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.
Sol 45
In the past few weeks I haven’t used my Lensbaby lenses as much, because I attended nature programs in groups, where an automatic lens was more useful. If I wanted to take pictures while hiking, I had to do it fast and not hold up the group.
Last week I spent a brief time at a pretty place in San Clemente, California. Casa Romantica is a beautiful venue for weddings and parties, and it is open to the public when no events are going on.
I walked around the garden three times, using a different lens each time while approaching the same subjects. I used the Sol 45, the Twist 60 and the Velvet 56. After comparing the images I chose the ones to post that I liked the most. One subject worked very well with all three lenses, I’ll save that for last. A few subjects didn’t work for me at all. So here are the winners:
The only image of the view from the gardens I liked was taken with the Twist 60. It was a dark, overcast day, but this is the lens I would use again for this view on a sunny day.
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:
- I would only use Lensbaby lenses (since I was shooting for this post)
- I would only use natural light and some light modifiers – light reflectors, light softeners and flags (these add shadow)
- I would take all the photos from a tripod
Here is my setup, showing my wonderful assistant, Destiny as well:
Whenever I talk to people about my current photography I tell them that Lensbaby lenses are perfect for me. The funny part is that many Lensbaby images are far from perfect if you are looking at them with your technical eyes only. I could even say that Lensbaby pictures are perfectly imperfect. What do I mean by this? Let me show you some of my creations and explain how the imperfection led me to create something that I felt stood out from the crowd.
Let’s start with this image, which I took with the Sweet 50 (my very first LB lens). Technically this image is not successful. I clearly wasn’t able to focus fast enough on any of the birds. Despite this, I really like the outcome. Thanks to the special effects created by the lens, I feel the movement of the birds, and I can almost hear the noise gulls make when a large flock of them fly away all at once.
A few days ago I hinted that I was going to bring up a topic and a related project I started working on. The topic is a life style change my husband and I decided on at the end of January, and it involves a diet change. We have been eating a lot less carbohydrates and minimized the sugar intake as well. We are not following a “brand name” diet, we have been just making more educated choices when it comes to our food. I don’t want this post to be just about the diet, but I do want to say that in addition to losing a lot of weight we are also feeling full of energy.
Eating a low-carb diet means that our vegetable intake has increased, and our fruit choices have changed as well. A few weeks ago I thought of a photographic project I could start that involves our new lifestyle. I want to photograph the food items that we are encouraged to eat, and therefore we have them at home almost all the time. In order to make these images a bit more interesting, I also started learning about food photography just recently. Hopefully, you’ll see an improvement in my food photos throughout this project.
A few days ago I posted some strawberry images. Strawberries are one of the recommended low-carb fruit, and I’ll repost two of my favorite images from the set:
Lensbaby Single Glass at F5.6
