Fun With a Fisheye | Part 4

If you missed my other four posts about shooting with a Fisheye Lens, you can find them here, here, here, and here.

Day 7...

Kevin and I live about half an hour away from downtown Phoenix, so we live in a pretty rural area. All of the following photos were taken just a few miles away from our house near the Gila River. (I've been surprised by how much water I've been finding in the Phoenix area once I started looking!)

Here is a photo I took of the river, with the lens zoomed so it gave a wide angle view...

Look how clear the water is!...

Like I said, it's a pretty rural area, so I was able to lay down in the middle of the street to take this photo.  (The river is off to the left side of the photo.  It's that shiny area you can see where the trees kind of break.)...

Before we moved here, I was expecting to see a lot of this type of hard, cracked dirt.  I was pretty excited to find it just as I expected and get a photo of it!...

I love me some cacti!  I truly am in love with the landscape in Arizona, and drive around in constant awe of all of the palm trees, cacti, and mountains every where I look.  I hope that these things never lose their sense of wonder for me...

I was really losing light fast, and was trying to capture as many photos as I could, but I would have loved to change out the lens on my camera and take another shot from this same position to show how close those mountains really are to where I was standing!  It's amazing how far away the Fisheye Lens makes everything look!...

See that tiny, little white speck in the center of the photo?  Yeah, that's the moon!!....

Gorgeous colors in the sky!  So far Phoenix has shown us some pretty impressive sunsets.  One of these days I'm going to get out with a different lens and really capture the stunning colors...

And there you have it! My week experimenting with a Fisheye Lens!

So, I guess the big question is... Would I want to own this lens? I really had a lot of fun shooting with this lens over the past week. I think that if I had more time to play with it (and learned the Phoenix area better so I knew of more fun places to photograph), my skill with it would have improved and I eventually would be able to take some really fun and creative shots. However, in all reality I don't see a lot of practical uses for the lens with the type of shooting that I prefer to do (i.e. portraits). I also think that eventually the novelty of the lens would wear off and I wouldn't use it all that often if it was in my camera bag. I think if I ever get the urge to experiment with a Fisheye Lens in the future, I'll just rent one again and save my money to purchase a more practical lens.

As always, thank you for stopping by and taking the time to check out my photos!

Michele Whitacre is a portrait photographer serving Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding area. Visit Michele's website at michelewhitacrephotography.com. Become a fan of Michele's work on Facebook. Follow Michele's updates on Twitter.

Fun With a Fisheye | Part 3

If you missed my other three posts about shooting with a Fisheye Lens, they can be found here, here, and here.

Day 5...

I decided to try something a little different with the lens today, and take some night shots with it. So, I headed back downtown with my camera and tripod to have a little fun. This was only my second time experimenting with night photography, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it! I definitely see more of it in my future.

These were all taken from the same parking garage as the images from Day 4.  (I guess I need to spend some time downtown seeing where else I can shoot from, huh?)

I really liked how they all turned out!...

Hubby and I had to jump into this one, just for fun!  This is definitely one of my absolute favorites of the week...

Day 6...

All of these photos were taken in Tempe, and I must say that they are by far my favorite set of photos from the week.  When I first got the lens, I had decided that I wanted to try to find a bridge to photograph, but where was I going to find a bridge in Phoenix?  I did a little research, and found that there were several bridges very close to each other that cross the Salt River in Tempe.  I had a ridiculous amount of fun playing with the lines of the bridges in all of these photos, and bending them every which way with the lens.  I do have a favorite of the bunch, but it was a pretty hard choice!

Here is another photo, where I zoomed the lens a little bit to use the lens as a wide angle and decrease the distorted effect...

Fav!  I just love all the curving lines in the image...

Believe it or not, I still have one more post of Fisheye photos to share with you, so I hope you'll join me again soon for Part 4!

Which photo set do you like best... the night photos or the bridge photos?

Michele Whitacre is a portrait photographer serving Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding area. Visit Michele's website at michelewhitacrephotography.com. Become a fan of Michele's work on Facebook. Follow Michele's updates on Twitter.

Fun With a Fisheye | Part 2

If you missed my other two posts about shooting with a Fisheye Lens, they can be found here and here.

Day 3...

I didn't have a lot of time to shoot this day, so I headed out to our backyard to try to get a few fun photos of Zoe & Lexi. It turned out to be a lot harder than I had imagined!

One of the nice things about the lens was that it did make it easier to get a photo of the two of them together. They didn't have to be sitting very close to each other for the lens to make it look like they were pretty close...

I took this one to give a better perspective of just how far away the lens makes things look. My arm is obviously not that long!...

