gabriel biderman fine art photography

Good times are ahead in the world of photography as Lensbaby just revamped their entire line of creative lenses for SLR cameras.  I’ve been a big fan of these quirky looking 50mm lenses that create a sweet spot of focus and selectively defocus the other areas.  They’ve been described as bringing a very dreamy and ethereal quality to your photos and because of their unique look they are always an ice breaker when shooting.

So when my friends at Lensbaby asked me to beta test their latest incarnation, The Composer, I was very excited and had no idea what to expect!  I received it right before my trip to the Oregon Coast.  Not only did Lensbaby create the new lens, The Composer, but they also revamped their entire line by adding the Optical Swap System to all their revised lenses.  Now one Lensbaby can have 4 different effects!  You can easily swap out the standard 2 element glass lens for a more dreamy 1 glass element, or 1 plastic element (more holga-esque), or a zone plate/pinhole element!  Ingenious idea!  The Composer that Lensbaby sent me only had the pinhole/zoneplate optical element, so that is what I’ll be focusing on in this article.  Also please be warned that I used a pre-production beta lens and things might still change by the time you buy yours!

The Composer, is and will be the easiest Lensbaby ever to use.  I have owned all the previous versions, and have demonstrated them to thousands of people at photo events.  It takes most people a week of constant Lensbaby use to get the hang of it.  When you first try a lensbaby it  can seem a bit like juggling while taking pictures, and no one really wants to juggle cameras!  However, the new Composer will eliminate all the intimidation of how to focus as it uses a simple ball and socket configuration to smoothly and selectively focus.  The previous versions, now called the Muse and the Control Freak really need the use of both of your hands to focus, while the Composer can be easily adjusted/focused with one hand by simply tilting the lens to the desired focus/defocus. I found the option to tighten the ball/socket to lock the angle position very helpful.  It’s just like the friction control on a ballhead, you can simply adjust the tension for your tilt.  A barrel focusing ring located at the front of the lens aids in fine-tuning the focus.

The zone plate/pinhole optical apertures are f/19 for the zone plate and f/177 for the pinhole.  For those of you unfamiliar with zoneplates, they look like a black and white bullseye targets.  A zone plate consists of a series of clear and dark concentric rings that have very specific diameters to create the chosen focal length.  These specific targets are shot on a clear based film and then placed over the hole that now becomes the lens.  In the Composer the zone plate/pinhole were placed in a shiftable turret making it quite easy to choose which one you wanted to shoot with by sliding the turret back and forth.  To be completely honest with you, I had The Composer for 4 days and mainly used the zone plate setting, which I found the most interesting and easiest to use.  Remember you are shooting with either f/19 or f/177 so your other choices are raising the ISO or lowering your shutter speeds in order to get the correct exposure.  Sunny days and tripods are a must for using the zone plate/pinhole element though I did find the zone plate shooting to be very hand holdable .  Also, the zone plate was easier to view the focusing in the viewfinder of the camera as it was letting in more light.  I usually set the Composer on infinity focus while shooting pinhole.  I was using a hand held meter for judging exposures though the in-camera meter in the Fuji S5 did pretty accurate job.

The first two images are of the Oregon State Hospital, where the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed.  Angus and I were given a hot tip that OSH was giving a one day only tour of the J ward, where most of the movie was filmed.  The Oregon State Hospital was built in 1883 and is in dire need of asbestos removal as well as other serious renovations.  The complete and total renovation of the J ward and OSH is to begin later this year and hopefully be complete in 2011.  The top image was taken with the pinhole setting on a tripod and the second image was hand held with the zone plate setting.  Notice the beautiful glow that emanates from most zone plate images.  The Diffraction of the highlights creates a very dreamlike look while still maintaining enough focus to make out details.  The pinhole looks sharp/soft and emulates a plastic lens look without the vignetting.  I personally do not like pinholes on SLR cameras.  I like hand made pinhole cameras or pinhole box cameras as there is usually a more imperfect look to them.  Heavy vignetting and bending verticals are usually what I like to see in imperfect pinholes.  Lensbaby creates a pretty perfect pinhole and I advise utilizing the long exposures that f/177 will give you as well as putting something strong in the foreground to heighten the pinhole effect. I found that the tilting or bending of the lensbaby with the pinhole/zoneplate element did not create any selective focus effects in the viewfinder, so I shot most of my images with it focused straight ahead.  I would like to further test this aspect as it would lead to a truly unique effect.

Besides the Fuji S5 with the Composer, the only other camera I had on this trip was the Wisner 4×5 camera.  So when we were led inside the Oregon State Hospital for the tour, I knew I’d be at a handicap shooting indoors at minimum f/19.  Just like any zone plate or pinhole, a tripod is necessary if you want to shoot indoors.  Outdoors, during the day, the Zoneplate Composer will make you incredibly happy as ordinary objects attain a certain glow.  The sunset Angus and I witnessed at Cannon Beach made my Top 5 Most Amazing Sunsets Ever list and I feel the essence of the memory was accurately captured by the zone plate Composer.

I reluctantly gave the Composer back to Lensbaby as they were preparing to bring it to the biggest photo trade show of the year, Photokina. I can’t wait to use it again as well as try the complete optical swap system. All the new Lensbabies, including the Composer, are due out in about 4 weeks. You can preorder and find out more information at Lensbaby.com or B&H Photo.

