Lensbaby Wedding Project
I love the Lensbaby lenses and will pull out the Lensbaby Composer at every wedding to snag a couple of dreamy portraits and will often use it for a few special pics of the rings and details. For a long time now I have wanted to shoot an entire wedding with one as a pet project. What would possess me to use a selective focus (and manual focus) lens to shoot an entire wedding? First off, its a challenge. As photographers we generally do not push ourselves with our personal projects as much as we should. Many have taken up trying to use their cell phone camera but its still all automatic, although you can still work on composition and lighting. Using a Lensbaby on the other hand is all manual. Since the Lensbaby lenses have a small “sweet spot” of sharp focus and the rest has a unique type of blurring to it, focusing is a real challenge. Try holding a camera, adjusting a focus manually, while holding a flash off to the side with one hand and you can imagine how awkward it can be at times.
In talking to a friend of mine, Chris Diset, who also shoots weddings in southern California, we got to talking about our pet projects and when I told him I wanted to shoot an entire wedding with a Lensbaby, he immediately invited me to do it at the next wedding he was shooting. This is why its great to make friends with other photographers, I would never have tried this for a client that was paying me to get the best images as I knew going into this project that my “keeper ratio” was going to be far below average. In the end, a little over 800 images were taken. The camera was a Canon EOS 50D with a Lensbaby Composer. Most images were taken with the dual glass optic, many of those with the super wide angle attachment, and a handful were taken with the FishEye optic.
Without further ado, I present an Entire Wedding Shot with a Lensbaby.
Journey to the Salton Sea
We were recently out doing a fun photo shoot in the Palm Springs area and looking for another location to go shoot at when our friend Emily suggested we head over to the Salton Sea. While I had heard of the location and had a vague knowledge that it was a body of water that had somehow been damaged by man, I really didn’t know much about the actual history of the area or what had finally happened to it. The story is both interesting, sad, and even horrific and it is actually rather difficult to find all of the information about it in one place. My goal is to create a series of articles and photo essays about the Salton Sea. This will not be a political statement or a “save the sea” message, it will simply tell the story and hopefully leave the reader with something that they didn’t know before. If you do not know the story of the Salton Sea, you are certain to at least find it interesting.
