Swirling – Inspired by Now

Since last summer one of my favorite Lensbaby lenses is the Burnside 35. I found many ways of using it, and I also know what subjects it doesn’t work with – at least for me. One of the features I really like in this lens is the swirling effect that happens when I use it at a wide open aperture of F2.8. But the aperture setting is not enough for the swirling to happen, so I set out to find out what else I need for the effect to show up in my images. In my experiment I had some success, but I also found it to be somewhat flawed.

I purchased a large bouquet of sunflowers, because they looked amazing. After about an hour of arranging them in a vase, filled with beans for stability and precise placement of the stems, I had a background ready for the test pictures. I needed the flowers to spread out as much as possible in the two dimensional picture, and this took some trial and error to achieve with the three dimensional objects. I created the photographs in my dining area, where there was plenty of natural light coming in through the windows. The only light modifier I used was a large piece of foam board from Home Depot with one side covered in a silver layer. This helped with brightening the shadows on the right side of the bouquet.

I started out with photographing the bouquet with various apertures. Since these are just test shots, I did not worry much about the sides not being perfect and some stuff showing from behind the black screen.