Pushing The Boundaries With Unconventional Lenses In Your Photography

1. Unconventional lenses welcome: Hey, I'm Denise Love and I want to welcome you to class. I'm the founder of 2 Lil' Owls Studio, which is my art and photography business that I started in 2012. I've been doing online workshops since about 2014. Today's workshop came about, because I want to share with you one of my own personal passions. I started photography with the regular kit lenses, the 50 millimeter lens, the regular macro lens, the 24-70, just like everybody else. But at some point in your photography career, you're going to think, "What's next? What can I do to up my game to the next level?" At that point, for creativity-wise, I decided to move into unconventional lenses, lenses that were out of the ordinary, not your standard auto lenses. That took me into the Lensbabies and to vintage lenses. I'll admit I tried Lensbabies early on and was very frustrated with the manual lens. But when you're trying to figure everything out in the beginning, your camera, your shooting, your lighting, your settings, everything that goes along with that learning curve when you first get started. If you throw a manual lens in on top of that, it's very frustrating. But there was a point in my photography career where I became frustrated just being in a rut and I'm like, "What else is there? Why bother? What can I do to up my game to the next level? I'm tired of everything that I've already got, or already done, or already been to." Then I picked the manual lenses back up, and I'm like, "This is it. This is the time when this is it for me." That really helped me go back to all the places I've been, revisit subjects I thought I was tired of and make them new and exciting again. I want to share with you in this workshop all the different lenses that I've tried, that I love. Some of these don't come off my camera now. They really set my style because as we go along and we try different things, we figure out what we like and what we don't like. Now people who often tell me, "Oh, I knew that was your photo, I recognized your style." That's part of finding your style. Figuring out what you like and don't like, and then honing in on those skills. In this workshop, I'm going to go over several Lensbabies and a few vintage lenses, and hopefully introduce you to some things that maybe you'd like to try out in your photography. I know you're going to love playing with some of these fun unconventional lenses, so let me show you what I've got. 2. Introduction to lenses: Welcome to pushing the boundaries with unconventional lenses. The reason why I wanted to film this workshop for you is because unconventional lenses has become my own personal favorite things to shoot with, and the creativity and the variety really spark my passion for my photography again, because at some point in your photographic life, you'll get to the point where if you're just shooting with a regular lens and you have the same subjects that you're shooting over and over, you're going to find yourself in a creative rut probably. You're going to think how do I get out of this rut? You'll put your camera down and you might not pick it up for months. For me, getting out of that rut meant exploring other things that I might not have normally thought to explore. When you're first starting your photography, you're learning so much that shooting with a regular lens is fine because you're trying to learn everything else that you need to learn. But once you know all the basics and you've got your rhythm down and you've got the style that you're creating, and you're looking for new things to learn and new ways to push that creativity, then changing the lenses that you're using to shoot will get you really excited about the subjects that you have available to you. I started out personally with the Lensbaby lenses, with the tilt shift lenses. If you go the Lensbaby route, this company seems to be really good at taking old lenses, vintage lenses, or even a very expensive regular lenses. Coming up with a more affordable way for you to be able to use that type of lens. I didn't know that Canon, I shoot with Canon products. I didn't know that they created a tilt shift lens that in their product line until recently. But they're tilt shift lens is over $1,000. I was like, "Oh my goodness." You can get Lensbaby lens for several $100. It's a big difference in the price that this lens company lets you hop in to that unconventional lens market for quite a bit less than maybe a regular lens. The thing I like about the tilt shift lens is they create beautiful distorted blur. We'll be looking at the Lensbaby edge lenses which create a slice of blur. We'll be looking at the spot lenses which create a sweet spot of blur, the sweet 50. I've got the edge 50 and the edge 80. I also have the velvet 56 and the velvet 85. Those lenses create the most beautiful blur in the photos. They're very velvety in the look, and they are reminiscent of some of the older lenses. I have a newer old lens personally that I think mimics the look of the velvet. The velvets run $4-500 for those lenses, and the antique lens cost me about $70. There are ways to get around the expenses of your photography if you're willing to go with an antique lens. The Lensbabies are new unconventional lenses basically. They also have little macro converters sitting here. I also have one that I'm going to show you that's super-duper old. Well, not super old compared to the antique lenses, but it's a very old Lensbaby lens that we take a look at, and it's the 3G. This lens has these bellows. It's very manual really in the way that you hold that lens to photograph versus the newer tilt lenses that they create. I have quite a few in the Lensbaby family because I knew they fit my camera, they are new, I knew they're not damaged, that kind of thing. But then I started looking around things, some other things that people were using and thought, "Oh, that looks fun too." I have an antique lens. This is the Helios 44-2 lens, and it is a 1960s Russian manual lens. Unconventional lenses are all going to be manual, unfortunately. Their manual focus and they do have a little bit of a learning curve. But once you figure out that learning curve, once you get that focus tip nailed, then I have that tip for you a couple of times in these videos, once you get that nailed, you'll actually perhaps prefer manual focus because autofocus misses your area that you're trying to focus on more often than you think. With the manual focus, you really learn to nail the exact spots you should have in focus. Now, I actually prefer the manual lenses so the antique lenses don't scare me. The Helios 44-2 lens is a lens from the '60s, and it's rather a magnificent find for about $50. You can get these on eBay for about $50. I got one that already had a conversion ring on it because this is an M42 mount on this lens. Then there's a little conversion ring that current converts it from M42 to my Canon camera, so you can get these little converters for any cameras. You'd get an M42 to Nikon or M42 to Sony or whatever your lens is, you just get that little ring, and then that fits right on your camera. That's how you convert these antique lenses to be able to use them, and then they are manual. A lot of times, you'll set your aperture and your focus through the lens itself, and you'll set your ISO on your camera. What I love about this lens is that I have surmised that I believe this is the lens that Lensbaby modeled, the burn side and the twist lens that they create. Because it's very reminiscent of all the photos you see coming out of those two lenses. It creates a little bit of swirly bokeh and it has rich, nice colors. You could get two of those lenses brand new from Lensbaby or try out the Helios 44-2 lens because I do believe that was the inspiration for both of those lenses, and I could be incorrect but from all the photos that I've taken, it really feels like this lens was the inspiration for that. They're cheap, they're about 50 bucks plus your shipping or whatever. Relatively, probably the best buy of all the antique lenses. The other antique lens that I have which funny enough is also an M42 mount, so I've got that same converter screwed onto the end of the lens and I get these off of Amazon and I think this converter ran right at $12 and it just tells you on this what that converts to, in case you forget. This lens is the Mira optic 50 millimeter lens and the only reason why I got on eBay looking for one of these is because somebody shared in one of the groups that the Mira optic company is coming out with some brand new lenses inspired by their old lenses, so that they can start selling lenses for the digital cameras in the newer format. I looked up the price of the 50 millimeter and it was like 1400 bucks. They had like a 100 millimeter and it was like close to $2,000 and I was like, holy cow, why so expensive? Then that inspired me to look on eBay for the antique lens because if their new lenses were inspired by their old lenses, maybe the old lens would be something fun to experiment with. I believe this was $70 on eBay and it's the Mira optic 50 millimeters, it's a 1.8 lens. What I believe this lens is a precursor for is these velvet lenses. Because when you take a look at the video for this and the photos that I got out of it, you're going to see that it creates really delicious blur and it's very creamy like the velvet lenses are. So for the investment of about $1,000 versus $70, that's a big difference for two old lenses if you just give them a chance. Because they're manual, you'll just need to get past that little bit of a manual learning curve. But let me tell you, once you get past it, you'll be so excited with the photos that you're getting that you'll wonder why you didn't explore this route before. A lot of people are afraid of antique lenses just because they don't understand them. So the biggest thing to understand is just getting that little mount. Some of the mounts screw on, some of the mounts are a tiny bit bigger, like on this one, it's a little bit bigger mount on here and I'll be honest and tell you I don't know how to get it off of there. I'm sure it comes off