved about this particular starting set-up is that there were about fifteen photographers but we all managed to get a different perspective of the starting throw.

    I started off at the yellow station where I ended up with my favourite shot of the day as I learnt that the most striking shots were those with the most colours and I managed to capture the volunteers throwing yellow powder at a lone runner.

    All in all what I liked about the day is that this shoot was completely different to anything I’d done before and I loved looking at the images after the shoot and spending time editing a selection of the images from each of the stations the yellow, the red and the multi-coloured. I also found it interesting to see that every photographer saw the colours with a different eye, a different view of this world in a colour burst.

    So if you are a photographer I recommend that you make it your mission to have a go at shooting a colour run. If not I suggest that you participate whether it’s for charity or for fun.

    Below is a selection of my photos from this event depicting my photography at every stage of the race: