A fellow photographer who's work I really admire is Bill Ballard in the US, formerly a blogspot guy now moved over to Wordpress. One thing in particular that I like about Bill's work is that his images are very natural, real people captured with sympathetic honesty, something I aspire to with my own portraits and character nudes.His recent entry was sharing some of his Lensbaby work, like Bill I have fiddled about but not really spent the time to prefect using it that I should, I bought the Lensbaby 2 which has the manual bellows for focus and therefor produces very random results. I have used the Composer model which allows the focus to be fixed, technically better but without the 'wow, wasn't expecting that !!' effect, but it has to be said also without the 'oops, that shot's rubbish !!' results.
So, in response to Bill am sharing a few location shots taken last year with models Fredau and Raphaella, all shot in relatively low light using the lens wide open at f2 or f2.8 for rather extreme focus pulling effects and the minimum 'sweet spot'
This rather quirky device takes a bit of getting used to and is not to everyones taste. Seems many folk I know that have bought one only seem to use them a few times compared to their main lenses. Must confess that when it does come out of its bag I will may take a similar shot with a standard 50mm, oh me of little faith !
I do want to try shooting with it at a much smaller aperture and with studio flash for a less distorted effect, just never quite got round to it. Well, I am running a couple of fine art studio workshops over the coming months where we will have a life model for the second morning session, time to play properly !
Thanks Bill.
