FreeLensing

A few weeks back I stumbled upon this PetaPixel article and, although I'd given free-lensing a go before: lens in one hand, body in the other, see what happens...
I'd never managed to get the results I was after. Medium to far distance focus being one problem and having the right "level" of effect another. 

By chance this time though, I read Jay Cassario's article immediately after tidying my desk. Once again I'd found an old, broken Canon FD 50mm f1.8 that has been filed in the "might-be-handy-someday-but-I-should-probably-bin-it" pile for as long as I can remember. So, without further ado, and in a flurry jewellers screwdrivers, tiny screws, precision machined parts and (less-than) precise fettling I had a freelens specific lens that should give me the results I was after.

With about a third of the depth of the lens removed and the aperture fixed at wide-open there is much more room for manoeuvre. Focus problems are removed because I can get the rear of the lens closer to the sensor. Obviously there's even more light leakage but I'm okay with that because it's balanced out by the increased "controllability" of the narrow focal plane.

And the results? Very interesting. It turns out the lens is actually in pretty bad condition, there's obvious deterioration of the optical coatings so the images straight out of the camera are quite flat in contrast and colour. However shooting RAW let's me worry about that in Lightroom later. Freelensing is definitely a technique that benefits from a body with Live View capabilities though. And shooting multiple frames handheld on a 5D mkII gives a much improved chance of getting the narrow focal plane in exactly the place you need, it does tend to wander no matter how steady I think my hands are. The 5D mkII also has the benefit of having the Live View focus magnifier close to your right thumb making it easier to control focus.  

The downside of full frame cameras is that the hole to the sensor is big enough to fit the back of my newly edited lens, not a problem if using Live View, but this could make a real mess if you decide to use the viewfinder and the mirror has to flip up out of the way. I've done this once already, it is not a good sound! 

Erring on the side of caution, I dug out my old 20D and checked the size of the "sensor hole" in relation to the lens elements. It's not possible to inadvertently move the lens too close to the mirror with this lens/body combo. And, in daylight, the 20D files at iso~200 are still more than useable. There's no live view, but smaller lighter weight body also makes for handy freelensing set-up to take out at any time.

I've now added the freelens-lens as a permanent feature in my bag and, as long as I use it sparingly, it makes for an interesting additional "effect" whenever time permits on any shoot. I'd maybe not go to the length of buying a new lens to take it apart, but that bargain bin in your local camera shop is definitely worth a look…

Corfe Castle and Kimmeridge Bay

At some point in the past month we'd agreed to meet up with friends and head down to Dorset for some early dawn land and seascapes. With sunrise around 7am, there was no option but to load up the coffee maker, set the alarm for 03:40 and try and grab a few hours sleep before an 04:30 departure. In a remarkably short time we'd sped down the A3 and through The New Forest to arrive, according to Here Maps, at Corfe Castle in a faint pre-dawn glow. It was only as we walked through the woods and headed up the hill that the sky started to brighten noticeably and we were able to start trying to spot the potential vantage points that gave a view of the castle and included the adjacent town and hills beyond.

I'd done some pre-shoot investigation with the The Photographers Ephemeris and knew roughly where I wanted to be, but there was still some up-the-hill, no, back-down-a-bit, maybe-over-there-then hiking through the frosty bracken and brambles as I got the castle and surroundings into a composition that I liked. Then it was a case of metering and balancing the exposures values for the land and rapidly brightening sky, to make sure I had the right combination of my new Lee filters in place.

I've never been to Corfe Castle before so I really was capturing images that I'd never seen before as huge castle ruins were slowly revealed by the rising sun. Also, I've been shooting a lot of people and events recently and it really did take a few shots before I made the mental switch to calm down, stop looking for shot/angle/filter and just enjoy being out capturing and creating images of what turned out to be the most beautiful time of day.

With the sun fully up, and the sky already started to show signs of an accurate weather forecast, we jumped back in the car to meet up with the remainder of our group down at Kimmeridge Bay. I've never been to Kimmeridge Bay before either, but there are more than a few photos of it online, so I had a pretty good idea of what it looks like. However, our group scheduling was only able to arrange a time when we could all commit to the early rise, there was nothing we could do about the times of the tides. So it was a very different view that greeted us as we walked to the cliff edge. The highest tide of the year was in. All the way in. All that was above water was the pillbox, which was handy, because it's a perfect feature in what was crying out to be a long exposure seascape.

The waves were just big enough to get a decent splash every now and again too, so I decided to lose the ND filter, switch from 24-70 to 70-200, and bring the shutter speed up enough to get an action shot from the same vantage point.

And this was all before 10am on a Sunday. So it was definitely now time for 2nd breakfast, Clavells Restaurant was on hand in the village to provide 4 hearty fry-ups and a pot of tea to get us warmed up and ready to head back out into the now definitely-getting-worse-fast weather. We decided to check out the slip way and waterfall on the eastern corner of the bay as we could park close while we kept an eye on a suspicious looking wall of grey that had appeared out at sea.

This was a good plan, barely twenty minutes later that soggy wall of grey blew inland and the wind and side-ways rain forced us to call it a day. But, by then we'd been up for eight hours, I'd seen two new places, shot a few hundred frames and had two breakfasts. All in all, not bad for a Sunday morning ;)