if I experiment with it here because it's got like a little locker ring on it. But what I have just decided personally is that I will just buy a ring for each lens that I buy and that ring can just live on that lens. Then I won't have to worry later about hunting down where it is I might have stuck this little ring. I can just leave it on there for the little bit of investment that it is and don't have to worry about do I have the ring on that lens or not? So this is another lens that is a mammoth lens. I mean, this is a metal lens and I swear this weighs like five pounds. It's completely manual, it's got all kinds of fun little movie things on here and you can get back pretty far. Let's see, this is a 75-205. There we go. What's really nice about this one is you can get further back and still get close shots and the very long lenses create the most beautiful blur because they compress the scene much prettier than a short lens. So I like having at least one long lens to experiment with. To get a 70-200 lens now in a new lens is expensive and this was 50 bucks. So this is the easiest way that I know of to get more lenses in your camera bag to inspire your creativity further than you thought you were going to be able to go and to experiment with older lenses because they really are easier. They're easy to learn, they're easy to get a hold of and they're cheap because since they're film lenses, people think they have no value because we don't use film cameras anymore nearly as much as we do digital cameras and so people think they have no value and newer photographers are afraid of them because we don't understand them. So I'm hoping by looking through these demonstrations and seeing some of the photos that we get with them, that if you're on a tight budget or you just want to push your creativity, you will try some of these unconventional lenses, whether they be the lens babies or the antique lenses, which are super cheap. I am going to be shooting on the full-frame can in camera, the 5D Mark 3, a crop frame and a full-frame camera is going to give you your photos. So either is going to work with any of the products that I've shown you. The biggest difference is going to be on a full frame camera. If you have an 85 millimeter lens, it's going to be truly an 85 millimeter lens. Whereas if you're shooting on a crop frame camera, then say on this velvet, the velvet 56 is going to be looking more like that 85 from the full frame because that crop sensor makes this lens optically seem to be longer than it really is. The only time that that really is going to be a big deal is if you're shooting in a tight little space like this. If you've got plenty of room, then it doesn't matter what lens you put on or what camera, they'll all work for you on either body. But if you're in a tight space, the shorter lens might be the way you need to go because sometimes I can't get back far enough because this is a tight little space behind this table. I can't get back far enough with the longer lens to get as much as the scene in as I'd like. That's the only reason why I went ahead and got a shorter one. After shooting with this Mira optic one, which I got after that one because I ordered this on eBay in a similar time frame, is that after shooting with both of them, this would have been sufficient for me. But you don't know unless you try or somebody tells you about it and I don't know of any little unconventional lens workshops or good information places to go and find out about all of this from a person that's not really biased to a particular company. So I hope you'll like looking through the different lenses and you'll get brave and try out some of these antique lenses. This Helios 44-2 is one that's very popular and we'll give you a really pretty swirly bokeh in certain situations. This Mira optic, antique lens gives you a really pretty velvety backgrounds which I love. Can't wait to see what you think about some of these options and I will see you in class. 3. Edge 50 Demo: In this video, let's take a look at the edge of 50. What I like about the edge lenses is they give you a really pretty slice of focus, and that focus can be diagonal, or it can be horizontal, or it can be more vertical depending on how you tilt this lens. What I like about these edge lenses is if you pull the lens out from the little optic there, you've created a macro function here on this lens. While it's not a true one-to-one macro, it's more of a 1-2 macro. It does let you get very close to your subject versus having to be far back taking the whole scene. I do like the versatility of this lens because of that pull out feature. This lens is really fun because it tilts. If you're tilting up, you're getting a different slice of focus than if you're tilting to the side or up or down. You're going to have to experiment with this lens to see exactly what it is that you're going to get in focus for that slice depending on which direction you go, you'll need to do a little series of experiments. I did some right here to show what it would look like with a low focus versus all of the higher focus. You can see as you move that ring around, you switch what you're focused on, just on how you have this tilted and then where you move this little slice around with this lens here. Then you also have on here the choice to pick your aperture. So the wider the aperture, the narrower that slice is, basically because that lens is wide open, it doesn't have very much time to shoot, so you're going to have a narrow line of focus with a lot of blur, versus if the higher you go, you'll have longer, that the shutter is open and you'll have a little bit wider area focus with less blur. These lenses are most popular in landscape applications. Say like city scenes and street scenes, because when you have that little slice of focus, you almost create that fun little miniature photo effect so that you're looking at a little miniature town instead of a big town because of the way that slice distorts the photo. It's a very cool look. In this application here, and for the lens demonstration videos here, I'm doing it in my little studio so I can film and control the circumstances that we have here. The reason why you would choose perhaps the 50 millimeter over the 80 millimeter, and the 80 millimeter I do believe is a discontinued length now. So it's one you'd have to find on like eBay. But again, there's the two different lenses. One is longer. I like the longer lenses for the compression that they offer because they make a prettier background. The shorter lenses are for when you don't have as much space. For instance, in this little Still Life studio, I don't have to backup as far to get everything in my scene as I do with that longer lens. If you're shooting in tight spaces, the 50 millimeter is the way to go. If you're shooting in larger spaces, the 80 millimeter is my favorite. But if you can't find the 80, the 50 definitely will do almost everything the 80 will in just about every circumstance that you can imagine. I just like longer lenses. In my mind, I want the longer lenses first and then I'll come back and get the shorter lens when I figure out that the longer lens doesn't let me backup far enough. The 50 is fine for this little space. It gives us different slices depending on what we focus on. It is great for landscapes and city scenes and ones where you are backed up and you have plenty of room so you can see that fun miniaturized effect. Then, let me show you the couple photos that I got of this scene. I was just trying to use these flowers before I threw them out because I've let them sit here for several days without using them and now they're on their last leg. Might not be the best photos I could have got using this, but certainly is very pretty for my demonstration. Here's the photos I got from this set today. I just want to show you where we have moved our slice and focus around versus where our blur is to just give you an idea what this lens might give you. This is focused right along this edge. I can see from the area of focus that we've got a slice a little bit along the diagonal with a whole lot of blur above it. A little blur below it, depending on how far you are from your subject will depend on how much of this really falls into blur. But because of where I was focused, this area here, we see the most of the blur in the top of the frame. As I move that tilt, you can tell here that I've got this little bit of book more in-focus, this base in focus and it comes here on this side with most of the focus here on the left. You can tell I was probably tilting the lens towards this part of the photo. Coming along here, I can tell a really good line of focus because I've pulled back a little further and this is what you'll get like pulling back sight for landscapes and stuff. You'll see a very definitive stripe. You can see here that we're going right along this edge to get a stripe of focus. Maybe not quite along the diagonal from say, the top to the corner, but more along this center edge, because I can see right above it, I've got blur, right below it I've got blur. I was probably going for a line of focused and maybe it was even a tiny bit tilted, it might not be completely straight. But you can tell that there's definitely a line in there with the blur above and below it. That's not going to be the photo for everybody. It might not even be the best photo for this set. But it is very fun to experiment moving that lens all around just to see where can you get the focus and then when you go back to review the photos, did you make the right decision? A lot of times I will go back to a set several days in a row and shoot some more because I find that the first photos I get to the set are not the very best. If I'll go back and revisit the set now I'm pushing myself a little further to think outside that box and say, "What else can I get now. I'm past the initial photo that everybody else is probably going to take, and now how can I make it different and what can I shoot that's different?" Then I did the last time I was up here and about to revisit that set up two or three days in a row. By that third day, I'm really trying to think outside the box and think how can