LENSBABY 101- Nuts and Bolts

By Moe Witschard

Over the past year, the Lensbaby Composer lens and its accessories have become mainstays in my camera bag. I’m very attracted to the quality of the selective focus that the Lensbaby creates and I’m going to share some of the basics of Lensbaby operation with you here.

The Lensbaby is a selective focus lens that has a “sweet spot” of focus that you can control the size and quality of. Focus falls away from the “sweet spot” in a manner that is controlled by you.

Lensbaby makes 3 different lenses that all accomplish the same end. They include the Muse, the Control Freak, and the Composer. For most photographers, the Composer strikes the best blend of control and spontaneity and is the lens that I recommend the most.

Having a “sweet spot” that is in focus, allows us to simplify and drive towards the essence of a subject. It also allows us to deal with a busy composition by throwing the non-essential components out of focus. It allows for new interpretations of a subject that are unconventional. The Lensbaby is also a tool that I reach for when I’m feeling uninspired and looking for an interpretation to get excited about. It will often get my creative, experimental juices flowing when nothing else will.

NUTS AND BOLTS

Aperture rings- aperture and its corresponding depth of field is controlled manually by the placing of a magnetic aperture ring next the optic of the Lensbaby. Each Lensbaby comes with a full set of aperture rings.

Shoot aperture priority- camera metering works normally except on a few older Nikon consumer bodies. Set to aperture priority, drop in the desired aperture ring, and let the camera do the rest.

Focusing- auto focus does not work with the Lensbaby because the Lensbaby is a manual focus lens. The easiest way to focus with the Composer lens is to center the lens in its ball and socket joint, then put the subject that you want in focus in the middle of the frame. Turn the focusing ring to focus on the subject, then without moving the focusing ring further, recompose, and then move the lens in its ball and socket joint until the “sweet spot” is positioned on the subject that you want in focus.

Locking ring- if you have difficulty with the focusing ring turning after you’ve focused, use the locking ring to lock the focus before recomposing.

Optics- The Lensbaby Composer comes with a double glass optic that produces a tack sharp “sweet spot”. If a more diffuse quality of focus is desired, there are three other easily interchanged optics available. The single glass optic produces a softer quality of focus. The plastic optic produces a very diffuse, ethereal sweet spot. The pinhole-zone plate optic produces results that are downright dreamy.

Accessories- Wide, super-wide, and tele lens attachments are available as well as a really fun macro lens kit.

I’m having a blast with my Lensbaby Composer. It encourages me to experiment and to try new things. It’s not for everyone, but most photographers who try it soon fall in love with it. I would recommend that every photographer at least try one to know if it’s for you.

For more info, check out the Lensbaby website at www.lensbaby.com

BROOKS RANGE PACKRAFTING SHOW

To me, spending time in Alaska's Brooks Range is one of the very best things I could dream of doing with my time. We did a 14 day packrafting trip there this past August.

What's a packraft? It's a small, light one person raft that weighs 5.5 lbs, can be rolled up and stowed in your pack when you're walking, and blown up and paddled when you want to float.

A trip of this nature necessitates watching every ounce that goes into your pack. I took a light kit: My Nikon D300, 12-24 lens, 70-300 lens, two batteries, 10 GB worth of cards, and a polarizing filter. No tripod. It all fit into my Lowepro Photo Runner fanny pack that I wore backwards so that the pack was in front, giving me easy access to my gear. When we were floating, this pack went into a lightweight, but very high quality dry bag. Check out the presentation below to see what we did.

Review: LENSBABY COMPOSER- selective focus lens

I have been a fan of the Lensbaby and the look it generates since I bought my first one four years ago. With the latest permutation of this lens, the Lensbaby Composer, Lensbaby has really hit a home run. It’s so much easier to use than any of the previous generations of the Lensbaby.

The Lensbaby Composer is a manual focus lens that comes in a mount for your brand of SLR. It is a selective focus lens that transmits an image that has an area of sharp focus, the “sweet spot”, with sharp focus dropping off towards the edges of the frame. The position of the “sweet spot” can be changed by rotating the Composer within its ball and socket mount. The size of the “sweet spot” is determined by which aperture ring you drop into the lens. Aperture ring changes are a cinch.

The Composer is a great improvement over previous generations of the Lensbaby. It works with the exposure metering system in your camera, which is something I love about the Composer over my Lensbaby 2.0. The position of the sweet spot is a breeze to change and there is a locking ring if you decide you need consistent positioning of the focused area.

I love the unique selective focus look of images taken with the Composer. It allows for infinite artistic license and I find that there are so many interesting possibilities that I end up experimenting with a subject much more.

Available accessories include a telephoto, a wide, and a super wide accessory lens, macro lenses, and the optic swap system, which gives you the choice of 4 different optics that can easily be installed and changed. The double glass optic gives a tack sharp sweet spot. The single optic gives a pleasantly soft sweet spot. The plastic optic yields an ethereal look, and the pinhole/zone plate optic allows for some really exciting artistic possibilities.

