Lensbaby for Street Photography

 Double Glass Optic 50m, f4, 1/4000sec ISO 200

Lensbaby and street photography, not an easy task but great tool to separate your subject from his surroundings.  I was in Palermo Viejo a neighborhood of Buenos Aires in Argentina, beautiful country, and an amazing city, that morning I decided to do street photography bringing only my camera and one lens my Lensbaby Composer and the double glass optic. The way this optic works like most of the Lensbaby optics, you have to manually add your aperture, small little disc that have a variety of size and shape.  One hint for starter, it is way easier to use f5.6 and up aperture to start an learn you way down to  f1.2 that will save you a great amount of frustration, my favorite aperture using this optic for street photography and portrait is f4.

f4, 1/400sec, ISO 200

 Double Glass 50m, f4, 1/1250 sec ISO 200 the morning news!

Back to Palermo, that day I decided to go for f4, wandering in the street close to the church I saw that homeless woman, in reality at that moment I regretted not having my Canon 24-105 lens "my favorite street lens", it means not only to be creative but to get closer to my subject, the double glass optic is only 50m. I gave the woman money and began shooting, no tripod, manual focus, at f4.  I learned 3 valuable lessons that day, never go out without my 24-105, start using Lensbaby optic more often and always bring a tripod.

The result was very interesting, now on I always have Lensbaby with me, it's a very creative tool that doesn't take a lot of space. For better resolution and more of Argentina images visit my site at

http://dianedugas-imagen.com
  

Black and White Fine Art Nude Project

I always liked black and white for fine art nude,  I like the simplicity of it,  no color distraction at all.
For this project I wanted simple beautiful arty images, minimalist style with a minimum of props focusing on the shape of my subject keeping her anonymous, no eyes contact no facial expression.

I find that eyes contact and facial expression are more suitable for glamour and for this project I really wanted fine art nude.

It was done with a minimum of equipment, Canon 5d Markiii, Canon  24-105 Lens, Lensbaby Pinehole and soft focus optics, 2 Canon Speedlites 600EX-RT on a tripod bouncing on a circular white reflector and Canon radio transmitter  ST-E3-RT for the flashes that were set manually.

We worked in a very small space in my bedroom, not more than 10x10 feet, using mostly only one white wall that had no distraction, it was far from the comfort of a studio, but nothing is impossible when working with a great subject!

We did the best with what we got, and the result of that cooperation and interaction between my subject and I was the most beautiful set of fine art black and white images.

I didn't want to put the images on my blog by respect for my subject as they can be copied, and put directly into google public gallery, but if you want to view them you can visit the gallery on my website just follow this link Fine Art Nude Project


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Grunge!!!

Grunge is very trendy and very interesting, it's the in thing in photography right now,  what exactly is grunge photography?

I don't think I have the exact answer, and I don't think that there is an exact answer as grunge like other kind of digital imagery is extremely creative and depends on the artist vision.

Normally these images or creations take a lot of editing, many hours in Photoshop, a lot of frustration and unsuccessful work that end up in the garbage bin, that's part of my experience and like many of other digital art, patience and practice is required.

The grunge effect can be described as dirty, gloomy, dark, old, eerie, using textures and mute color.

 The urban graffiti-like design is often done using one, two, three or more images.

The following images were done using textures, vectors, one to 5 images and hours of Photoshop editing.

City Woman with Tatiana Vladimirovna, done with 2 images, a lot of texture and editing

Miror, only one image using texture, brushes, and vectors.

Help me with Jessy Cortes, using 2 images, textures, vectors, brushes.

Dream with Christina Patterson, using 5 images, textures, brushes.

Bullet Man, using 3 images, texture and brushes.

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Session Boudoir, Lightroom Mute Color Preset, Model Jessy Cortes

When shooting Crazy For Love with my friend Jessy, we tried different outfits, props, lenses and lighting effects, during that set up time, I did few test shots, "a boudoir mini session", it was a great way to warm up.

I decided to process all of the images in Photoshop to do the basic corrections, after what I imported all of them into Lightroom, and applied Jade preset from Scott Wyden Delightful series, this preset added a hint of nostalgia and lowered the saturation,  it's a perfect fit for boudoir, the Delightful series cost only $5.00.

 I like to use Lightroom when I want to batch process my images, it's fast and easy.

Behind the scene shots,

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Crazy For Love with Jessy Cortes

This story was inspired by love, love that end, a tragic story of a woman that became crazy after her lover left her.

We had a lot of fun doing this one, it was done at my friend David Café , "León Café Bar". It was an opportunity to set a small studio in a different environment.  For this session I used  2 Canon Speedlites 600ex-rt with a radio transmitter Canon ST-E3-RT, a small LED light, a soft box "Lastolite Beautybox 38cm x 38cm for one of the Speedlite and  a circular white reflector for the second one. To be able to control the exact amount of power I wanted from each flash I  used manual setting.

All the photos were done with a Canon 5DMarkiii and a Canon 24-105 and a Lensbaby soft optic. We also did some glamor shots that day that will be part off my next post.

Jessy was amazing like always, her play was so intense, my goal was to capture the intensity and let the photos echo how great her performance was.
 

The story,

" after her lover left her she went out for a drink, got drunk and became sad, and crazy.

Second part,

That poor woman got obsessed and crazy, obsessed with her reflection wanted to kill this reflection...
As you can see  Jessy got into her personage like a pro, she had no fear, she was amazing, a real actress a real star.
To get her to look as bad as possible, we used make up and harsh lighting, and the rest was Jessy play!!! I was only taking the shots, to get the mood she created.

I like to take the time to say thank you to my friend David, his Cafe was the perfect setting for our story. I also wanted to mention how lucky I am to work with Jessy, she is so talented and so generous, thank you Jessy:)))

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Penelope with Jessy Cortes

Penelope is a beautiful song a story from Joan Manuel Serrat about a woman that waited all her life for her lover to come back, going back to the train station hoping, a sad story as he never came back to her or, they were never able to reconnect, as the time passed they couldn't recognized each other.

Penelope story was the inspiration for last week story teller photo session with my best body Jessy Cortes, she is an amazing woman, and she did like always a perfect job. We had a lot of fun, I only used my 5DMarkiii and one lens Canon 24-105, when working with Jessy I have no fear, even taking photo under harsh light, with her nothing is impossible.  I used different preset in my processing to reflect the past, using nostalgic color and bw filters.

 It was a great day of work, , we added these photos just to add to this sad story, to have fun using this space, Mendoza is one of the perfect place to play in a dangerous place without being outlaws, the authority are extremely patient and only told us to move when they needed to move the train!

 

 

Behind the scene with Karl our dear friend, bodyguard and make up artist for the day!!!

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