Paul Lester Photo

The first time that I had ever seen or heard about a Lensbaby was last year at The Radiant Vista Inspirational Weekend in Atlanta, GA. During the course of the weekend, Craig Tanner mentioned the Lensbaby a few times as a lens that he liked. He also mentioned that it was difficult to focus and get used to; however, he said that he really liked it in certain situations.

When I returned home, I thought about ordering one and, finally, after about a month, I decided to take the plunge. At the time, the Lensbaby 2.0 had just come out, so I ordered one of those. I’ve had the Lensbaby now for just about a year and I’d have to say that I find it not so very useful. I’ve taken about 210 pictures with it, but have only liked a very few, which are displayed here.

Sometimes when I look into my bag and think about shaving off a lens or two, the Lensbaby is always up at the top of my list. In looking across various photoblogs, I see the LB used here and there; however, most of the photos that I see are not to my liking. Some just make me motion sick!

I just think that the LB has a very narrow usage. Now that I look at some of the images that I liked, I kind of like the LB, but only in very narrow applications. It can enhance a picture by bringing selective focus to a subject and giving the image a unique look, but it can also destroy a picture and make it look contrived or gimmicky.

I guess that it all comes down to knowing when not to use it, like in this final photo:

I’ve been reading Alain Briot’s Thoughts and Photographs series of essays. Most are quiet interesting, but most of the material I’ve already picked up over some 20 years of having a camera in hand; however, I just read essay number 18, entitled: Visualization Realized: from perception to expressive print.

This essay dealt with getting your ‘feelings’ into the final print. My camera has the facility to make a sound recording that is associated with a photograph. I’ve looked at this feature and thought that it would perhaps be cool to record the sounds that I was hearing, as a curiosity, for later. Surely, it’s not used to record exposure information as that would be redundant with a digital camera as everything you need is in the EXIF data with the image.

The point of the essay was if you recorded your reason for taking the picture, more specifically, what attracted you to the scene, then you’d be able to get a better final print by concentrating on those areas to bring out that feeling that you were trying to convey.

In another essay he makes a specific point that he is an artist, not a documentary photographer and that his photographs represent what he ‘felt’ about the scene, not trying to portray it scientifically. Some of his photographs my be enhanced in color, contrast, etc. to convey their meaning and to invoke an emotion … this same emotion that he felt while taking the picture.

This certainly sounds like a good idea, one that I’m going to give a try the next time that I’m out shooting landscapes or subjects that lend themselves to such a technique.

Well, gotta run and learn how to record on my camera! Fortunately, I keep the manual in the bag. So many features, so little time!

To date I’ve not done much printing of my color images, preferring to print primarily black and white. Only recently, at the behest of my wife and couple of other people, I’ve decided to start printing some of my color work. A few things that I’ve found out:

1) You have to have a calibrated monitor to get something even close to what is on the screen to come out of the printer.
2) Printing ain’t cheap! I’ve found that it is costing me about $2.00/print for an 8×10. Mind you, sometimes I have to print a few before getting it right, so each print on the way is $2.00. Each set of cartridges cost about $60 and I can get about 30 prints. Of course, this depends on how much color they have or how much black is included in the print. The more color dense, the fewer prints.
3) Color management is an entire topic unto itself.
4) I really don’t like the 8×10 crop! I want my full frame! 8×12, or 9×13, so a new printer may be in my future!

I’m printing with a printer that is, by printing standards, pretty old. It’s an HP 7760 and it prints wonderful prints, especially black and white. It has a special cartridge that contains 3 shades of gray inks, when combined with the color cartridge, it gives somewhere in the area of 4,000 true shades of gray. The black and white prints look truly amazing.

So, I’m looking for advice on reducing costs and good, no nonsense books on color management for CS2. I find that I can even get two different looking prints of the same photo depending on if I use CS2 or Lightroom to do the printing. Sigh.

I’m sure that one way to reduce costs is to print my test pictures on 4×6 stock, which I plan to do.

Thanks for your help!

About the picture: Taken with my Canon Powershot A530: 1/100@ f/5.5