Speaker – Polina Plotnikova – Capturing the Mood

By | 9th October 2024

8 October 2024

Polina started by demonstrating her love of Flower and Still Life photography.

Then Polina briefly covered some creative optic choices (Petzval and Helios lenses), before moving onto Lensbaby. Polina is a Lensbaby ambassador and her talk “Capturing the mood” is for those who are generally interested in alternative special effects in camera as opposed to post-processing.

The first challenge is to identify the right optic for the creative look envisage.

We started the review with the Composer Pro optics: Sweet, Edge, Twist and Sol. Sweet gives a focus area in the centre of the image and blurs radially. Edge gives a line of focus. The focus point for both can be adjusted from the centre of the image, and through 360 degrees for Edge. And the effect is stronger the wider the aperture. Polina also showed how sharp the focus in the centre of these images.

Sweet, Twist and Sol are suited to round(ish) subjects. Sol is similar to Sweet, but gives a larger area of focus and can be difficult to set up, with the Composer Pro lens mount bending too much.

Edge is more suited to linear subjects (for example seascapes and landscapes).

As with many systems there are a number of accessories and Lensbaby has Macro filters and templates for shaping points of lights in the bokeh.

Lensbaby also offers standalone lenses and Polina covered these: Velvet, Burnside and Trio.

Velvet gives a soft focus / glow effect and particularly effective for open spaces, such as Seascapes and landscapes.

Burnside creates a Twist effect, but has an additional setting to create a vignette in camera.

Trio is three lenses in one (Sweet, Twist and Velvet).  Trio also has a fixed aperture, so there is no adjustment from the strength of the effect. Trio allows shooting between lenses, which produces a multiple exposure effect.

Polina completed the talk discussing the Omni Creative system. This allows several optical ad ons to be placed in front of the lens to produce unique optical effects, in camera.

Lensbaby lenses are available for most camera mounting systems and don’t forget there are also camera mount adapters available to switch camera mount systems.

Overall a thoroughly stimulating talk, presenting many ideas for creativity in photography.

If you would like to see more of Polina’s work or book a Workshop check out the following:

Website – www.polinaplotnikova.com

Instagram – photoartitude

Facebook – polina.plotnikova.372

Flickr – PolinaPlotnikova/albums/

 

Area Photographers Group Website here