Detached

A few weeks ago, I attended an online meeting with my photography club, in which we shared what we thought was our best photos of 2021. As you know, I've been sharing my favourite photos of the year on the last blog post of December since The Brown Knowser started, so when this meeting was planned, I drew on some photos that I included in my year-end post.

In this meeting, we were asked to submit between two to five photos and be prepared to discuss why we thought these photos were our best of the year. We didn't have to submit photos that we took at a club meetup, which was good: in 2021, I only attended one photo event.

I submitted four photos from December's blog post: the pre-sunrise silhouette of Notre Dame Cathedral, in Ottawa, on the morning of the solar eclipse; the enhanced photo of Valle Crucis Abbey, from my 1991 trip to Wales (which was included because I brought the washed-out original back to life in 2021); the night shot of Toronto's cityscape; and the nude photo from the one meetup that I attended.

I enjoyed seeing other members' photos, many of which were also taken outside of a photo meetup. It showed me the talents of the other photogs and gave me some great ideas and inspiration for taking photos of my own.

One of our photographers loves to work with old camera lenses in a technique that is called freelensing, whereby you detach the lens from the body of a camera and hold it just in front of the body. You then move toward or away from your subject until it appears in focus, and shoot. The result is a super-macro image with an extremely small depth of field. There can also be some distortion on the edges of the photo.

It takes a lot of patience to get the image into focus and even more concentration to hold that subject in focus while you hold both the lens and camera, and snap a shot.

I decided to give this technique a try, myself, so I grabbed my Nikon D750 D-SLR and removed my 24–70mm lens. Inspired by my photo-club colleague's interest in old camera lenses, I took my old Minolta 58mm, f/1.2 lens from the SR-T 101, which is all but a museum piece that I display on a bookshelf.

When it came to coming up with a subject for this experiment, my choice was obvious: orchids. I love these flowers and our white orchids were in full bloom.

When I held the Minolta lens in front of the Nikon body, I found that what I saw was far too blurry to make out the orchids. They were just a haze of pink and orange, surrounded by white. When I tried to focus better by bringing the lens and body closer, the lever for the aperture control on the lens started poking the interior of the body mount ring and I worried that I might damage the camera.

The solution was to reverse the lens so that the front of the lens was matched up with the body mount ring (known as reverse freelensing). In doing so, I found that the orchid came more into focus and was magnified even moreso.

Keeping a steady hand was crucial and a huge challenge. It took several minutes and the steadiest hand I've ever had for shooting a photo. After my third shot, I had to call it quits because my hands were feeling the strain of holding the lens steadily in place and I didn't want to risk dropping it.

I only took three shots but I found that in post-processing, all three turned out pretty well. The purpose of this type of photography is to come up with a pseudo-impressionist style of photo, rather than a perfectly exposed, super-sharp image.

What do you think?

I'm going to try this technique again but next time, I'd like to put the body on a tripod to help make it a bit easier. I'll try again in the spring, when flowers bloom outside.

Happy Friday!