Stop! in the name of love
Before you break my heart
This is a photo of a rosebud in our garden covered with raindrops in the morning. What I like most about it is that if you look carefully at the upper two drops you can see the Stop sign that is at our corner outside the garden.
Meta information: Nikon D70, Lensbaby 2.0, no aperture ring, +14 macro filters, ISO 200, 1/250 second, routine post-processing in Photoshop.
It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere out there a dame was in distress.
But this time it was a digital dame, and–oh, no!–her pixels were breaking up…
This photo was taken with my Lens Baby and macro filters with the f/8.0 aperture ring. It’s part of an experiment to see what happens when I boost the ISO with Lens Baby photos. After all, these photos are not crisp anyhow–one may as well get the benefits of a high shutter speed!
The Digital Noir figure was lit with a combination of ambient daylight and a colored Tungsten spot. ISO was set to 1000. The shutter speed was 1/500 of a second. I accepted the default settings for Raw conversion, and did essentially no Photoshop processing.
This is a photo of a single drop of water in a thin tree branch that I photographed yesterday morning with my Lens Baby and macro filters. I took the picture outside our dining “nook” while the kids were having breakfast, getting ready for school, and cackling about their Dad photographing outside in the rain.
The blue color comes from the blue paint used on the exterior sashes of of our windows, but I couldn’t figure this out at first. The image has almost no depth of field. The twig the water drop is dripping from is making a triangular motion effect.
I’m intrigued by how abstract this water drop has become. (There are more water drop photos taken with my Lens Baby to follow!)
I didn’t use an aperture ring (the Lens Baby equivalent of wide open) and exposed manually at an ISO of 200 and shutter speed of 1/125 of a second. I only performed routine level-balancing and sharpening work in Photoshop.
A reader writes:
I’ve read your piece on photographing the lobelia flower with your lens baby, as well as the item you refer to with more information about this set up, and I still don’t get it. Could you please be a little more explicit?
OK. There’s nothing like a straightforward request, and the whole Lens Baby thing is pretty straightforward. But, before I get started, another photo:
You get a Lens Baby from Lensbabies.com. It costs $150 plus shipping for the Lens Baby 2.0, and you need to specify the lens mount (Nikon or Canon and some others). The Canon version provides some exposure automation (I think), but there is absolutely no automation with the Nikon version.
Here’s another photo:
The macro kit for the Lens Baby consists of two glass filters that screw on the end. One is +10 and one is +4 diopters, and you can stack them together to get within 2-3 inches of your subject. These filters will run you another $29 bucks and come with absolutely no documentation. They do arrive in a sweet little carrying pouch that says “Lensbabies” in a kool typeface. (You gotta love this kind of packaging, elevating form far over function, as all of us visual people do from time to time!)
Here’s another lens, baby macro:
The Lens Baby itself has no ability to focus. Essentially, you have a “sweet spot” towards the center of the thing that is more-or-less in focus, and all the rest of the image is sweetly and pleasantly blurred.
The exact location of the sweet spot is impacted by a couple of factors. First, the end of the Lens Baby is flexible and bellows-like, so you can bend it around. This changes both the size and location of the sweet spot (although I’ve found that the way the photo comes out looking does differ from the way I see things through the viewfinder, through-the-lens viewing or not). In other words, chance and its guardian angel Sarah Dipity (serendipity) play a role with Lens Baby photos.
Here’s another photo:
The other factor that influences focus also influences exposure. The Lens Baby 2.0 comes with a bunch of different magnetic rings that you plop into place inside the barrel of the Lens Baby lens. (The Lens Baby comes with a little tool that allows you to easily remove the rings.)
These rings set the aperture of the lens. The smaller the opening in the magnetic ring, the smaller the aperture, and–to some extent–the greater the apparent sharpness of the Lens Baby due to higher depth of field.
At best, how sharp are we? Not very. That’s not the point of the Lens Baby:
As a practical matter, once you have the macro filters in place, particularly if you are using both of them, you probably don’t want to be bothered with changing the aperture rings (you’d have to take the macro filters off to change the aperture ring). I find myself using the Lens Baby “wide open” with no aperture ring, since it’s not the point of the thing to be sharp, and with the widest aperture you are most likely to get acceptable results hand holding in the part of the image that is sharp (because the wider the effective aperture, the faster the shutter speed you can use).
So, all the photos that accompany this story were taken with my Nikon D70 mounted with the Lens Baby, no aperture ring, and both +4 and +10 macro filters. There’s no focusing, and no exposure automation.
What you have to do is set the camera to manual (M on the dial for those of you who are acronym tone-deaf). The only control you have over exposure is setting the shutter speed.
The photos that accompany this story were taken at shutter speeds between 1/60 and 1/200 of a second in overcast, but bright, conditions. But trial and error is required. You’ll also need to review the results on your LCD display as you take the photos, and give praise for the bracketing inherent in the Raw format.
Having set the shutter speed where I guestimate it ought to be, the process of taking one of these photos is pretty intuitive: I get close, wiggle the Lens Baby, and when I like what I think I see, press the shutter release.
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It is the lot of mortal man, woman, and child to be afraid of many things, and I think this face looks afraid.
Actually, as the driver of the diabolic Coca Cola truck, he should have nothing to fear.
These photos were taken with my Lens Baby equipped with macro lenses.
The snake below is much happier, indeed looks quite tempting!
View the Snake Giving Tongue larger.
No, it’s not Photoshop! I did nothing in post processing except to crop in a little, normalize the levels and sharpen the Raw file slightly.
This photo was created with my Lens Baby (described in an earlier post) which essentially will turn your (and my) expensive digital SLR (Nikon D70, Canon EOS, etc.) into a cheap, soft-focus camera with a disposable lens. Yeah for technology!
My Lens Baby is now equipped with a set of macro lens, so I can do groovy Lens Baby macros, like this one, baby!
I took this picture while experimenting with my new Lensbaby 2.0. The Lensbaby is a weird gizmo, actually a lens, that you can use with detachable lens cameras like my Nikon D70. You have to get the Lensbaby with the right mount for your camera, of course. I think it comes in Nikon or Canon mounts.
There’s no aperture setting on the lens, you use little magnetic rings for a choice of a few apertures within the thing. And it only works in Manual mode on my D70 - so you have to guess at exposure, and control it using shutter speed.
The thing is on a sort of flexible bellows tube, and selectively focuses depending on how you bend it. The Lensbaby product documentation is about the length you’d expect for a tea set, not an optical product. But this is about fun, anyway! Anyhow, the doc calls the area that is in focus, which depends how you push, pull, or bend the thing, the “sweet spot” - and basically it seems to focus in pretty close, around a foot or so away from the lens. But, hey, there are lots of ways to use this thing, and I’m sure you’ll get different results than I do.
Here are a few more it’s the Lens, Baby experiments from today (Julian’s Star Wars sandals, and more flowers):
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