I make this more different than anything I've ever done. That is how I personally grow my skills and get past my own boundaries as far as what I'm going to shoot. If I'll stay longer and longer, I'll get better and better with those photos. Moving a little further, we've got this slice right through here. I would probably crop this in because you can see the edges of my tiny area. But I do like how I can see the slice right here and the blur above and below. Coming in a little closer, you can see I actually got the slice of focus right along here. I would not say that that would be the best for this photo, but I was moving the lens around, just seeing where can I get the focus, where can I get the blur, and when I come back later to look at the photos, what did I think of what I got? Then here we went from focusing on the backside of the flowers to focusing on the front side of the flowers. You can tell I've got the focus right along here. I was tilting that lens in this direction, and then I've got tons of blur here in this upper right corner. This isn't a lens with a specific look. It's not going to be for everyone. It's going to give you that slice. It works really good on city scenes where you're trying to get a miniaturized city look because it is that fun tilt effect that it's giving it. But it does have its place in flowers for me and in still life. It just really depends on the setup. I like to do a set up and then pull every single lens out that I have and shoot the set with every single lens. I might spend a couple of days doing that, and then come back and revisit and think, which ones were the most successful, which ones are my favorite. I hope you liked taking a look at what the edge 50 will do and I'll see you back in class. 4. Edge 80 Demo: This lens is the Edge 80 here that we're going to look at in this video. The amount of distance I had to back up on this lens to even get this part of the scene in focus was, I would say, at least four feet. Behind this table I have about 2.5 feet and then I have another desk that sits behind us here. I had to lean way back over the desk just to try to get this in focus and it was hard. That longer lens definitely is a challenge for me if I want to get a big scene in focus. Then this lens also has the pullout macro, just like the 50 millimeter one does. Then I could sit in about the same place to get the macro set up, which is about where this camera is sitting. Or as if I was sitting here with the 50 millimeter, I got this whole scene. With the 80 millimeter, I was real tied up on these flowers. Big difference in the length of that lens and how far you're going to have to get back for that 80 millimeter one to get your scene in if you're shooting in a tight space and then if you're shooting in a big space outside, this 80 is definitely my favorite lens. It works in the same way as the 50. It tilts around and depending on which direction you have that tilted, that'll determine which direction you have that slice going. Most of the time if I'm shooting still eye, I'm shooting on a diagonal and I have it tilted to the upper right or the upper left. If I'm shooting out in nature, it might be fun to have a slice of focus across my scene. Sometimes I'll play with it being up or down, depending on what part of that scene I want to be in focus and what part I want to be in blur. This lens, another thing I like about it is where with the sweet spot, it's a real challenge to get the exact place that you want, you're moving in and out to nail the exact little area. With the slice of focus, everything in that slice is in focus from way up here to way back there. I'm not really sure how they do that, because with a regular lens, that depth of field usually makes a big difference, but on this tilt lens that slice tends to be everything in the slice is in focus. It's easier to find the focus because as you're moving the ring in and out, you're moving the slice up and down the frame and then everything in the slice is in focus. For a long time, the Edge 80 became my most favorite lens, because when I had it convinced him my mind that I couldn't focus manual lenses because my eyes played tricks on me, I convinced myself that the Edge 80 didn't play those tricks and that it was the one I could use. For years, the Edge 80 is the one I stuck to. Whereas now I feel like I have mastered the little trick of the focus, which is the very slight moving of your body rather than the continual moving of the focus ring. Now I've really branched out into so many other antique and unconventional type lenses. I come up with photos that I couldn't come up with three years ago. It helps me push my own creativity and keep my excitement about photography fresh and new, because on top of getting excited about a new prop, I can get excited about taking that prop with a different lens than I could probably ever do before. I can get a different flower photo than every other flower photographer out there, because I'm now trying lenses and stuff that they're not trying and I can get a look that they're just not going to be able to replicate. I really love that about being able to use these different lenses, the creativity and how it just opens up the world of what I can get in my photos versus what everybody else can get. Edge 80, really fun. I took a few photos with this and I'll show you what I got. It is another one of those that really is well suited to outdoors and landscapes and things where you can really back up a little bit more and pull in that little slice of focus. But when I'm doing scenes like these, it's excellent for macro and you just pull that front edge out for the macro capability. On top of that, you can put the extension tubes on your camera, then put this on your camera and you get that much closer. I do like how much further the extension tubes extend the use of every lens that we have. Let me take some photos of this and I'll be back. Here's the photos that I got on this set. I was way back far to get this much in the scene, on top of a desk that was behind my table, but let's take a look at where the focus is. This is going up through the scene right here. Not the most successful shot here, but I was moving the focus all around and getting closer and getting further back just to see what are we going to end up with? Here you can see my focus is in this lower right part, this whole area. Then my blur is in this upper left section. I had the lens tilted towards this direction to get that in focus. Here we go. I've got the focus right across. I can see the books in focus coming through here. It's probably more like the focus is right up through this way a little bit, because from where the books are focused and where the blur is. It's interesting. I noticed after I took these photos, I had this mug where I could see the handle. This is a good exercise in looking around your scene before you start taking the photos to see what in that photo is distracting. When you get to your computer it's going to draw the eye where you didn't intend it to be drawn. Going back, I would not have my little mug showing. I wanted that to look like a vase not a coffee mug. That is drawing my eye in that photo more so than the slice of focus. Fun, interesting, little lesson. Look around your scene before you start taking photos and see what's going to be in the picture that's going to draw the eye where you didn't intend it. Here we've got the focus a little bit lower than the blur up above. Again, probably not where I'd want the focus in the end, but I just love the coloring in this photo. I'm going to continue to move around. Here, I actually focused behind the flowers. I was probably further back and didn't realize I didn't even have the front in focus. I found that very interesting. The slice is along this edge and the blur is above and below it. That's a fun experiment in where is your focus and what part of the photo are you trying to pull the eye to? I definitely pull the eye to this part right back here on this corbel. Is that what I intended or did I intend to have the flower in focus? Sometimes you're purposely putting things in the foreground in blur for a reason and that could have been what I was doing there. Let's take a look a little further. See here's the focus where it's on the front flowers and not the back. I like taking different photos with different areas of focus to see when I get to the computer side which one was the most successful. I can see my slice coming across here with the blur above and below. I do like with this lens getting in closer, because I like to fill the frame with my subject and I do a lot of macro and so I do like that this lens has the front pull out element that lets me get in closer. Again, you can see here's our focus and our blur is back here in the back there. Then you can definitely take portrait style photos rather than just landscape direction and get some really nice slices of focus with that lens. You can see now that I've turned the mug so that this little handle is not so prominent. You don't even see it and it makes for a better photo. I wish I'd turn that around for the whole time. I see I've got the slice right in here, the blur above and below it. But probably what would have made this more successful is if I'd had that front flower in the focus. I did continue to move the focus around. This is one of my favorite here. The slice is here on this angle. The blur is above and below it. You can see here in this type of photo how we've made that more successful by putting the focus in the right spot, having the blur up above and below it, and just seeing what can we get with the different lenses and what's going to make it a successful photo? This is much more successful than some of the other attempts and I really do like it. Same photo, I think I just highlighted it because I liked it too. Here I think the focus was a little off in the back on this angle, so not my favorite. I probably should have cropped that. Here we've got the focus on the flower. I did go ahead and edit this photo a little bit because I did particularly love it. Out of this set, after I moved the lens and the focus and the set around, my favorite ones are this one, where this part of this photo is in focus with the blur above and below, and this one where I've got the subject in focus and the pretty amounts of blur around it. This is not, again, a lens that's for everyone. It's a very specific look. It gives you a line of focus with blur above and below. Depending on what aperture you pick, that'll determine on how big that slice of focus actually ends up being for you. But if you're more adventurous and you want different lenses to play with and experiment with, this is definitely a fun set to try. I'll see you back in class. 