Lensbaby Session with a Pink Dahlia
I have once again added a few more pieces to my Lensbaby lens collection; this time I found a set of three optics that fit into my Composer Pro base. I also found a beautiful pink Dahlia plant at the local nursery where I learn about gardening tips and tricks on most Saturdays.
I was wondering how differently I could capture the same flower with all my Lensbaby lenses and optics. So I emerged in a photo session with the Dahlia for a good two hours. I used two additional accessories for all images: a +10 macro filter or a +10 macro filter combined with a 36mm macro tube.
I took about 350 images. After a long culling process I narrowed them down to 20 pictures to include in this post. I’ve done a little bit of post-processing in Lightroom, and I combined just a few image pairs in Photoshop after noticing that I had not used the right aperture on them. By combining two images with different focus areas I achieved a better final image.
I’ve decided to group the chosen pictures by their topic. Here is the first set, featuring the flower viewed from the bottom:
The second set is a lot more abstract; I used the macro tube for all of them. When I was this close to the flowers, suddenly the highlights on the petals “transformed” into flying birds – at least in my imagination.
Instead of showing the flower from the bottom like in the first set, these images feature it from the top side:
The images in this set were composed similarly to each other:
The final set features the little curly petal two ways:
All of the above images are somewhat similar, but they are also different. Each lens and optic featured them in a different way. I really like the Single and Double Glass abstract ones, and since all of them turned out so painterly, I can now chose one or two to practice digital hand-painting on (in Photoshop). I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at the images as much as I enjoyed creating them.
This post is part of a group of posts about Lensbaby related topics. At the beginning of each month we feature images and stories taken with our Lensbaby lenses, and link to each other. Next up in the blog circle is Melita Kyle, please click this link to see her post and keep following the circle!
All very beautiful! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for visiting Carol.
Wonderful to see your selection of lenses and what you use to experiment with. Thank you for sharing those. I particulalrly like the second image with its soft blurred edges. I also like the ones’ that are close up as they look like the edges of little white clouds floating in a pink sky!
This was a really fun exercise for me. Since I primarily like to photograph flowers I wanted to know what I could do with all of the lenses. I love the softness and dreaminess in all images, which of course comes from using Lensbaby lenses. I like having lots of options for different photographic interpretations. Thanks for visiting Melita.
Lovely set of images Gizella, I like the more abstract ones bext too.
The abstract ones were kind of a surprise for me. I wasn’t expecting anything like them, but I loved the outcome very much. Thank you for visiting Janet.