Photo from December 30, 2005

I love taking photos of people taking photos.

I drove home for the holidays that year which meant I could bring all my photography equipment. I went down to the beach to photograph and snapped this shot when playing around with my Lensbaby.

The image was already pretty high key as it is. Processing through the image seems to be a fight between adding contrast, saturation, and detail and keeping true to the otherworldly nature of the photograph. In the end, the only thing I was sure about was that I needed to burn a vignette on the edges. RAW photo or no, there was not much detail to work with anyway.

The Lensbaby is a “selective focus lens.” In other words, it’s two pieces of glass you just play at with like an accordion and hope something is in focus. Another thing is the D70 cannot meter without the G or D hardware in it, so you have to prep it and chimp the preview to figure out what your range is. Hence the high key of the photograph is more an accident, then intent.

The only way to use it effectively is to burn through exposures and hope something you have is useable. It’s damn difficult and when you have something not usable, it isn’t usable at all.