Your Camera is also a Toy: So Play

Because photography usually (not always) requires a camera to produce pictures, it has become a very technological pursuit. Let's face it, even a $100 digital camera is a cornucopia of miniature electronic miracles--so it's hard not to think of taking pictures in a very high-tech light. But taking pictures should also be fun and sometimes you need to remember that your camera is, in many ways, just another toy used for having fun. And if it's a toy, then it's also meant for playing.

There are lots of ways to play with a camera. For one, you could set your shutter speed to a ridiculously-slow shutter speed and take intentionally blurry photos--streaks of light from holiday displays, kids running, or even the path of stars through the nighttime sky (but use a tripod for that one). Or you can put a piece of colored plastic--not an expensive filter, but a piece of colored Mylar or a sheet of plastic food wrap--in front of your lens. What happens? What happens if you spin around during a long exposure? Kids are usually much better at this kind of thing than adults because they haven't learned that you're not "supposed" to do a lot of these things.

Last night I was sitting at my desk, bored, and I noticed that a chambered nautilus I keep around as a prop and a plastic plate I was eating from had a similar spiral pattern. I had my Nikon D90 next to me (I almost always have a camera within arm's reach) and I happened to have my Lensbaby out--a fun lens-substitute that is designed for letting you play with things like soft focus and focus-shifting. So, rather than haul out a tripod and put on a "good" lens, I just started playing with the Lensbaby and the shell/plate idea. I was only using a gooseneck desk lamp for light and the shutter speed (in manual mode) was around 1/4 second. The Lensbaby has to be used in manual, so you kind of have to try one exposure and then check the LCD to see how close you are--then adjust it until you get something you like. I shot the photo above in RAW (I shoot everything in RAW) and played a little with exposure and color balance in editing. The quickie self-portrait below, also taken with a Lensbaby (five minutes after the nautilus shot) is completely uncorrected--it is exactly as it came out of the camera. Trust me, if I had been doing this seriously, I would have corrected my blood-shot eye!

Both of these photos are horrid technically, but they were fun to take and I was surprised by both results. And in the end, getting surprised is sometimes a lot more fun than knowing precisely how your images will come out.

Take time to play with your camera--often it will take you to places you could never have imagined while you were trying to get everything to be as perfect as your camera would like to make it.

More Fun with the Lensbaby, Baby

Here's another shot with the Lensbaby Composer (see the previous post for more on Lensbaby). I'm having quite a bit of fun with this lens and have written a full page about it for the revision of my book the Joy of Digital Photography. Maybe I'm being influenced by seeing Tim Cury's extraordinary new Alice in Wonderland film (go see it if you haven't--one of the best films I've seen in many years), but I think we all need to step away from reality now and then--if only visually. If you want to check the pricing out for Lensbaby, try clicking the B&H ad in the margin or just go to Amazon:  Lensbaby The Composer for Nikon F mount Digital SLR Cameras (Nikon) or Lensbaby The Composer for Canon EF mount Digital SLR Cameras (Canon).

Oh Baby! Fun with the Lensbaby!

I finally got around to playing with new new Lensbaby today (something I've been dying to do for many weeks) and once I got a handle on how it worked (it took me about a half an hour to get the basic concept down), I had a really great time.

The Lensbaby, if you're one of the few photographers on the planet that isn't aware, is a type of tilt-shift lens that lets you take the main element off-axis and shift the sharp focus to specific areas of the frame. In other words, you can keep one part of the image (say the center) sharp while tossing the sides or the top and bottom out of focus. The lens simulates effects that can be created using a traditional large-format camera (because they let you shift the planes of the film and lens separately) or a 35mm tilt-shift lens (which does a better job than the Lensbaby in some ways, but costs much more). In the photo here, for example, I first focused the center of the lens on the center of this unusual building and then used a pivot built into the lens to throw the sides and top and bottom of the frame out of focus. The effect looks a lot like the "miniaturization" that cinematographers create when trying to make things look falsely small. Click the image to make it larger and you'll see that the building looks like a toy from a tiny toy train village--no?

There is no aperture control in the basic Lensbaby (and you have to focus manually, of course), so you have to use your camera in the manual exposure mode.  I just shot a series of exposures in each lighting situation until I got an exposure that looked good and then kept that setting until the scene or lighting changed. Since I shoot in RAW all of the time, correcting exposure and white balance is simple.

The Lensbaby is a part of a rapidly growing and fun system of optical toys--which is very dangerous for a gadget-oriented person like me. It's a very fun and experimental-type accessory and I think you learn a great deal about photography by stepping away from the compulsion to make only technically perfect images and by tossing a little Impressionism into the mix. Check out their site for galleries of some very creative and fun photos created with their system. I guess in some ways the Lensebaby is just regarded as a toy--but hey, isn't that what all cameras are in one way or another?