The dogs didn't really like having the camera so close to them.  If Lexi had turned her head just an inch or two her nose would have hit the camera lens (which happened more than once!), and it kind of freaked her out a little...

Loved this one!  I thought it was fun how curved it made the dogs legs and bodies look...

Day 4...

All of these photos were taken in and around downtown Phoenix.

I meant to try to take more photos like this one, looking up at the tall buildings but I actually forgot until I was on my way back home!...

Kevin went with me for my morning of shooting, and let me take a few crazy photos of him.  This one was my fav...

I'm a sucker for palm trees!  I love this one, but wish it was a true circle image...

These next two were taken from the top of a parking garage.  Between the two photos I shifted the position of the camera a little bit and you can really see how much more the buildings curve the higher in the frame they are...

This one is my all time favorite photo that I took during the week!  It looks like something out of a movie with the ominous clouds looking like they are circling over the city...

These next few photos were taken through the windows of one of the taller buildings downtown, so please excuse the reflections in the photos!  I didn't have a filter for the lens since it wasn't mine.

I was really having fun using the larger buildings as curving frames for some of the smaller buildings out in the distance...

I really liked how much of the landscape you could see in this next one...

Love this one!  Fun, right?...

So, which one do you like best?

By the third and fourth day, I started to feel like I was figuring the lens out a bit and was able to branch out a little bit and try a few more fun things.  I'll be back again soon with Part 3, so check back to see what else I captured during my week with the Fisheye!

Michele Whitacre is a portrait photographer serving Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding area. Visit Michele's website at michelewhitacrephotography.com. Become a fan of Michele's work on Facebook. Follow Michele's updates on Twitter.

Fun With a Fisheye | Part 1

If you missed my original post about shooting with a Fisheye Lens, you can find it here.

The first evening that I used the Fisheye Lens, I just walked around my neighborhood taking photos of random things that I came across.  I was mostly trying to get a feel for the lens and see how it worked.

Day 1...

This photo was taken with me laying with my feet next to the trunk of the tree (I deliberately left them in the photo for a little perspective, and you can see them in the bottom right corner ).  The tree was near the top of a small hill, so I am laying a bit upside down with my head lower than my feet.  If you look at the top left of the photo, you can see the cars that are on the road behind me...

Here is the same photo, but I have inverted it, to give a different view. In this one the street and cars are easier to see...

The instant I saw that photo, and realized just how much of the scene around me the Fisheye Lens could capture, I was in love! I felt like a kid in a candy store - eyes wide open, staring at all the possibilities in front of me!

This next photo was probably more fun to shoot than it is too view. What I really should have done was tried recording a video through the lens to see how it looked. Watching the cars zoom up and down the curves felt like I was watching a kid playing with toy cars on a race track...

Day 2...

All of the following photos were taken just a few miles from our neighborhood.  I have no idea what the buildings used to be, but I'm a sucker for old, falling apart, graffiti covered dwellings!

This next photo really shows how much the lens curves things, as the two railroad tracks are parallel to each other in reality...

I hadn't quite learned my lesson about getting close enough with this next image.  I was close enough to that wood pile on the right side that I could easily touch it, and it still looks a million miles away!  I was checking out how the horizon curved through the lens when I moved it away from the horizontal...

I had read that Fisheye Lens often have a lot of chromatic aberration, and you can really see it in this photo...

One of the practical uses I can see for a Fisheye Lens it to be able to photograph inside of doorways and capture the whole room inside.  I never could have gotten the following two shots without it.  This photo is taken looking through the door way that is visible in the photo above...

This is another view into the small building taken looking through the doorway that is visible on the left side of the above image...

I then moved on to another nearby building.  Those grey metal beams in the foreground of the photo aren't curved in reality!...

This photo is taken looking straight at the wall that is on the left side on the above photo.  I love how it curves everything and makes it look like it is bulging out straight at you!...

For this final image of the day, I zoomed in a little bit to use the lens more as a wide angle and minimize the barrel effect.  On my camera body, this would be a nice feature of the lens but on a full frame camera this photo would have still been quite distorted (and all of the above photos would have been true circle images instead of just the edges having the black rim like they do)....

So, which one is your favorite?  My two favs are the first and the last ones.

I really enjoyed my first two days of shooting with the lens, and felt like I really learned a lot about what I was able to do with it!  But, there are lots more photos coming up, so stay tuned for more fun Fisheye pictures in Part 2!

Michele Whitacre is a portrait photographer serving Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding area. Visit Michele's website at michelewhitacrephotography.com. Become a fan of Michele's work on Facebook. Follow Michele's updates on Twitter.

