When I was experimenting with the Twist 60, I tried it with my beautiful and fragrant Freesia flowers. The first image was taken at F2.8 from about the minimum distance this lens can handle. Post processing in Lightroom, On1 Effects and Topaz Studio.

For the second image I placed the +4 macro filter on the lens, and this is the image I created (same post-processing):

There is definitely a lot of potential in this lens for me. I’ll share more images in the coming days.

Which image do you like more?

In the month of April I will try to post at least a picture every day. Sometimes it will be just the image, sometimes a little story to go with it, and other times it might be a series of pictures.

Since today was a traveling day for us (visiting grandparents), I picked the above image to showcase.

This is a Fortnight Lily from my backyard that bloomed just minutes prior to this shot. I was in the backyard testing the Lensbaby Twist 60 without and with a macro filter on my flowers, and during that time the bud opened into this pretty flower. I did use the +4 macro filter for this image.

Enjoy!

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.

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Flowers make me very happy. Their sight and their fragrance make me feel in a way that not a lot of other living or not living things do. I admire their ability to attract my attention as well as of insects, I love how colorful they can be, and how my mood changes positively when I am surrounded with flowers.

A few weeks back I purchased some annuals for my backyard, including a Denver Daisy. Everything on this flower is very photogenic. It doesn’t matter from which direction I approach this beauty, it almost always gives me wonderful photographic results. In fact, I truly enjoyed their beauty after they passed their prime. It was a different kind of beauty, but I loved it nevertheless.

In order to portray the difference of the live floral beauty and the dead one, I used a slightly different post-processing technique. I created painterly images from all, but I used two kinds of color schemes; a warm palette for the earlier flowers and a much colder and dramatic one for the second set. One image I digitally hand painted. This is a technique that I am currently studying, and this was one of my practice pictures.

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About a week ago a friend of mine asked me if I could demonstrate the different looks various lenses can create of the same subject – including the Burnside. I picked a rose in my brother’s garden for my subject, and used four different lenses: Nikon 35mm, Lensbaby Burnside 35, LB Velvet 56, and LB Sweet 35. Please don’t expect this post to be a complete test of the 4 lenses; my goal was to give a good indication about the various looks you can achieve. I haven’t done any post processing on the following images. I will show a few images from each of the four lenses, then later in the post I’l put them next to each other for an easier comparison.

First, I’d like to show you three images I took with the Nikon 35mm lens, which is an automatic focus, prime lens. I got as close to the subject as I could, which was about 10″ (click to enlarge).

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