Times when I reach for my Lensbaby Composer:
1) when selective focus is a must for the subject, often in portraits
2) when one part of my composition is too busy and I want to simplify it with selective focus. (i.e. busy foreground in a landscape shot).
3) when I want to show the viewer an interpretation that they’ve never seen before.
4) when I’m feeling uninspired and looking for a creative interpretation of my subject to get excited about.

In summary, the Lensbaby is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED in my book. It brings new exciting views of the world and new, artistic possibilities that are within reach of anyone willing to experiment. It’s guaranteed to spice up your camera bag.

10% DISCOUNT

For a 10% discount on anything ordered from the Lensbaby website, lensbaby.com, enter the coupon code mwitschard09 into the coupon field as you check out.

I'm Crazy About Digital Infrared

I am inspired by more traditional, literal interpretations of landscapes and nature; but I’m also very strongly drawn towards abstract, other-worldly renderings of these subjects. Many photographs that stick with me over time suggest a different reality. This explains my current year and a half long love affair with digital infrared (IR). At that time, I had an old Nikon D70 body which I sent off to be converted for digital infrared shooting. A whole new world opened up for me and I haven’t been able to stop exploring it since.
Here’s a little background on the whole IR process: as wavelengths of visible light get longer, they go from violet to red. Infrared begins where red light ends. We can’t see infrared with our eyes, but sometimes we can sense it as heat. Converting a digital body for infrared shooting involves removing the high pass filter, which protects the sensor and actually cuts out infrared, and replacing this with a different piece of glass that cuts out visible light and lets the infrared pass through.
There are two alternatives to the converted digital camera for shooting infrared. Both have serious disadvantages. The first option is to shoot infrared film, which is an expensive proposition, both in film and in the processing. It is also a royal pain because IR film is SO sensitive to light. The second option is shooting with an infrared filter on the end of your lens. This works OK, but results in very long shutter speeds (usually multiple seconds), forcing one to always shoot from a tripod. I love the option of being able to shoot handheld. With infrared filters that’s just not an option.
In my world, converting a camera to infrared is the way to go, hands down. I got mine converted at www.lifepixel.com . The converted camera operates as it would normally. Auto-focus works, metering works, and you can look through the viewfinder and see the image as you’re capturing it. Compared to the other options for creating infrared images, shooting with a converted digital camera is a wonderfully spontaneous and liberating process.
I am thrilled about infrared for many reasons. Anything that reflects a lot of infrared appears light in tone. Vegetation and people, both very effective infrared reflectors, are rendered in ethereal, light tones. Infrared absorbers like blue sky and water are rendered in dark tones. Most infrared images end up with some color information in them. This color usually does not match the real world, but sometimes it can be very beautiful. I end up converting most of my infrared captures to black and white images, because I love the look. This often results in a fairly high contrast image that has beautifully light toned vegetation.
Another reason that I am so excited about digital IR is because it keeps me more productive and more engaged around mid-day. Infrared shooting is often at its best during the middle of the day when objects are hot and our eyes perceive the scene to be harshly lit. Now that I am shooting digital IR, mid-day is becoming incredibly productive for me and since there is so much infrared being reflected at that time of day, much of this work is shot hand held, which I thoroughly enjoy. These days, I often shoot with my regular color body until around two hours after sunrise and then I switch to my IR body and just keep on shooting. When the light starts getting soft and sweet in the late afternoon, I switch back to my regular body.

Here are 3 shooting tips for digital IR to get you started.

1) Shoot in RAW if possible. This always affords you more options later.
2) When checking your histogram, know that with IR you may have to overexpose by up to a stop to get a good exposure that has lots of information but is still not close to being clipped on the right side.
3) Shoot middle apertures when possible. IR is more prone to flare than visible light is. Shooting at middle apertures, around f 8 for most lenses, helps manage this because smaller apertures are more prone to flare.

And finally, I have yet to meet a photographer who has explored digital IR shooting who hasn’t totally fallen in love it. If you want to add some exciting, creative options to your shooting that allow you to be super productive during the middle of a sunny day, digital IR could be for you. Give it a shot!

More examples are available in the Landscapes portfolio on my website at www.moephotography.com

LEAVE THE LAPTOP AT HOME!

