About six or seven years ago, while visiting my birth country, Hungary, I started working on a photo thematic. I loved walking on the old streets of the Castle District in Budapest, and I was (and still am) amazed by the gorgeous – mostly antique- door handles many of the doors have there. In addition to finding more ornate and wonderfully unique handles in Budapest, I also captured some in Eger, Kőszeg, and in some other cities. I created some final photos, printed and shared them with a mentor of mine. He wasn’t very impressed…
Lensbaby
The pictures in this post were taken during the summer when I was visiting my family in Hungary. This was the second time I visited the “Fűvészkert”, an arboretum in Budapest. It’s a wonderful place for plant and flower lovers, with or without a camera. I spent a few hours walking around and capturing flowers with three of my Lensbaby lenses: the Twist 60, the Sol 45 and the Velvet 56. I hope you’ll enjoy the photos of the flora of the arboretum as much as I enjoyed seeing them in live.
In mid-August I grew my Lensbaby family with a Fisheye lens, which was then on sale (September 1st is the last day to get a nice $100 off of the lens). Due to a nasty backache I haven’t been able to shoot much lately, but I did take the new lens on two shorter walks with me. The first one was in a nearby park on an overcast day, and the second one was to Descanso Gardens near Los Angeles. Using the Fisheye lens certainly has a learning curve.
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)
Since I own both a crop sensor (Nikon d7000) and a full frame (Nikon d750) camera, per request of a fellow Lensbaby lens user I took some comparison photos. She wanted to decide if she should get the Twist or the Burnside lens for her camera. I didn’t do post-processing on the images to show how the lenses capture the subject naturally.
1. In the first comparison I photographed the subject from the closest distance possible, which was about 19 inches.
Full Frame at F2.5
Crop Sensor at 2.5