BBL 2011-2012 | Rent a Fisheye Lens

#11 RENT A FISHEYE LENS AND EXPERIMENT WITH IT

Why did I include this on my Bucket List?

I included this because I thought it would be great to experiment with a new and different realm of photography. Every time I have seen a photo taken with a Fisheye Lens, I've always thought to myself that the images look like so much fun to create. I really wanted to test my limits and see what I could do with one.

Was the experience what I had hoped it would be?

Using a Fisheye Len was everything I was hoping it would be and so much more! It was such a great learning experience and really got me thinking outside of my comfort zone. Shooting with this lens was so different from shooting with the lenses that I am used to using, and I had to look at everything in a different way. It brought an excitement to shooting that I haven't felt since the first time I picked up my camera. Did I end up with any show stopping images? Nope. Did I have A TON of fun playing around with this lens for the past week? You bet I did!

The details...

I'm going to spare you the lesson on Fisheye Lens, but I will say that if you ever consider renting or purchasing one, make sure you do your research and know exactly what you are getting! I was surprised by how much there was to learn while I was trying to decide which lens to rent.

I settled on the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye. I don't shoot with a full frame camera body, so most of the other options weren't going to provide that typical fisheye distortion look. That's all well and good if you're wanting just a wide angle lens, but I wanted to have myself a little fun seeing just how much I could distort reality! And distort I did!

It took me a while to get the hang of using the lens. Everything I read about shooting with a Fisheye said that you have to get close to your subject, and that everything would look farther away than in real life. They weren't kidding! One of the photos I tried taking was of a flag off in the distance framed by trees on both sides of it. It truly would have been a gorgeous shot with a zoom lens. I took it with the Fisheye, got home and put in on the computer, and I would have needed a magnifying glass to even see the flag!

After the first couple of times using the lens, I finally started to figure out what it could and couldn't do, and that's when the fun began! My goal for my week was to spend as much time with the lens as possible, and see how many different things I could come up with to photograph, while applying the fun barrel effect that Fisheyes are known for.

I will be sharing a series of posts with my Fisheye photos over the next week or so, but for now I'm going to leave you with this:

It's a series of photos I took of myself while hand holding the camera. It was kinda fun to see the different ways I could distort my face! This was my second time shooting with the camera, so I hadn't quite learned yet how close I needed to get for maximum distortion. If you've never seen photos taken with a Fisheye lens before, take a close look at each of the images and see how things are distorted. Check out how the headboard on the bed, and the whole room in general are curved. Check out how long my arms look, and how small and far away my body looks. Check out how HUGE my forehead and nose look in some of the photos, and how about those glasses?? I purposely wore them, instead of my contacts, because I thought it would add even more fun to the photos.

I hope you'll come back later this week to see more photos from my Fisheye Lens Experiment!

P.S. What do you think? Should this count as my September Self-Portrait? :)

Do you want to see my entire 2011-2012 Bucket List? You can find it here.

Michele Whitacre is a portrait photographer serving Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding area. Visit Michele's website at michelewhitacrephotography.com. Become a fan of Michele's work on Facebook. Follow Michele's updates on Twitter.

Birthday Bucket List | 2011-2012 Edition

To quote the great Ferris Bueller (what can I say? I'm an 80s kid), "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

Life does move pretty fast these days, and it seems to be moving faster with each passing year!  In an attempt to slow down and make time to have a little fun, I've started keeping what I call my Birthday Bucket List.  Basically, it is a list of new things I want to do before my next birthday.

When I first started doing this, the number of things that I wanted to do in the coming year was the same as the age I would be turning on my next birthday, but as the years started adding up I found that I just couldn't keep up.  So, instead I've narrowed the list down to 12 things, with the goal of attempting to mark one off my list each month.  (But don't hold me to that!)

So, here is my 2011-2012 Birthday Bucket List:

1. Plant a palm tree... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

2. Make pasta from scratch... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

3. Find a new music artist/band that I love... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

4. Take a vow of silence for 24 hours... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

5. Fast for 24 hours... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

6. Cruise around the Hawaiian Islands... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

7. Try to surf... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

8. Try a new sport or form of exercise... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

9. Take a photo a day for a 30 days... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

10. Take a photoshop class... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

11. Rent a Fisheye lens and experiment with it... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

12. Rent a Macro lens and experiment with it... CHECKED + BLOGGED!

As I complete the items, I will mark them off the list and write a blog post about the experience.  I'm really looking forward to the coming year, and getting to learn, see, and do some exciting new things!

Michele Whitacre is a portrait photographer serving Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding area. Visit Michele's website at michelewhitacrephotography.com. Become a fan of Michele's work on Facebook. Follow Michele's updates on Twitter.