Welcome to my August 1st Lensbaby Blog Circle post, which is a brief insight into the first few days of our annual family visit to Hungary.

My daughter and I arrived after midnight last Thursday, after a long, 26 hour trip (due to flight problems). Late morning on Friday we immediately headed to my brother’s weekend home by Lake Balaton. I took some pictures in his very nicely kept yard (his son was a great helper), at the lake in the morning, and some flowers during my walk. On Saturday we visited an adventure park near the city of Veszprém, where the cousins had a ton of fun playing together in a pond. We also visited another adventure park in Budapest on Tuesday. The following pictures were all taken with Lensbaby lenses, mostly with the Twist 60 and the Double glass. I hope you’ll enjoy a bit of European photography from me.

(Double glass)

Read More

Welcome to my June 1 Lensbaby Blog Circle post! For this post I used the dried up roses my daughter gave me for Mother’s Day. My goal was to experiment with them and see what I could create. I set a few limitations for myself:

  1. I would only use Lensbaby lenses (since I was shooting for this post)
  2. I would only use natural light and some light modifiers – light reflectors, light softeners and flags (these add shadow)
  3. I would take all the photos from a tripod

Here is my setup, showing my wonderful assistant, Destiny as well:

Read More

I was supposed to post this yesterday (to keep up with my daily posts), but it was a very busy day for me. I’ll tell you about that in a different post later.

I chose this project for three different reasons. One is that I have been learning a tiny bit about food photography, and I wanted to try out some of what I had learned. Secondly, I haven’t done a comparison between lenses experiment for a while, and I want to find the best lens(es) for what I want to start now – which would be the third reason for the project. But I’d like to share that with you at another time.

This is what I tried yesterday:

I set up a plate of yummy strawberries on my dining room table, since I get the most natural light there. I used two white reflectors to bounce some of the light back on the fruit. I then used the following lenses with or without macro attachments and at various apertures: Nikon 50mm, Lensbaby Velvet 56, Single Glass, Double Glass, Twist 60 and Sol 45. I am going to show you the images that I liked the most – for different reasons. Some, because they somewhat resembled an image I would see in a magazine (with more props or better composition perhaps), others because of their very unusual looks and feelings. I’d be happy to know which images you appreciate the most.

  1. Nikon 50mm with 12mm macro extension tube

Read More

On the last weekend of November I suffered from a stress related back injury, and pain in different areas of my back has been troubling me since then. Unfortunately, this also meant fewer photoshoots in the past five or so weeks. Last week I did have a short photowalk on the grounds of one of our city libraries prior to picking up a reserved book, and I’m happy to share the images I took there with the Lensbaby Blog Circle readers.

The library is located at the Irvine Ranch Historic Park in Irvine, California. It is a replica (2008) of the Irvine family home, which was originally constructed in 1876. The park itself was established in 1996, and it houses 24 original ranch structures that represent the agricultural history of Orange County.

The double rows of palm trees seen on the fourth image were planted in 1906. The park has many trees, flowers, and it has a section where they are rejuvenating avocado trees.

Read More

In mid-December I was able to make another visit to the Los Angeles County Arboretum. Since my daughter started high school, visiting places that are somewhat far from us has become quite difficult due to her very strange drop off and pick up schedule. But this day provided an opportunity to spend some time farther away from home, and I chose the Arboretum for my destination.

I have been using my Lensbaby lenses a lot more than my auto lenses. One exception was a fundraising project at my daughter’s school theater program, where I documented their creation of a play throughout two weeks of rehearsals, and made the images available to purchase for the parents, which resulted in some extra funds for the Theater program. When it comes to people photography, catching moments on stage – especially with youth actors – is what I really enjoy to do.

Now back to my Arboretum visit. I first walked though the Aloe Trail, and towards the end of it I found this gorgeous succulent in the shade. (Velvet 56)

Read More