5. Lensbaby G3 Demo: In this video, we're going to talk about the Lensbaby 3G lens. This is one of the very first lenses that Lensbaby made. It is a lens that you cannot get on the Lensbaby site anymore, but you can get it off eBay. I got this for about $40. It wasn't even very expensive, maybe $50, but it was pretty cheap compared to some of the lenses that you can buy out there now. It's the Lensbaby 3G and it's on bellows. This lens, their very first versions of the tilt lenses that they offered. It's really cool because it's on this almost looks like a plumbing pipe kind of scenario. You can take photos with this lens all the way far out in the distance by pulling this lens in, and you can get super close by pulling this lens out. It's got a little system on here that isn't perfect, but it's nicer than not having any. Whereas if you're tilting the lens, there's a button right here on this side, and if you hit the button, it will stay put to where you put it. Then there's these little pieces right here on the bottom, if you push together, it'll make it maneuver again for you. That is a really cool way to get it to stay put while you then try to focus the lens. You focus here with the ring going in and out, and you just want to determine how close do you want to get or how far out do you want to be. You'll have to be taking your fingers, positioning that and using your other finger to hit the dial. This is a manual focus lens, so you're going to have to be thinking of all that and your focus at the same time. But the reason why I like using unconventional lenses like this is because it really stretches your creativity, it really makes you put thought into the photos that you're taking. You work a little bit harder at getting the exact spot you want in focus and throwing the blur where you want the blur. You get so much more creative with a lens that's out of the ordinary than you do with just slapping on a standard lens. On this particular set up, we are going to experiment with this fun lens here. If I put this in live view, we may be able to see what I'm focusing at in real time. Let's see. If I can get this pushed out, and then with that button pushed, then I can work at some here with the little focus ring. Let's see what I've got in focus here. Here we go. Then I might push in and out a little bit to try to get the exact thing in focus, and then look at the photo that we got. You've got a lot of blur, you've got the little bit of focus spot right in there because of the way I had the lens tilted. That's a super cool photo for something that was doing here from the side on camera with you. I'm going to experiment with this lens a little bit and see the different photos that I can get, and then I'm going to show you what we got. This is a super fun lens. I'm really glad to have gotten a very, very old one to experiment with. I would say this is closest to the Spark on the Lensbaby site. If you can't get this old lens and you want to purchase one that's current, I believe this will be closest to the Spark. Let me take a few photos and just see what we can get with this lens. Let me talk about this lens again for a moment. This is the 3G. Let me tell you at what made it a little bit easier in finding the focus and getting the photo that I wanted. If I was holding the camera like this in one hand, and then pushing it and pulling it with the other hand, and then moving my body in until I actually found the spot I wanted in focus, that allowed me to get a photo I wanted easier than trying to move all the dolls around and do everything at the same time. Controlling it with the one hand, and then moving until you get the spot you want to focus made this easier to take a photo with. You've got to experiment with these unconventional lenses. They're not going to work like a standard lens, but they are going to give you some amazing photos. Let's take a look at the photos that we get with this lens. I've just taken several just to experiment with the angle and the amount of blur that I got depending on how I tilted this lens. You'll notice we get a spot of focus and we get a little bit of a shootout blur around it. That shootout blur varies on how much we tilt that lens as we're going. If we move to this one, I get a little more shooting blur. Almost like it's radiating out. Almost like if you're thinking of sunbeams radiating out, I feel like that's what this lens does. It radiates that blur out. The effect is just more significant depending on the angle that you're tilting that lens. This lens is definitely the most difficult lens that I have. Sometimes as you're tilting, you don't get any focus at all. I find it a success when I get something in focus and lots of this running blur that we get. Out of all the lenses, this is probably the one I would try the last. I would try some of those others first and just move up in difficulty as you go. If we change over here to landscape orientation, portrait orientation versus the landscape, we're still going to get pretty blur that radiates out. Look how pretty that photo is right there. In that blur is real pretty and that focus right here. It really just adds that extra element to your photos. This one, you can see I tilted it a little more and that blur just radiates out even more just adding that extra special touch to your photos. I hope that after you really get comfortable with unconventional lenses, that you step outside your comfort zone. This one lens is definitely outside my comfort zone. Just give some of the harder elements a try because they're going to push you in your photography, they're going to make you a better photographer and artist in the long run. The things that you learn, working through the difficulties of lenses like this are definitely what make you a better photographer and artist. I will see you back in class. 6. Lensbaby Sweet50 Demo: In this video, let's talk about another unconventional lens which I really love, and that's another Lensbaby lens because be quite honest, some of these Lensbabies are the easiest to get a hold of, and I've got on my Lensbaby Composer Pro, and I have a new composer now called Composer Pro 2, and that is simply the mechanism that fits to your camera and tilts around. Then this tilt mechanism works with their sweet lenses, and it works with their edge lenges. What it is, it's the holder for the lenses that you swap in and out of it. Basically, all you do is you pick the lens that you want to put in it and clip it in, and then your lens is in. The lens that I currently have in it is the Sweet 50 which is the newer version of the lens because they used to be a double glass optic. The thing with these little double glass optics is they've got these little disks in here that are the aperture disks. You actually have to change these in and out for whatever disk size that you're wanting your aperture to be, and so it was a very manual process there to get your lens disk to fix the aperture and then fix the lens into the holder. Then on your camera you would manually focus and set that ISO so that then you've got all of your different components working together. They simplified this process just a little bit and updated this double glass optic, which is about a 50 millimeter lens also, this is the replacement one, and they've replaced it with the Sweet 50 which what I love is now those aperture settings are controlled right here on the lens. Whereas before, we were changing them out with this very manual little disk system. This is really nice because now we can set our aperture right on the lens, and I'm sitting about F4 because we can pull it all the way around and see where it starts, which is 2.5, and then with each click, we get a new aperture setting. The way that these tilt lenses work on the sweet spots is there's a spot of focus like right in the center of the lens, and it shoots out from a blur from there, the sharpest point is the center. If you're using this lens straight, then it's going to shoot like a fairly regular lens. If you want to have a spot of focus with a whole lot of blur, shooting off from that, that's when you tilt the lens. You can tilt this up, down, sideways, anyway you want, there's a whole rotation in here that it allows you. Generally, what you're doing. Let's say this is our scene because that's what I'm shooting. If I want to focus, if I want the books and the chair used to be in my frame, and I want to focus say on the cherry and the spoon. If I'm coming from the front, that's going to be in the upper right corner of that frame. I know on this lens if that's what I want most of the focus to be, I'm going to tilt this towards the upper right. If I wanted the focus to be upper left, I would tilt it to the upper left. If I wanted the focus to be down here on the cherries in the lower left, I've focused that to the lower left. The more you tilt, the more extreme the distortion is on the rest of the photo. That's what I like about these lens is that distortion, because I like blur and then I like distorted blur. There is a difference in the blur. What that Lensbaby velvet, it's a straight lens and it just makes all the background velvety. With these tilt lenses, you get a lot of blur, but you get distorted more, and it's really a completely different photograph that you're getting between the different Lensbaby lenses. I'm going to take several photos of this very simple setup. You'll notice that I'm just on a dark wood surface. I have my crate setup because I love my crate. I've got a couple books and some cherries, and you all have a bad habit of buying some fruits to photograph, and then never getting around to him. This