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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

A Learning Experience

Photography is a fascinating hobby. I've taken several hundred thousand photos over the last 5 or 6 years and I am still learning more about the art every day. I mentioned last week that I have been experimenting with Pentax Takumar "legacy" lenses. They are called "legacy" because they are left over from the days of film cameras. Most of the Takumar lenses I have are 40 to 50 years old. Fortunately their metal and glass construction ages well. They mostly come from the time before autofocus and autoexposure so they are nearly fully manual - not quite in that although I set the aperture and focus manually, I am happy to let my camera choose an appropriate shutter speed. Lately I've been experimenting with de-focused backgrounds, mostly using these Takumar Lenses. This technique is widely used by photographers to isolate and accentuate the subject of the photo - particularly portraits. I can't say as I've got it under control yet but here are a few examples of the technique.

5 comments:

Stefan Jansson said...

That is how I shoot most of my street portraits. Been toying with the idea of old lenses, or maybe a new Samyang.

JoJo said...

I still have my Pentax K1000 from 1985 and I really loved the results I got because it had that meter that would put the needle in the middle once you adjusted your lens settings. It took a lot of the guesswork out of it. I'm still shooting on automatic with the Canon I got last year....one of these days I need to really sit down with that manual and read it.

The Furry Gnome said...

Very good examples!

William Kendall said...

I like what you've done with these.

Stephanie said...

I wish I still had my old lenses. A fellow camera club member told me about an adapter to use other lens for the digital camera. These shots came out stunningly beautiful!