Simple Strategies for Power, Storage, and Backing Up on Long, Remote Photo Trips


So you’re planning that long and far away photo trip of a lifetime. Maybe it’s a two week rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. Maybe you’re trekking in the Himalayas, or perhaps you’re following in Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe’s footsteps and planning a ten day horse packing trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Time’s have changed from when all you needed to do was load your view camera and film sheets onto a pack animal and go.
You’re probably sporting one of the later generation DSLRs, which sounds just great until you start thinking about how to recharge batteries, where to store your images, and how to get juice to your laptop. What to do? How do you sort through the options of solar rechargers, extra laptop batteries, hard drives, backup hard drives, generators?……..the list goes on. My mantra for any long and/or remote outdoor or travel trip is this: Take everything that you truly need, but keep the kit as light and as simple as possible. If I don’t really need it, it stays at home.
Powering my camera: If outlet power is unavailable, I keep it simple by avoiding rechargers, solar or otherwise. I just take extra camera batteries. Today’s SLRs are energy misers. Camera batteries last longer and take more pictures than ever before. On my very longest trips, like a 5 week wilderness expedition on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic where there were no outlets, I took 4 additional batteries for my camera, in addition to the one it came with. Each extra battery costs $40 and weighs 2.6 oz. That’s a $160 investment in power that weighs 10.4 oz. In 5 weeks, I made about 3,000 captures. I tried to not use too much juice looking at the camera monitor and when the trip was over, I had gone through 4 batteries and still had one remaining. $160 and 10.4 oz is much cheaper, much lighter, and far less likely to be problematic than any solar roll or generator that I know of.
That’s all well and good you may be thinking, but extra camera batteries won’t power a laptop. Well, you got me there; however, I’m here to tell you that if you are going on a long, remote photo trip, you should seriously consider keeping it simple and just leaving that laptop at home! What is the most important use of the laptop to the digital photographer?......for editing our images of course. Sure it can store images, but lots of devices can. My feeling is that I can edit at home on my big beautiful flat screen while sitting in my super comfy office chair. When I’ve invested weeks of my life and thousands of dollars to get to a remote place, the last thing I want to do is edit images. I’d rather spend my time going out and creating more images! Leaving the laptop at home on a long, remote trip makes for one less device to charge, one less thing to get stolen, one less thing to carry.
Here are my strategies for storage and backup. If I’m off on a shorter remote trip, say up 10 days and if I want to keep things as light as possible, I will bring extra batteries for my camera and all the compact flash cards that I need for the trip. I will keep the images on the cards and not store them or back them up until the trip is over. If I start running out of card room, my extra battery or two will give me the juice to edit images while looking at them on my camera monitor and I will create more storage space that way.
On a longer trip where I’m shooting so much that I am forced to download cards or if weight is not an issue, I will take along portable storage devices. My favorite product to date is the Sanho Hyperdrive SPACE Portable Storage Device and Memory Card Reader. I own two and they are available with capacities ranging from 40GB to 500GB. My preference is for a device that does not give an image preview. My philosophy is that if I need to see something larger than the 3 in. wide image on my camera monitor, I can wait until I’m at home. A portable storage device without a monitor is smaller, lighter, and cheaper. One Hyperdrive weighs a tad over half a pound and is about half the size of my SB-800 Speedlight flash unit. Put a memory card into a Hyperdrive, turn it on, and then watch as your card is quickly downloaded and data is verified from card to device. I like to have two Hyperdrives on a longer remote trip. I download each card to both of my Hyperdrives and then I carry one of them and I give the other one to one of my traveling companions and make sure they keep it in a safe place. If I’m concerned about moisture or shock, I’ll put each Hyperdrive in it’s own tiny Pelican box. The Hyperdrives always stay on our person or nearby. They never go into checked luggage that could be lost. This storage and backup system is redundant and fairly fool proof. It helps me sleep at night.
So the next time you leave for a long, remote photo trip, remember: Keep it simple! Consider leaving the laptop behind, carry plenty of freshly charged extra batteries, and carry a portage storage device or better yet two.

A Great Small Camera

Some of the wilderness trips I do call for going light and fast. That's when I reach for my Panasonic LX-3. camera It's a truly amazing little machine. At 8 oz., it's boasts a super fast f2.0 Zeiss lens, a 10 mp sensor ( the cons of more resolution in a sensor this size outweighs the pros ), the option to capture in RAW format, and a decent video mode. I've printed some images from this little camera at 12 x 18" size and they look great. I've been enjoyed putting together some stills and a little video from some the trips I've taken this camera on. Here's a show from a packrafting trip I did this past July.

Glacier National Park Photo Workshop

I returned home a week ago from teaching a photo workshop in Glacier National Park. We based out of the town of West Glacier and spent 4 days exploring various locations in the park. It was the end of the season in Glacier and there were very few visitors in the park. The weather was moody. I love it like that. Our first morning out was spent on the east side at Two Medicine Lake where we were greeted by a cold, snowy sunrise. Later that afternoon we made our way to Lake Saint Mary and had a great shoot at my favorite beach. The rest of the workshop was spent on the west side of park along McDonald Creek, up Avalanche Gorge, and on the shores of Lake McDonald. Fall is a beautiful time to visit Glacier.