time, I bought these yesterday, and I'm like, "I'm going to get to these today." I'm going to just photograph this setup. Some of the other things that we might consider is a bowl in here, and possibly even fabric for some texture and some lighter tones in there, and then because I'm in this window where the sun is coming in right now because early in the day, and this is an East-facing window, I have some black cards put up in front of the scrim that I have in my window because the scrim is filtering the light, and the black cards is really allowing me to direct the light, so I can get something super yummy, moody with some fun, intentional distorted blur. I'm going to take several photos of the scene and then show you what pictures we might get with this lens. This lens, again is a manual lens. You can set the aperture, I want about F4. You're going to set the ISO. I am on my full-frame camera, so it's a true 50 millimeter. If you're on a crop frame, that'll be closer to say, 80 millimeters because it's a crop sensor. I'm trying to keep the ISO fairly decent, but if I'm on a cheaper camera, I'd be a lot lower than 640. By 640 is doing it in this setup and I'm keeping the shutter speed fast enough where I can handhold because I want to get all around the scene without setting up on my tripod, but I can certainly set up on the tripod if I needed too. I'm just trying to keep all the settings fast enough, and it is going to be a little bit darker when I get to the processing, so I may brighten it up, but we'll see. Then because it's a manual focus, we're going to get the distance that we want out. We're going to adjust our focus ring just a little bit, and then we would need to slightly come in and out of our zone until we nail the exact spot that we want. Because remember, if we continue to shift this lens around trying to nail the spot, we're breathing, we're moving the camera with this movement, and we're probably never going to get the exact spot that we want, so I am setting it where I want it, and then shifting myself slightly until I nail the spot that I want. These lenses are has a learning curve. If you don't have any manual lenses, I would recommend you take a 50 millimeter lens, set it to manual on that focus and start practicing so that you can get a hand on how to use that manual focus a lot faster. Let's take a look at the photos that this lens gets. This is our sweet spot lens, and so we're going to end up with a spot of focus and a lot of blur, and depending on how far you tilt that lens will depend upon how distorted that blur is. Here, I was focused in this area, including part of the cherry, but not necessarily the whole cherry, and then we blur out from there and the sweet spots, a pretty good size, it's like about like this size here. Depending on where I tilted that lens, here's a little more tilted. You can see that that blur starts to radiate out almost, which is really cool. If I tilt it even more, you can see how extreme that gets. I was hand holding here, and a lot of times, I'll be set up on a tripod to make sure I really nail my focus. Now, I even set up on a tripod and tether quite a bit because the longer you shoot, the less than a hurry that you are, and then you learn to start taking your time and slowing down and really nailing the focus and maybe taking one photo instead of 100 photos and getting it right in camera very quickly, and even though it's a lot more work to set up on a tripod and tether, you do end up with a better photo, faster really then taking the 500 photos you might have otherwise taken trying to get the one in focus. As I go along in my own photography career, I advance and try to get outside my own comfort zone and end up my own knowledge and different things, but this series is one that I had hand shot to give you examples with, but it's certainly not something that you could preclude yourself from taking longer, setting up on tripod, and really taking the extra effort. Let's just move along because I don't think there's anything and focus on this, but I did like the extreme amount of blur. Here, I came in even from another angle. Again, focusing here. I needed to work harder on my focus in this set, and this is an older set for me, every recorded parts of these videos to give a little more updated information about the lenses and things, and so it's very interesting for me to go back and look at older photos and think, "Okay. How would I do that differently now, and what would my set up really be?" I really think you should do that is you should go back into older sets and maybe even recreate 8 Psalm and say, "How can I do this different and better now?" Which I probably would do because I like cherries and old spoons and old books and containers, and so I have all of the little elements in my prop closet, pretty fabric to recreate this very easily. Again, a little bit different focus. This is shot a little bit more with the lynch straight and less tilt, and you can see that you still get a spot of focus with some blur but the blur is not so exaggerated. As I tilt that lens, we get more exaggeration. Then I also played with a little bit of the books up higher and the books down lower. Just testing out different compositions and coming in from different angles and tilting the lens and making the lens go a little bit straighter and a little bit more distorted. I really like this one. I like the dark and moodiness. I like the distortion of the blur, I like that the spoon and cherry are in focus because in my mind, that really is the subject and the other stuff is just the dressing. Then just to show you a few shoot with this lynch straight on, you still get a spot of focus, but you get a lot less distorted blur, so it shoots a little more like a regular lens if you're shooting with it straight without the tilt. The sweet spot lenses are really fun. I gave you something different to play with. I hope you enjoyed seeing the amount of blur that you get depending on the amount of tilt that you do and how extreme and distorted you can create those. I hope you have fun if you give this lens a tryout, and I will see you back in class. 7. Lensbaby Velvet 85 Demo: Hey, so in this video I want to talk about the Lensbaby Velvet lenses. They make the Velvet lens in two different lens. You have an 85 millimeter and you have a 56 millimeter. The 85 millimeter, I absolutely love and that's the one you see on my camera, because it is a longer lens length and longer lenses compress photos prettier in my opinion. They give you a very pretty background blur and a nice in-focus subject. I shoot for the blur. I'm looking for the very pretty blur and the very pretty compression that the longer lens gives us. In general, the 85 length is going to be the one that gives us the prettiest compression. Depending on where I'm shooting, will determine if I can use the 85 or not. If I'm outside shooting in nature, I've got plenty of room and the 85 is perfect. I'll use that one, outdoors all day long. If I'm shooting here in my little tiny still-Iight studio, because the lens is so long, you have to actually stand back further from it to get all the parts of your photo that you want in the photo, all the parts here. You have to get back further if you want more in the photo than just say this vase. If I wanted to get from this side of the vase, all the way way here, all the way to this side of this corbel, then I'm going to have to stand way back because this lens is so long to get all those pieces in my frame. In this scenario, a 56 millimeter would be the better choice. When I get that 56 millimeter, I'll be able to talk about it and how much more of the scene that we'll be getting. We can compare the compression of a scene between the two lenses and you can see exactly the difference there. The other difference that I noticed is that this lens goes to F2.8 aperture, which I don't normally use because it gives you a very soft, glowy look to the photo and I like the velvety look without the glow. I'm generally shooting on a F4. The 56 millimeter goes all the way down to like an F1.6, I noticed on the little ring that has on it. I probably wouldn't use that one wide open either because I'm not looking for that strange, glowy feel that gives all the elements. I want it to be a pretty velvety feel. So I do tend to put this one F4 and after I shoot with 56, I'll be able to tell you if I feel like that should be the same or not. The thing about these unconventional lenses and really every single one of them that I use, is going to have this problem is they don't talk to the camera as far as focusing goes and camera settings. So you either want to be an aperture mode or manual mode to set your settings, I'm usually in manual. Then you have to do your focus with the lens itself. In general, what I usually do is get it focused where I want it. Then I will very slightly, move my body in and out to nail the exact spot that I want in focus and I'll be hitting that shutter at that exact spot. If you continue to move the focus ring as you're trying to focus, you'll never get the spot you want because you are causing movement every time you do this. Whereas if you set it and then slightly move the camera in and out, then you can nail the right spot as you're hitting the shutter button. The other option with these manual lenses, if you feel like you just can't get it focused and you didn't want to make sure your diopter button is set correctly for your eyesight. It's a big deal for these manual lenses so you can actually see what you're focusing on. But if you feel like you just can't get it focused hand-holding and looking through the eyepiece there, you can set this up on a tripod, put your camera on a live view and then while it's on live, you can see a little bit better. With it being on a tripod, you can then get the exact spot and focus that you want. That would be the second way to figure out how to focus a manual lens, if you're just not able to get it through the eyepiece. The thing that I really love about the Velvet lens, it's a little bit different than a regular lens, is the amount of blur that it throws your background scene in and the little velvety quality that it gives. It's