Lensbaby Love
I have a Lensbaby.
For anyone unfamiliar with these nifty devices, it's a variable focus 50mm f/2 lens. The single lens element is fully adjustable to enable a focal 'sweet spot' to be found in creative photography. A particular setting can be locked and then fine tuned by rotating any of the three protruding long screw threads. To change the aperture, a series of magnetic aperture rings is provided and held in place in front of the lens element by a series three small magnets. It's a quirky lens with a maximum aperture of f/2 and produces a wide range of focal effects. Mine is a Lensbaby 3G ... which is now sold as the 'Control Freak' (can't imagine why ... I mean look at the thing!).
Picture courtesy Lensbaby
When I first received the lens (passed to me by a cinematographer friend who'd purchased it for cine-work but found it unsuitable) I put it on my D80 DSLR. It produced some neat results but it wasn't a go-to lens by any means. Also the lack of adaptive exposure metering in the camera body meant more then a few frames to get the manual exposure just right ... it just seemed a bit of a chore. For this reason I had been putting off trying the Lensbaby on my new D600 body and but ... well ... whatever(!) ... so I took it along in my bag to the abandoned shops in the previous post. I put it on the camera, dialled in what I thought was my anticipated exposure setting and took a picture. Beautifully exposed! Well I wasn't expecting that! So I left the settings as is, re-composed and took another shot of something somewhere else ... and? Same! Great exposure! It was then I had one of those total 'Derr!' moments when I realised the D600 was automatically adjusting to bring in the best exposure for the scene ... it actually had very little to do with me and my settings ;-)
Now, this was fabulous news as I am essentially a lazy photographer at heart and I realised that the previous burden of adjusting exposure had been banished ... it was like I had a new lens ... which I guess I kinda do. Here's the same shops as seen through the Lensbaby ... Enjoy!
Lensbaby love ... have you ever fallen in love with a lens (or anything for that matter...) all over again?
Autumnal Fire
Canberra has had one of the most spectacular autumn displays in years. A combination of the drought breaking last year and a very mild, wet summer. The oaks and maples are still running yellows but the main show met the icy winter blasts that heralded the beginning of winter's grip ... great cold fronts dragging up air from the antarctic. Where there were streets transformed into riotous displays of colour, trees now reach for the sky with branches bare save a few hardy splashes of colour clinging on.
The first picture was taken of a golden ash in full flight using a Lensbaby 3G ... a quirky little lens that can produce outstanding results. The second picture, below, is the back deck after a recent rainshower. You could likely guess what kind of trees we have in the back yard...
For a lot of you it will be late spring or early summer. Canberra, although known as the 'Bush Capital', has many exotic tree species and plantings ... which I find kind of nice as the Euclaypts, being evergreen, aren't renowned for their spectacular seasonal shows. Autumn in Canberra is gorgeous. Do you have native flora where you live? A mix? Is the landscape around you so modified by people as to form a new kind of 'natural' or native?