Had a little impromptu photo shoot session with the stunning Lady Medusa in which we commandeered an alleyway as a makeshift studio with a brick backdrop and I got to play with three new toys:
- Lensbaby Composer Sweet 35
- Ricoh GXR with A12 M-Mount Module
- Stealth Holga from HolgaMods
Lets start with the Lensbaby! This one had the least use for this shoot, as to get a large enough sweet spot I had to stop it down to f/8 to f/11, which, given the late afternoon/ dusk lighting conditions rendered me unable to see through the viewfinder on my Nikon D7000 at all. However the shots that were produced are indeed something unique and the optics are superior to that of the original double glass insert.
Next up is the new Ricoh GXR M-Mount Module, on which I used a Carl Zeiss 28mm f/2.8. Two things I had encountered using this was: It was either a transmitter for the strobes or using electronic viewfinder on the hotshoe and encountering the same issue as the lensbaby with the manual aperture stopping down and hence decreasing the brightness of the visible image, in this case the electronic LCD couldn’t shift the brightness of the preview enough so I had to guess the focus using the distance scale on the lens itself and composition which proved to be relatively easy. Here are the results out of the Ricoh which were processed through Photoshop:
The final camera used for this shoot is a Stealth Holga from HolgaMods. I had always wanted to try my hand at lomography but was aware of the different quirks, idiosyncrasies and faults of the cameras, that is until I found HolgaMods where Holgas are fixed up to actually work (with both apertures!) and even calibrated with a close focusing mod. These are straight scans of the negatives (Kodak 400 TX), from this experience I learnt that I still have a way to go in terms of guessing distances and that the viewfinder in the Holga suffers from minor parallax error and is slightly narrower than whats captured by the lens.