almost like in Photoshop, a very slight Gaussian blur that's built into the lens, for instance. It's just real painterly, it's real smooth, it's really pretty blur this lens creates. I'm shooting for the blur, because I like to add textures and other fun things to my photos. That blur is perfect for simplifying the background to the point that I can add textures and it can enhance the photo even further while I'm in camera before I ever got to Photoshop. I really love the blur we get with the Lensbaby Velvets. It is my number one favorite lens at this point. I have a lot of other unconventional lenses that we'll be taking a look at during this series, because I like lenses that are out of the ordinary. When you start out you can get a 50 millimeter lens and you can work that lens for a couple years. Then at some point you're going to get to thinking, what more is there? What more can I do with other lenses perhaps? I like unconventional lenses because they help you get as creative as you can in your camera. I'm going to go ahead and take some photos with the Velvet. We'll take a look at what those look like and I'll be back. One thing I meant to mention here with the Velvet lens is the point of focus is sharpest in the center of the lens and then it's going to be a little bit softer along the edges of the lens. You want to be real cognizant of that when you're composing your shot. If you've got, say this flower at the very edge of the photo, it's not going to be as tack sharp as it could have been if they were further in towards the center of the photo. While I don't compose anything normally centered in my photos, I do try to keep the point that I've got in focus not at the very edge. One other thing too about this velvet is it does have some macro capabilities. If you've got the lens all the way out, you can get pretty darn close on this flower photo or whatever is called. You'd get pretty darn close it's a 1:2 macro, whereas a true macro is 1:1 magnification. This is 1:2 magnification which is super close but not true macro. But let me tell you, it does get you pretty close. If you have extension tubes that'll get you right up on there if you need some true macro shots. I do like the versatility of these lenses also. These are some of the photos I took with the Velvet 85. This lens is a little bit more difficult to use inside because it is so very long. This is my favorite lens if I'm out at the botanical gardens and taking photos of flowers outside and doing things where I know I'm going to have a lot more room to backup and work with. But it is really good for macro inside, because you can't get pretty close and get the 1:2 macro close-up photos. But overall it is harder inside with the longer lens. But I do love this lens, this is the one that came out with first and it is the velvet that I owned first and the 56 came out. I got that because I work a lot of indoor things then I thought this is going to be more versatile for me. If you only have one choice or the other, 56 for inside, 85 for outside, and if you only have the choice for one go for the 56, it is the most versatile. But I do love my 85 and the blur is pretty. I had to go way back trying to get this which is hard in my little studio area. So I got back as far as I could to even get that much in my frame. Whereas the 56, I could have got the whole set and the frame quite a bit easier. It has really pretty delicious blur if you're shooting at about, this is about a F4. I'm close, you can see the flowers in focus. I know I was not at the 2.8 because I don't have that little glowy feel that the 2.8 gives us. I was a little bit higher than that. But look how much detail that we compressed in here, that 56 might have gave us a little more detail on that fabric down there. I mean that 85 lens compressed to that right out. I just love the overall velvetiness that we get with these velvet lenses and this one is getting in a little bit closer. You can see on that macro ask 1:2 ratio, we still get really close. For the most of the stuff that I do that usually as close as I want to get, I don't have to be tied in on the tip of this flower. If I wanted to, then I could add my Kenko extension tubes and I could definitely get right in for super macro for this lens, but for most of the everyday work and things that I do that's close enough and I love that. Just a little bit further pull back on some of those sets. That's the photos that we're getting out of the 85. You get the yummy delicious blur, you do get really pretty areas of focus, we can still get close in for macro. It really is best for areas that you have room to back up and get your whole scene in that photo if you need to. This is my favorite lens for outside, if I'm doing stuff where I've got plenty of room. I will see you back in class. 8. Lensbaby Velvet 56 Demo: Let's talk about another unconventional lens. I just got it in. It's the Velvet 56. The Velvet 85 is probably my number one most favorite lens. The problem that I have with it here in my little tiny table setup is sometimes I want more in the frame than that 85 will allow me. I work in a tiny space. I can't back up far enough to get everything in the frame I want in the frame. That is the instance when a 56 might be the better choice of lens on these little bitty setups. I do like longer lenses because they compress a scene prettier, they pull the back ground in such a way that it makes it a real pretty blur and ties the photo together quite nicely for me. If I'm outside or if I'm shooting in any space that allows me enough room to backup to get everything in my frame that I want in my frame, then I definitely want the 85. But here in my little studio, the 56 definitely gives me more options for fitting more in the frame. I took a picture here of the flower set up and the entire background. Whereas with the 85, maybe I would have got part of the flower setup and part of the background. It was nice to experiment with the little bit shorter lens on my tighter space. This lens is great. It goes all the way down to 1.6 F-stop. I'm still going to use this at probably a 2.8 or a four because anything wider than that will give me that glow and I'm not generally going for that glow in my photos. Then what's really nice about this, just like with the 85, is you can go all the way out to a one to two macro, which is not true macro, but it does let you get really, really close and you can still add extension tubes to your camera that can cause extension tubes and then get right in even closer if you need it to. It doesn't even matter that it's not a one-to-one because we can add the cheap extension tubes to it. If we're going out there, we can focus in as close as five inches so I can get real close to these flowers and I can get a lot of detail. The Velvet 56, I've been working with it for a little bit now. It's a nice, nice lens. I think behind that 85, it's still going to fall in the realm of my favorite lenses. Whether I choose the 85 versus the 56, it's going to be based on how tight my spaces that I'm working in. If I have room to backup, I'm definitely going to pick the 85. If I don't have room to back up, then I'm going to go for the 56. This is on my full frame camera, so it is a true 56. If I was shooting this on my crop frame camera, then it would come out with the crop factor of the 1.6 and it would actually feel like more like that 85. It'd be real close. It probably be maybe 90 millimeters equivalent because of the crop frack factor on that crop frame camera. That's another consideration. If you're shooting on a full frame camera, it's going to be true to the size it says. If you're shooting on that crop frame camera, this lens is going to appear longer than it is, and you would need that same backup space that I need with the 85 on this camera and on the crop camera, it would be about the equivalent of the same length and that 85 would be closer to, I don't know, 120 or 130. It would be much further out. That's a big consideration on these two lenses. Also, what camera are you shooting on? Is it a crop frame or a full frame? Let me show you a few of the photos that I got with this lens. You can see the difference that we got, this one versus quite a few of the other lenses that we've been playing with. Let's take a look at the photos that we got. But first I wanted to point out something that's important here with all of these lenses that are manual, whether they're the Lensbaby or the vintage lenses. These lenses don't actually talk to the camera, so you're not going to be able to take photos with five different of these lenses and then go back to your records, say like here in Lightroom and be able to figure out what lens you used if you don't save that information somewhere manually yourself because the camera's not talking to the lens, so the camera's not saving that information in our EXIF data for us. What I usually do is either write on a piece of paper like this, the lens that I'm using and take a photo of that first. I've also taken a picture of the lens I'm about to put on my camera so that I'll have a picture of the lens and then the photos after of the things I took with that lens. There I've got little cute business card sized pieces of paper that I've written the different lenses that I have on and keep them together on a little key chain and I keep that in my camera bag. There I can just pull those fun little cards out every time I change out my camera lens and take a picture of the lens I'm about to use. Then that starts off that row of photos. Every time I come to one of these, I know that I've changed the lenses and then I know what lens I used. That's how I keep track of the lens I'm using. There's really no way to keep track of your aperture unless you write down on this paper a specific aperture and take a photo of that, and then don't change apertures unless you take a new photo with the new aperture on it. If you want to get that detailed, then certainly do that. I'm mostly stick to an F4 for my aperture, that's my favorite, 5.6 if maybe I'm coming in closer. Maybe F8 if I'm doing macro, because as you get closer, you really get into a lot more blur because your planes of focus are a lot closer. You're only