Inspired by Now

Tag: Lensbaby

  • Laguna Beach Walk

    Laguna Beach Walk

    After dropping off my daughter at school (she has just started as a Freshman), I headed down to the ocean with my camera to take a walk in one of my favorite beach cities, Laguna Beach.
    It was pretty early and the city was not as crowded as I experience it most of the time. I grabbed my Lensbaby Burnside 35 for this short walk, and except for the last image, I kept it on my camera.
    I couldn’t walk by this beautiful Lily without snapping a picture of it. Then I headed down to the beach.

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  • LA County Arboretum Visit with my Lensbabies

    LA County Arboretum Visit with my Lensbabies

    Smile! You are on camera.
    Yesterday I made a visit to the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia. It was another hot (89F) and sunny day, not the most ideal day for photography, but I still had a ton of fun. I took all four of my Lensbaby lenses and I ended up using three of them. I started out with the Burnside 35, switched over to the Velvet 56, and finally used the Sweet 35. Let me take you on a pictorial walk of the arboretum and also give you some of my thoughts about the lenses.
    There are lots of different birds at the Arboretum, but what it is most famous for are the peacocks. There are over 200 peafowls leaving on the premises currently. These two were my favorite photographs of them from yesterday, and I prefer the Burnside photo over the Sweet 35.

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  • Frisbee Golf

    Frisbee Golf

    My hubby and I spent about an hour at a nearby park playing frisbee golf.  I don’t go anywhere without my camera, and this morning wasn’t an exception either. I took the Burnside 35 lens, because I am still practicing people photography with it. My husband is usually a willing model.
    Just in case you don’t know this game: it basically follows the rules of golf, but you play it with specialty frisbee disks that fly far away. The holes are metal baskets.

    ​Some courses are in mixed used parks, like the one we went to yesterday, others have dedicated fields.
    I approached the game with my camera from a few different point of views.
    First I only photographed the player as he was throwing the disc. I didn’t like these too much because you couldn’t tell that the person was playing frisbee golf and not just throwing a frisbee. Then I started incorporating the basket as well to give my images a story. ​


    Here is my favorite one: it shows what game is being played, and the frisbee disc is in motion and well visible. This picture tells a story.

     

    ​Since the park has some old, tall trees, I took a few pictures of a few from different distances. To end my short post I’m going to show the tree images to you.

     

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  • My Final Thoughts on the Traveling Burnside Project

    My Final Thoughts on the Traveling Burnside Project

    In the spring of 2018 I was extremely happy to find out that I was one of the chosen Traveling Burnside Project participants. I was given a Lensbaby Burnside 35 lens to take pictures with partially in the United States, and then in Hungary as well.
    I took all my Lensbaby lenses on my trip to Europe, and one zoom lens. Surprisingly, I left the Burnside on my camera for most of the time, and not just because of the project. I liked how light my gear was, I liked looking for the right subjects for the lens, and I started becoming more efficient with manual focusing as well. I found that certain topics didn’t work for me with this lens, but many others did. Obviously, the same can be said about any lens. I loved finding subjects where I could utilize the swirly effect.
    I have been writing about my experience with the lens (all posts here), but as the end of the project approached I felt I should give my final thoughts about it.
    First, I want to tell you where I felt I was most successful with the lens. I absolutely loved certain floral images the lens created. Utilizing the wide open aperture and the highest vignette setting I’ve created flower images that really wowed me. Some of the following pictures were created strictly with the Burnside, for others I used a +4 or +10 macro filter. My post-process tools were Lightroom, On1 Effects, and rarely Photoshop.

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  • Visiting a Hungarian Cemetery with the Burnside (Traveling Burnside Project)

    Visiting a Hungarian Cemetery with the Burnside (Traveling Burnside Project)

    Cemeteries in Europe are different from the ones I’ve seen in the USA. In Hungary, many people regularly visit their passed relatives in the nearby cemetery and take care of their graves. Not everyone, of course.
    I thought that using the Burnside in the local cemetery could work really well. Yesterday I took off to make the visit there, but I had to turn back from the first bus stop due to the dark clouds and the thunder. We ended up with over 4 hours of rain and heavy storms, so the photo trip didn’t happen. But today was a better day and I made it to the cemetery.
    First, I visited my grandparents’ graves, then walked around for an hour and kept looking for the right subjects for the Lensbaby Burnside 35 lens. I think I was able to find very interesting ones.

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