Sick again

and feeling down. Mourning my Sammy cat and feeling anxious about young love on the rocks. Sick or not, I have to get out of the house, even if its only for an hour. Taking pictures always makes me feel better. So I grab the new bag and drive out in the setting sun to an abandoned house I visited only once before with my niece.

The place is deserted, like before, but my visit doesn't go unnoticed by passersby on 240 and somebody honks. Prudence urges me inside, away from curious eyes. The place feels different from the last time because today I am alone and the wind is making the doors creak open and slam closed on their own. There are two of them on both sides of me and I feel surrounded by ghosts.

Outside, a strip of metal dances in the wind near the roof and I think maybe somebody is up there. To my left, a wall of glassless window frames remain closed, save the last two that stand open for no reason.

Not far in the distance a child screams and sounds eerily like a coyote that has corned its prey and I begin to wonder why I came here. My head is telling my feet to beat it outta here double quick time but my feet know better.

I clear my head and remind myself that I love these old places. That they don't scare me. That I am here to record the beauty they have to offer as best I can. I grab my camera, attach the Lensbaby, and begin to shoot.

These distorted color and black and white photographs mimic my mood.

Lake LA

in hearts and stars.

Images shot using the Lensbaby lens heart and star app ring accessories.

Favorite Place

In the house to sit and watch the wild goings on of the desert that surrounds me.

Image taken with Lensbaby lens, no app ring in very low light with no tripod.

Tinkerbell Was Here!

And she left a trail of stars to dance across my window pane.

Image taken at night on a Nikon D80 using a Lensbaby with specular light star shaped accessory.

Try, try, try again

Until you get it right.

Let's see if I got this right.

Still getting used to how this works

Well, I can see from my posts that uploading a small image only means the image on he main page is small but the image loaded is still large. So, rather than erase what I have already, I am going to see about resizing each image to about 200kb or so and loading them up as medium for the main page. Here we go!

Setting Sun

This shot was taken using the wide angle accessory for the Lensbaby. When I took this shot, I had no idea there was an aperture ring in the Lensbaby and shot it with an app of 4. Later, when I went to toss the Lensbaby box in the trash, it felt kinda heavy to me so I looked inside and found a little closeable pouch for the lens as well as odd looking device that resembled a tiny bellows with a piece of metal in the end. I looked it up in the instructions and found out that there were other aperture rings inside the round part and that the metal piece on the end was an actual magnet used for removing the metal app rings from the Lensbaby face.

So, I plan to try the sunset shot again using the f8 app ring to see what I get, though I do really like this shot as it is. To me, it reminds me a lot of a picture I would have taken as a kid, had I had a camera then that is, as my family and I traveled to the desert to spend the weekend with family, friends, motorcycles, chilled carrot and celery sticks out of the cooler, melting plastic utensils in the camp fire and a night sky filled with more stars than empty space.

Setting Sun through Joshua Trees

This shot is was taken using the zone plate accessory for the Lensbaby. I was recently told that some people hate this kind of shot. Seems a strong emotion for a picture but ok. Myself, even though I took the shot, Im not really happy with how large the sunburst is but I wanted to post it to show the effect. I plan to try this zone plate with different app rings in for night time city shots to see what happens to the lights. Should be interesting.

Joshua Tree

This shot was taken with the normal Lensbaby lens without any accessories attached. I converted it to gray scale, cropped it a bit and added some grain in CS3.

Got my Lensbaby

Yesterday, January 15th, 09, I received a new lens. Its called a Lensbaby and its purpose is to cheaply mimic a tilt shift lens. While the Lensbaby cant quite match the subtle blurs that you get with a tilt shift lens, it can still create some interesting effects. So far I like what I see. There are lots of accessories made for this lens and I have most of them and used quite a few of them the same day I got the lens.

Here are just a few images shot with the Lensbaby.