going to get really crispy whichever plane of focus that you're focused on and everything else is going to be in blur. The further you are back, the more things appear on the same plane. I'm usually on an F4. These velvet lenses have something special with them. If you're on the 2.8, they actually take on a glowy feel. Like this photo, a little bit of a glowy feel. You almost wonder if anything in the photo is actually in-focus. Even though it's got that almost Gaussian blur look to it, there is still focus in the photo, but at 2.8 wide-open, you're going to have that really glowy, velvety look to the photo. Whereas if you were stopped down to say, an F4, you'd probably have more in focus and a little bit less of the glow. I do tend to stay on, say an F4 gives me the yummy velvety field to the photo. But I don't get that odd glow that comes with the 2.8. I'm just moving around the photo here. I'm getting really pretty nice blur in the background, changing around the different areas that I'm photographing. Then I'll come here. I was changing apertures and testing out a wider aperture and just playing around. You can see all of these have such a really beautiful velvety feel. Here's a good example of wide open. This is about a 2.8. It might have been maybe even a three. I might've had an in between the 2.8 and the four. You can see we have the detail here of the flowers, but a whole lot of blur. But if I take that same photo on say an F5.6, I get a lot more detail here in my subject, and more detail in the blur. It's still a really pretty velvety feel to the photo. Just an interesting comparison there on different apertures a lot of times on sets, I'll type the same photo with two or three or four apertures and then I can compare those on my computer to be like, I really do like F4 the best. That's how I decided that was by just playing and comparing different photos. Then just different angles here, getting in real close. This is more of the macro capability if you're coming in close. This is not a true macro lens, it's more of a one to two ratio. If you wanted to get closer, then some Kenko extension tubes would definitely get you there. I love this lens. It's my favorite out of probably all of the lenses that I have. It's the one that will usually live on my camera until I decide to do a setup and play around with different lenses. Hope you enjoyed a look at what this lens might do for you. When we get to the 85 millimeter, we should see a little more compression in that background and maybe even a little less detail in that blur because we're compressing a little bit differently with that longer lens. That's fun to experiment with. I will see you back in class. 9. Meyer Optik - Vintage lens Demo: In this video, I want to show you exactly what a conversion ring looks like. They look a little bit different just depending on what mount versus which lenses that you have. But this is basically the converter piece. What it does, is it takes an antique lens like this Meyer Optik, 50-millimeter lens, and it converts it to the new camera that you're putting it on. So this is like an M42 mount and I got the little mount that goes from M42 to EOS which is what my camera is. You would just look on eBay or Amazon or wherever it is that you're going to get that little converter piece and I get them off of Amazon usually, and you just screw that right onto the lens, and luckily this one screw's off. I've got one lens where after was put on I can't figure out how to get it off. Usually what I do, is I just figure I'm going to buy a converter for every single lens I have, and that way I don't have to worry, does this one have it on or not? How do I get it off for the next lens? It's ready to go. Then once you get that on there, then you're ready to mount that to your camera just like you would a regular lens and it comes right off just like any lens that you have, and the reason why I bought this Meyer Optik lens, it's an old lens, it's completely manual, so you adjust your F stop here on the frame and you adjust, your focus on the frame and you would control your shutter speed here on your camera. The reason why I thought this might be a fun lens to experiment with, is because I like 50-millimeter lenses to begin with, and this one goes all the way down to 1.8 which you can get a current 50 millimeter that does that also. But these lenses are known for their really pretty background blurred bokeh. I thought that might be another fun lens to just play with and see how does that look different than the other ones I have. Because somebody showed me where this company is now producing brand new lenses bringing back some of their old lenses that they're famous for, and the brand new 50-millimeter lens is like $1400. This lens, which is the antique original lens is $50. That's a big difference if you see a lens that you're wanting to maybe experiment with and you don't have $1400 for the lens maybe look and see if there's a vintage version that you'd be willing to try out for quite a bit less money, but it will be more manual in the way it works. But I got to tell you, we all have the excuse of I don't like manual lenses, I can't see the focus, doesn't work for me, it's hard and I completely agree I had all those same excuses for the first many years that I was trying to use like the Lensbaby suite spot lenses. I decided I don't like these, I can't find the focus, it's not working for me, my eyes play tricks on me. I had every excuse under the sun but then once I figured out, instead of moving this ring around, trying to continually focus, if I went ahead and focused it and then move myself in and out to nail the spot I wanted and I've had the shutter going fast enough and the ISO low enough so that I didn't have lots of grain, if I could shoot that photo and get a clear photo, I was excited, and now it's almost like second nature. It's actually much easier than I ever expected it to be, and on my regular lenses don't mind swapping over to manual now, and since I for the majority of the time use either Lensbaby's or antique lenses, it's actually become like second nature to focus this now. Even though your first little bit of use with a manual lens is frustrating if you will make yourself sit there for a couple hours with a setup and really concentrate on getting that focus, and learning how to pull that in and out but with your body to nail the spot you want, it actually gets a lot easier and then you get excited to try all these different lenses that weren't really open to you before because you just didn't know about them and you are scared of manual. Again, one of the ways to really make sure that this is working for you correctly is to make sure that diopter is set for your eyesight. So when you're looking in there, if you're not seeing a clear focus, even when you've got an auto-focus, adjust that little knob until you can see the focus of the camera sees and then that'll be a lot easier for nailing the focus on your photo. That is a manual lens with the adapter, and you can see how easy that was to apply it, and then the possibilities of the lenses that you might try out now or open to anything that was ever created basically, so I hope you'll give those a try. This is a setup that I've just been playing with because I got these flowers at the flower market a couple of days ago. Then yesterday, I played with another set, so I've left these sit here for two days and now the petals are just naturally falling off. I didn't plot these off, I pulled them out of their package and I just fell off just like these just did. I'm going to take some pictures of this setup, and I actually like that there is this beautiful spray of petals down below here, so I'll see if I can't get some of those in my photo. I'll show you some photos that I've gotten with this lens. Let's take a look at a couple of the photos that we got from the Meyer Optik lens and you can already see that we have a really pretty glow about it and a little bit different velvety look to the background that we might not get with a normal lens, and that's why this lens reminds me so much of the Lensbaby velvet lenses. It's almost like we took a photo with a regular lens and applied a slight Gaussian blur to the overall photo to get that look, but it's coming out of camera and I really love being as creative as possible at a camera. When I have a new lens that gives me some exciting effect that I'm just not going to get from a standard lens just reignites my passion for the photography. I really love the yumminess that we get, the detail that we get in the background, the slight glow that comes from the lens. I just love all of that. It's just so beautiful coming straight out of camera. If I were to take a regular 50-millimeter lens, I just wouldn't get that slight velvet next to it. It'd be slightly different. What's really interesting about the different sets, is I like to do that, I like to take all the different lenses sometimes and take a set of photos of the exact same setup and then compare each and then decide what made the better photo for me? What might I do different? What lens really pulled everything together? For me, the Meyer Optik is definitely one of my favorite vintage lenses for under $100. I think I might have paid $70 for that lens, and it's one of my favorite. Wide-open, you get that little bit of glow, you could stop down on this lens just like on the velvet and get a little more tighter focus and less of that glow, and it's just a beautiful lens. Hope you like to seeing the photos that we got from this vintage lens, and I'll see you back in class. 