Single-Serving Photo

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason, and plot.
I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

More games with the Lensbaby 3G starring my good friend, Guy Fawkes.

Today I received my brand new Lensbaby 3G from B&H. I’ve been looking forward to buying one of these ever since the first version came out, but I’m very glad that I waited for the third iteration because the new features it has are (in my mind) indispensable.

I set up a very small tabletop studio rig yesterday, so I used it to explore the Lensbaby and see what it could do. It’s really a very nice piece of equipment with solid build quality, but make no mistake: it’s not easy to use. Having no functional autofocus means paying a lot more attention to the perceived focus and the way the bellows is manipulated takes getting used to. People without a fair amount of dexterity may become very frustrated with it.

Anyway, without further ado, here are a few samples.

I will post more soon!

More photos from Harkness Memorial State Park. I’m playing with some new Photoshop techniques (and still giving Lightroom a run for its money), so I’ll be posting more specifically about that later. Perhaps another tutorial? We’ll see!

It was a very seasonable Spring day this afternoon with highs (finally) in the upper 50s, low 60s. I spent some time down at Harkness Memorial State Park getting back into the swing of things with my particular brand of abstraction.

These photos were all processed with my brand new copy of Adobe Lightroom 1.0, which I purchased after participating in the public beta since it was released and I admit it, I’m hooked! The one photo here worth saying more about is the first one, an oddly glowing charcoal grill. I attempted a technique that has been generating a lot of buzz lately; so-called HDR or High Dynamic Range. I prefer to call it Compressed Dynamic Range because I think it’s more accurate, but I’ll do a whole post about that later on.

Suffice it to say, the photo was created by combining two photos with different exposure settings (handheld!). It takes a bit of Photoshop to make the slightly different handheld photos line up, but I’ll do a post about that some time, too. I should also mention that despite the veritable glut of software available for this (like Photomatix, Photogenics HDR, PanoTools, etc.), and because I am both cheap as well as old-school, I achieved the effect entirely in Photoshop.

Without further ado.

I was at the Martin Center in New London photographing a winter guard practice that my friend coaches, purely as a favor, and couldn’t help but to grab a few other interesting things I saw along the way. I hope you enjoy them!