Friday, January 25, 2013

What Would Bugs Do with a Samyang 8mm

I'm unsure why most people get into photography. For me it's emulation. I see something I like and I want to see if I can achieve something approaching that model. Of course artists strive to produce something unique that pushes the envelope. I guess I'm not an artist because I simply want to be able to manage competency in producing a photograph. I try to please me, of course. Chuck Jones said he and his fellow cartoon artists at Warner Brothers produced Bugs and Daffy cartoons to make themselves laugh. In that respect I'm like Chuck and the boys working on Looney Tunes. I want to see something that pleases me. I've always liked classic black and white in medium and large format. The large plate film cameras don't produce the level of barrel distortion you're seeing here. You can get medium format digital cameras with great glass and avoid it but here we have an APC camera with a fish eye that's been straightened a bit. But even though there is distortion you do get a capacious feel to the scene, which is what I'm after. We're taking in pretty much the whole room and seeing a bit of outside. I chose the level of contrast to match a particular aesthetic perhaps lost in the translation. I won't bore you with the technical aspects of what I went through to produce this particular photo but I will display one of the composite shots that went into making it. What's hilariously ironic is at least half or more of viewers will likely like the original better than what I was trying to achieve.
And even though I said I wouldn't do it, this is from three shots combined to produce an HDR in Photoshop (this shot was in the middle of the three exposures) using a Samsung NX10 camera with a Samyang 8mm fisheye lens. Here's the camera and lens:
 It's a manual focus lens but with it's field of view and standard aperture setting pretty much everything from a few feet to infinity is in focus anyway. Great snapshot lens on a small build format, APC sensor camera. Here's one more shot from the combo:
 This was another three shot combo processed into HDR, which sort of works well with the super wide shot.

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