10. Helios 44-2 - Vintage lens Demo: In this video, I'm going to show you the Helios 44-2 lens. This is a little bitty lens and it's an antique lens from, I want to say I read it was from the 1960s and it's an antique Russian lens. When you order this, you have to get them off of somewhere like eBay. They come from; I think mine came from Serbia when I ordered it, so takes a couple of weeks to get it, but it was less than $50, so I really like that about this lens and is a very cool lens for a very little price. This lens, in my opinion, is the precursor to the Lensbaby twist lens because if you are in the right place out taking photos, you can get a great swirly background. I'm sure the twist is a little more consistent than the Helios because I've actually been experimenting with this lens in my little still life studio. If you're taking it in a scene like this where you're really closed in on your subject, it reacts very similarly to a 50-millimeter lens, so you don't see the swirly. But if you go outside and you're standing a few feet from your subject and your background is way back in the background, then you get the swirly effect that this lens offers. You can see back here in the background of this, the background starts to do a very soft swirl which is a really cool effect in your outdoor photography, especially if you like taking, say, people, can you imagine this behind a portrait, flowers. I was a couple of feet from the flowers, low to the ground so I could shoot up towards the trees. You get this beautiful bokeh swirly effect with this lens. This is a manual lens just like the other unconventional lenses I have. You set the aperture here on this front ring and you focus it here with the lens, and just like with the other manual lenses that I use, I get the focus set to about where I need it, and then I move my body in and out to nail the focus. Super cool lens to test out when you don't have all that much money to invest, or if you're just looking for the next creative thing that you want to try out. The Helios 44-2 lens is a super cool lens to experiment with and it's not very expensive. I did quite a few little tests with this lens and I did some inside and some outside just to show you the differences. That's not to say that these are the best photos by any means because I did these tests a couple of years ago and ended some refilming of these segments to talk about them. This here is the Helios inside. What I like about this vintage lens is that you have a little bit of natural vignetting and you have some different things that might be considered flaws or variations that you might not find them on nice brand new lens and that's what I find so interesting about vintage lenses. You're going to get these things that you're not going to find in a new lens. I like some of the saturation and the vignetting that I get using the Helios. Then I like some of the interesting effects that I get in the background blur. You see less of the swirl here, but you do right here in the books see a little bit of some swirly background blur back there. That with a regular lens, I would just see regular blur, I wouldn't see some of these variations quite so interestingly. The Helios is one of my very favorite lens to put on my camera and shoot and look how beautiful this is as a portrait versus a landscape. Some of my favorite photos come from the Helios and I still see a lot of very interesting movement here in that background blur which I particularly love. I was focusing on some different stuff just to see where was the best composition versus where I focused versus what is going on in that background blur. So I've just moved all around and got a few different sets with this one that I liked. Then I went outside because it's early spring and I just wanted to see what we could get with the fine bokeh in the background. That's where this lens really shines in the background bokeh on scenes where you're a little further back and you can see the swirl or the variations back here in the background that you're just not normally going to get on a regular lens like some of this movement back here, it's just so delicious. Then yummy bokeh right down here in this lower right, we really get some yummy interesting effects with the lens. Then as we're going along, we're going to actually, if we pull further back to a bigger scene, I click out pretty that bubble bokeh is, if we pull back now we can actually start to see the swirl that this lens creates. You can imagine if there was a person standing right in the middle of this and the background is swirling around them, how interesting that photo becomes versus a straight lens with that background is just in blur. If we focus on say, flowers real far upfront and the background will fall back, you really start to see that background swirl around and do things that it's never going to normally do for you. The closer you get to the subject and then see that swirl come along in that bokeh. Love that. This is one of my favorite vintage lenses to play with. It's inexpensive, there's a lot of them out there, you can get them off eBay, and then you have to have that converter ring to convert from your camera body to that camera lens. I'll talk about that ring in-depth in the mire optic videos, so if you haven't watched that video yet and you came straight to this one, go back to that video, and at the beginning of it, I talk about the converter ring from the vintage lens to the modern camera and show you what that looks like. I hope you enjoyed this little look at what the Helios lens can do. This one's good for inside or outside. You'll really see interesting details in the background blur, and then if you're outside and you're in the right setting, like you're far enough back from the background, you'll really start to see the swirl that this lens gives that background bokeh. I will see you back in class. 11. Carl Zeiss Biotar 58mm - Vintage lens Demo: I'm back with another vintage lens to show you because I ordered it and got it in and thought I might as well add it into our unconventional lenses workshop. I ordered the Carl's Zeiss Jena Biotar lens. This is a German lens. It was the one that the Helios company stole the formula for to make the Helios lens. I thought since I love my Helios 44-2 lens so much and they stole that Biotar formula from the Zeiss company that I might like to try the original lens to see how I liked it also. This lens is the original one that makes the pretty swirly bokeh if you get it outside like you're taking a picture of a person and the background is far enough back, the bokeh and the blur swirl a little bit and it makes real pretty bubbly bokeh also. This lens just came in. It took a couple of weeks to come in from Germany. It's in extremely good shape for an old lens and it's also an M42 mount lens just like the Helios. If you get both those or one of the other, you're going to use the same converter ring on either lens because they're both made to mount the same camera, the M42 mount. This one's pretty fine. You just pull this top-down to change the aperture setting to where you want it to sit. You focus it manually and then you'd set, of course, your ISO and shutter speed on the camera like you normally do. This lens, I've been shooting a still life with it because it's convenient and I can set it up here in my house. I would say out of the two lenses now that I have experimented with both of them, weirdly enough, I prefer the Helios lens. It lets you get a little bit closer to your scene. It'll let you focus in closer than the Biotar one and you can get closer, of course, on this one with an adapter ring. So I was playing with a 12-millimeter extension tube on here. These are the Kenko extension tubes and this is a 12-millimeter one. I couldn't get close enough with the lens by itself and I felt like the 12-millimeter almost made me get too close and there was a happy medium with Helios on the same scene. Out of both lenses I do like the one that stole the formula from the original lens a little bit better. This is a heavier, better-made feeling lens than the other one, I feel like. The other thing I want to point out too is the Helios lens is, I took a picture of something, the most widely manufactured lens out there. Once they made it, they made a million of them. It is fairly cheap to get that lens, about 50 bucks. The original lens is not so widely made as the Helios, so it is more expensive to get these. It ran me about $180 and took about two weeks to come in from Germany. Out of both those choices, I like having as many vintage lenses as I can. So I'm glad to add that to my collection. I will certainly be playing quite a bit with it. But out of the two, I do really like the Helios one the best and it's cheaper. Just my $0.02 on the different lenses there that give you a really pretty blur and bokeh and in the right situations that really pretty swirl to the background. I took several photos of this setup with this lens. I'm going to show that to you. You're probably not going to see the swirl effect as if I were outside shooting stuff, but just remember that this lens does give you that effect. Let's check out some of the photos that we got from this lens. You can see it's very similar to the way the Helios looked. I am getting some yummy natural vignetting to the lens and if we get far enough back, I am also seeing some of the yummy swirl in the background. This is about as close as I could get without the extension tubes. I do recommend the extension tubes to get closer. You can just see how yummy that natural vintage lens gives you. Out of the two, I do still prefer the Helios lens. But I have discovered after quite a long time of shooting with both lenses, that the Helios if you're shooting on a full-frame, does have a problem when you're shooting to infinity. The lens backs into the camera and so it makes the mirror hit the lens and it errors. If you're shooting on a full-frame and you're wanting to be able to focus to infinity, that would be the one reason why I would recommend the Carl's Zeiss lens to you instead of the Helios. If you're shooting a close on everything like I tend to do or if you're shooting on a crop frame camera, then neither lens has any errors and you're just fine. I just happened to figure out the error by accident and thought that's an interesting fact to share with you guys. Just decide how are you are going to be using the lens and then which is the better choice if you're shooting to infinity, if you're shooting long scenes like landscapes and things. I hope you enjoyed checking out all the yummy lenses that we had in this workshop. I hope you decide to give some of my tests out. If you do, please come share some photos with us. I'd love to see what you're working on. I'll see you back in class.