Lucy And The Lens

Tag: #NikonD3200

  • 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.

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    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:

     

  • Owls At Waterstones Preston

    On the 31/07/2016 I went to Waterstones to pick up my pre-order of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now I like to go to Waterstones quite often for a browse and usually never leave the store without three books and I also order books on Amazon. For Harry Potter and the Cursed Child I made the decision to pre-order my book and pick it up from Waterstones.

    A few months later I am really glad I chose to do this because I got to combine my love of reading with photography yet again as Waterstones had real owls in the store courtesy of Barn Owl Bill. I was really excited about this because I love owls and I have never had the pleasure of photographing them before. The best thing about photographing owls is that you don’t have to tell them to pose, they just do it anyway.

    My Favourite shot taken on my Nikon D3200 with my Telephoto Zoom Lens was of the beautiful owl who lost one of its eyes when it was run over by a car as for me beauty appears in the unlikeliest of places, the owl did not need two eyes to be beautiful, it just was. The detail on its feathers was striking.

    But for me the event was not complete without one more thing. I couldn’t go and photograph the owls without holding one and the wonderful event organisers kindly captured a shot for me.

    Below are my photographs from the event:

  • My Camera and Lens Collection

    For this post I have decided to discuss the types ofd cameras and lenses i typically use and those I want to try and use in the future. I will be discussing my phone camera, digital SLR and my Polaroid Socialmatic Camera.

    First of all I am going to talk about my phone camera. I know this isn’t technically a camera but this is something I always have on me and there are lots of apps you can download to make your photos look more professional. At the moment my friend has inspired me to do a 366 days of positivity thing on my personal Instagram where I have to do 1 post a day. Sometimes I use quotes and screenshots but most of the time I take pictures and I admit when I first started to do the 366 days I used images straight from the mobiles camera roll. But now I have started downloading post edited images from my camera on my phone to use for my Instagram and now if I do, do mobile photography itself I have a photoshop express app for slight touch-ups. Another trusty sidekick app for me is Layout for Instagram so I can create a simple collage of multiple images for my accounts. Another Great app is Vsco cam because it has professional camera settings and it comes with its own filters and you can also buy filters for different types of photography. There is also a range of free filters you can download and add to the app.

    Typically I shoot on my  Digital Slr which is a Nikon D3200 with an AF-S Nikkor 55-200mm Telephoto Zoom Lens. Either these shoots are planned days out with Preston Photographic Society or Lancashire photo walks. I also take this camera on Holiday and pretty much everywhere I plan to go and sometimes even on spontaneous trips away. The subject of the shoot is the deciding factor for the settings I normally use.

    A studio portrait shoot is typically shot on a 70-200mm focal length depending on how much of the subject you as a photographer want your viewers to see. For this Kind of shoot the ISO should be no more than 200 because the studio lights already brighten the subject so you don’t need to add even more brightness. The shutter speed is set at 1/125 to avoid camera shake and if the subject isn’t moving and you up the shutter speed it will become blurred. Only up the shutter speed if you are doing an action shot.

    For most of my shoots I tend to use the manual setting on my camera and you can usually end up with a pretty good guide of what your aperture and shutter speed need to be and adjusting accordingly.

    Finally I am going to discuss my most recent addition to my cameras, the Polaroid Socialmatic. So for months I had been looking at Polaroid cameras on the Polaroid website and I got one a couple of months ago for my birthday. There’s a funny story behind this though. I was planning on getting a Polaroid Z3100 as I thought the Socialmatic was too expensive. However on my birthday I happened to be in Cardiff and I knew they had cameras in urban outfitters and so I went in on the off chance and there it was the exact model of the polaroid Socialmatic I’d seen on the polaroid website at a bargain price, so I was ecstatic. But I had no idea why until I got home, the camera was in Chinese and although I did Chinese Gcse years ago I just didn’t have the skills to figure it out. So I spent a couple of months with a camera I couldn’t use until earlier this month when the problem was finally solved.

    So now I’ve told you this story I am going to talk about the camera itself. The Polaroid Socialmatic is a modern version of the vintage polaroid camera in that it has its own phone network that allows you to upload pictures straight to Instagram as well as choosing and printing the shots you desire, straight from the camera.

    What’s Next?

    Now I have a Digital SLR camera and a telephoto zoom lens my plan is to keep adding lenses every Christmas and for birthdays and also saving up money to buy my own lenses.

    There are four lenses I currently have my eye on but I am waiting for a defining moment to buy one, as that is when I usually tend to indulge in material things.

    The first of these is a 50mm prime lens to give my images a wider depth of field.The second is the most expensive of these which I recently had the opportunity to test it is the Lomography 58mm f1.9 Petzval art lens which comes in brass or black and allows you to alter the distance between the lens elements. Any lens that gives your image a different perspective like the fisheye and the wide angle also fascinates me.

    I hope you enjoyed this post, stay tuned for photographic ideas, additions and events I’ve been to.

  • 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: