Lens-Artists Challenge #348: Serenity
This week Egídio from Capturing My World Through Brazilian Eyes is hosting the Challenge, and his theme is, ‘Serenity‘. ‘Last week, Ritva asked us to break the rules,’ says Egídio. ‘This week, I’m challenging you to find serenity in your photos.’ Egídio continues, ‘Serenity alleviates today’s problems for me,’ and he continues to give several lovely examples of photographs that bring him serenity.
For me, serenity is simply achieved by taking photographs. I like nothing better than taking a train to Aveiro, or a ‘walk around the block,’ to relax me and bring some peacefulness to my thoughts. I derive an extra bit of pleasure by trying something new, and these few images are a perfect example of that. A few days ago, I came across a blog post from Dave’s Place about his close-up experiments with a Holga film camera and a +4 close-up filter.
Dave achieved some really nice results with the close-up filter taped onto the Holga lens, the lens set to infinity and the camera held at the focal distance of the close-up filter from the subject, which for a +4 diopter filter is about 25cm. Now, I have a Holga lens for my micro four-thirds mirrorless cameras, and I wondered if such an arrangement would work with the Olympus Pen E-PL2 and the plastic Holga lens I picked up recently.
I had this nagging idea that somewhere I actually had a close-up filter, and sure enough tucked away in one of my boxes was an old Jessops +4 close-up filter. Also in the box was a 52-58mm step-up ring, which luckily fitted snugly onto the front of the Holga lens. After a bit of experimentation I realised that rather than setting the lens to infinity, if I set the Holga lens to the portrait setting, the closest focal distance on the plastic lens, and held it about 15cm from the subject, I got a nice close-up result. It wasn’t perfect, and it was a bit finicky seeing if the subject was in focus on the LCD screen of the camera, but it worked.
I took the Holga/close-up filter combination out for a ‘walk around the block’ in the woods and fields behind our house, which at the moment are filled with spring flowers. The cloudy weather (and thunderstorms) of the morning had mostly cleared away, even though it was still quite windy, but it was great for some close-up photography. And it worked a treat!
I had the camera set to aperture priority mode, and manually set the ISO depending on the sunny or cloudy conditions. On reflection, I probably should have left the ISO on auto mode. As mentioned it was sometimes difficult to see if the subject was in focus on the LCD screen but the results were fabulous. The Holga lens has a fixed aperture of f8, but it also has these circles around the aperture, which I think are intended to give it that lo-fi ‘look’. In the close up images, this resulted in some fabulous swirly bokeh, and with the vignetting gave some images that I really loved. Serenity achieved.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can po3st their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
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