I spent the last full moon weekend in Oregon visiting my oldest friend, Angus.  In the 20 years that we have known each other, we have had plenty of epic adventures in New Hampshire, Seattle, SF, Portland, and NY.  Usually one of us is visiting the others new home town and the fun follows.  However, on this trip out to see Angus in Portland, I suggested we do a road trip around the Oregon Coast.

Recently i was easily guilted into purchasing a 4×5 large format camera by another dear friend, David Brommer.  He had been nudging me this way, calling all my cameras “weenie format” as he lugs around his beautiful 8×10 Deardorff.  The Large Format cameras really haven’t changed that much in the last 75+ years.  They’re usually wooden, need a tripod, a dark cloth to view the image, and produce negatives/positives that are 13x larger than a 35mm neg.  You get optimal image quality and less to enlarge in the dark or lightroom.  Pictured on the left at the bottom is what my Wisner Technical Field camera looks like, red bellows and all.  It only weighs 6 lbs and I love it!

So I have been “getting to know” the Wisner lately and wanted to dedicate this trip to Large Format shooting.  I warned Angus that if he thought I was an annoying photographer friend before, this LF camera would only make things worse.  My man has the patience of a saint and did a good job documenting our escapes!   I probably got it down to about 8 minutes to set up and 2 minutes to break down the camera.  My shortest exposures were 1/4 of a second and my longest 30 minutes.  However, I decided to throw a wrench into the whole process and wanted to get some 4×5 nocturnal images.  Again, you’re looking through a 4×5 inch piece of glass with a loupe under a dark cloth to focus.  This is not the most conducive way to focus at night and required me using lots of high powered flash lights or simply not shooting certain subjects because I couldn’t see or focus on them.

The first shot of the White Satin Sugar Factory is the simple story of passing by a subject several times and saying to yourself, “I’m going to shoot that.”  I knew it would make a great night image, my only concerns were the trains that were frequently running or parked in front of the factory; plus every other time I drove down this street, several cops were pulling over “perps”. Lo and behold, when I arrived at 12:30am to shoot,  3 cop cars were across the street and a train was parked in front.  Not wanting to be mistaken for a perp, I parked about 50 feet from the cops and as I got the gear ready the train started to pull away.  I dashed across the street, crossed two sets of train tracks and went down a small incline to take the first test shot which was a 7 minute exposure.  Right at the end of the exposure, another train pulled up and parked, completely blocking me from the street and cops.  I moved the camera to a better position right between the two sets of tracks and started my 14 minute exposure.  I had to stop the exposure 11 minutes through because the train next to me started to chug and take off.  It was obviously shaking the ground and I did not want it to affect my picture.  Luckily you can easily do multiple exposures with LF cameras so 2 minutes later I finished off the exposure and left the scene.  When I got home from this trip I developed my test shots first and then fine tuned my developing for the final negatives.  The correct exposure was 7 minutes at f16 and this image was 14 minutes, so I underdeveloped this negative by one stop and saved those precious highlights on the right from getting blown out.

The other two images were taken at the ever popular Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast.  The whole coast is pretty amazing with massive rocks, ancient trees and cliffs all coming together to form something very primordial.  Haystack Rock has probably been captured millions of times and as Angus and I strolled down the beach I wondered when the last time it may have been captured with a LF camera.  As I was setting up a shot under the dark cloth, I peered out to find about 8 people gathered around me wondering what the hell I was doing.  I let everyone take a peak at the image’s reflection on the glass under the cloth and gave a brief history of photography.  One guy thought he was going old school by bringing his 10 year old Sony Mavica digital camera that writes directly on CD.  He quickly conceded to me.

Enjoy, and more stories and images to follow!

What a week! Less than 15 hours after touching down from my week at the Maine Media Workshops I met up with over 40 strangers and led them over the Brooklyn Bridge in celebration of Scott Kelby’s 1st Annual Photowalk. A Photowalk is a social gathering of photographers who walk around, take pictures, have fun, and share their images. Scott Kelby is “the man” who organized over 6,000 people from 43 countries (44 states in the U.S) and in 241 cities to come together on August 23rd and have fun photowalking. There were 4 photowalks in NYC alone! Thanks to Scott, there were probably 1 million images taken that day in the name of photowalking! Pretty cool. Oh ya, Scott Kelby is also the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, #1 technical writer on Photoshop (he makes it fun and funny!), and good friend.

When Nancy and I showed up to our meet our fellow Photowalkers at the base of the NYC side of the Brooklyn Bridge we all felt like we were doing something special. In front of us were hundreds of tourists crossing the bridge, but we were photowalkers and we were on a mission to shoot, have fun, and get some ice cream on the other side of the bridge! The walk was two hours and probably took 1 hour to be mindful of the bikers, tourists, and other photographers crossing the bridge. The other hour was spent exploring the Brooklyn Bridge Park, cobblestone streets of Dumbo, and the Old Fulton Landing, which has spectacular views of the NYC Waterfalls and the 125 year old Brooklyn Bridge. I was happy to see that I was not the only one shooting film as I counted 3 people using Holga/Diana cameras!

It was a great time, Nancy and I met so many friends and great photographers! Our group’s top picks can be found on our flickr page. Look through here and tell me your favorites! I had a tough time choosing “the one” as there were so many strong images. My winning choice can be seen here.

You can see all the winning images from all the cities, including the grand prize via the Photowalk website.

Finally, kudos to Geoff Fox, who travelled from Connecticut to take part in the Photowalk and created this amazing panoramic shot of the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan from the Old Fulton Landing.