OK, now I'm impressed! f/0.8!!!! These are so wonderful, such a mood about them. Not angry, ethereal to me. I'd nicname this lens "The Ghost" :smile:
As far as shooting au naturel, too many funny comments are falling off the tip of my tongue, flowing towards being tossed out on my ear!!!! :biggrin: Now there's a Cafe get-together I think I'd skip!!!!! *LOL*
So sorry to hear about the loss of future fruit. Can't make little mittens for these tree branches? In Florida, they'll light smudge pots to keep the tree blossoms from freezing. Any bets if these blossoms die 'on the vine' so to speak, next year will produce a bumper crop. Mother Nature seems to work that way. If one year is a miss, the next seems to be a hit.
That first photography is my favourite of the series.... :smile:
Sandi :
Well, with respect to the apricot trees, the tree on my property, on a ridge to the north of the city, hasn't started to blossom yet, so it's possible that we'll see fruit on that tree (I get a crop about every two or three years). And, for reasons I'm not altogether knowledgeable about, apricots
thrive in northern New Mexico. There are also odd "micro-climates" all around the city where we'll see fruit one year when everyone else is barren. We'll see how the year develops.
The Ghost, eh ? Well, that's another name for these lenses. This one came from Harrison Diamond, who followed in the footsteps of Bjørn Rørslett in fabricating these lenses. Both Annedi (Andrea) and I were fortunate enough to benefit from Harrison's industry and intelligence. Bjørn's comments on large aperture lenses, BTW, can be found in his discussion,
Need For Speed.
The Rodenik, or
The Ghost, is a funny lens to shoot with. It's fixed focus, so the photographer sways back and forth drunkenly trying to land their point of focus, which is microtome-cut thin, making the usual "razor-thin" DOF of something like an f/1.2 lens look like the thickness of an unabridged Webster dictionary. Picking the point/layer of focus is a fascinating exercise, and I'm sometimes known to gently move forward shooting machine-gun style for different points of focus on the subject. It doesn't always work, but then, it does other times.
There's a pile o' field curvature in this lens, and even the centre's not quite what one expects, so getting a compositional focus is something amazingly fun as well (if swinging one's head back and forth like a hissing snake is considered fun by a person). In fact, composition with a fixed focus lens is also rather amazing - sometimes the subject's just too large to fit into the frame, and boy howdy, that's that for the shot. The lens creates serious constraints for composition and angle, but that's perhaps the "charm" of shooting with it.
And then there's the weird and wonderful haze coupled with almost an aura around some objects. Learning how to process these images is like learning digital processing from scratch - it's
that different.
:Smoking:
But when the images land on the screen with the sizzle of something quite different, well, that makes all of the effort worthwhile. :biggrin:
Thinking about it, perhaps instead of swaying drunkenly, I should drink before shooting with
The Ghost. Hmmm... Food for thought...
And I won't even essay a comment about shooting
au natural after imbibing ! :actions1: :384: :373:
John P.
