I'm now selling my photos!!!

I now host galleries of my favorite photos @ www.lloydshell.zenfolio.com Feel free to surf over there to see photo's that may have drifted into the darkest reaches of the archives here on Blogspot.

I also have begun selling my photographs when requested, I can handle most sizes and finishes either locally or via my on-line printing service.

Thanks for looking!

Lloyd
lloydshell@gmail.com

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Nice Relaxing Evening... Playing with my camera and the Christmas Tree.

I have been itching to try some tree lights shots this year. Decided I had waited long enough so I pulled out my Pentax 135mm f2.5 manual focus lens and had some fun.

Now you may ask why that focal length? Well a couple of reasons, first it is reasonably sharp & contrasty wide open which helps as I don't have any lenses with rounded aperture blades so if I stop down I get funny shaped out of focus lights in the background. More on that later. It is also a pretty sharp lens wide open too. I also liked the focal length as it helps to narrow the field of view and isolate the things I want in the picture.

The only drawback to the lens is the closest focusing distance is not fantastic (like 5-6 feet) so I don't get a lot of magnification out of it, plus the depth of field is rather thin at wide open apertures as well.

Well.. on to the pictures.

This is the only one I took that was "In focus" that I really liked, need to work on lighting.

This was deliberately out of focus, looking for a fairly dreamy look. Did this simply by putting the lens at the closest focus distance and then backing away until it looked pretty fuzzy. The change in shape of the color disks towards the edge is called "coma" I hadn't realized that this lens had that much, of course this is a rather extreme test of the lens.

Now these last 4 shots are to demonstrate different loosk I was able to achieve. All were taken from the exact same spot. You will notice an octagonal shape to the blur disks, that is due to the shape of the diaphragm of the lens, it has 8 blades.

The first two are at maximum focal distance (Infinity) The first at F4

This at F2.5

Now at Minimum Focus Distance and f 2.5

F4

Overall I like the effect and will play with it more, probably should pull out some other lenses too, just for fun.

5 comments:

What Karen Sees said...

Hi Lloyd,
Love your 'play time' with the camera and Christmas tree. I don't mind at all if you put a link in the comments on my blog, but I'd love it more if you'd visit my blog again and post several of these beautiful images right on today's post. I've increased the size of the thumbnails for people to see, so I think you'll get more visitors to click over to your blog to see them all. P.S. I didn't know the lights were on at Temple Square in the morning. The big question for me...which time is the warmest, or I guess I should say, the least cold??? Have a great day, Karen

Thoughtfully Blended Hearts said...

Wow...this is such a "beautiful" way to learn about photography...thanks!!!

Scott Law said...

One of the many wonderful things about digital is we can play around a lot more and not have to wait for processing (or pay for it) It looks like you had a lot of Photography Phun with these. I'm going to have to try some similar things.

Lloyd said...

Thanks for commenting y'all. It was fun to shoot these, but funner to know that others are looking!

Lloyd

Lisa said...

Very nice Bokeh