Dragons Coven ~ Photography Challenge

Yes, it is Musume, who is still doing the Photography Challenge! At least I am having fun, and it makes me try new, weird things! Anyways, beware of photography rant ahead.

Anyways, I got some good news on October/November, so I decided to splurge to congratulate myself... and ended up purchasing more vintage lenses. Why? Because they are cheap, and I don't need autofocus to focus dolls. Dolls will "wait" for me to be ther 15min trying to get tack-sharp focus. Anyways, I found this guy who had an arsenal of vintage lenses, and among them, had a very unique thing: a Carl Zeiss Jena 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 that was using the Minolta mount! I had to research them as well because I only knew the moder Sony Zeiss. It turns out that this lens was from 1962, and Jena was the side of the factory that ended up in East Germany. The lens is huge and heavy (about 700gr just the lens).

I wasn't that keen on getting telephoto lenses for dolls, but as I said, it was cheap (like USD 55) and in such a perfectly mint condition that even included the original (leather!!!) carry case. So I practiced a bit at home with it, and went to the park. The photography challenge had Full Body and Silhouette. I know I did both already, but I wanted a different take on it: I wanted to make the dragons standout in a fully blurred background. Here is my top photo, and before/afters plus setup photos underneath!

I honestly don't remember the settings for all of these photos, but this lens has a minimal focusing distance of 1m to 3m. That means that I had to be quite far away from the dragons. Also, it is a zooming lens, which means that you can zoom in *with* the lens, instead of having to move yourself walking-in and out. But, here is the before/after of that one!

Now, here comes another one, with "backstage photos". This is the final, edited shot:

I know that Eiar looks as if he is about to fall, but oh well! I love, love, *love* the bokeh effect on that photo! This lens is amazing honestly. But I was literally using a whole, large staircase in a park. Don't believe me?

At the left you see the lens in mt camera, full of numbers. I'll explain. First, the lens is vintage so the thing that says "Fotga MD-NEX" is an adapter that allows me to use a Minolta-mount lens in a Sony E-mount camera. From there, we have the lens... which is quite large. So, in terms of numbers, I was at 200mm (vertical numbers on the right), using a focusing distance of 2m (the horizontal white number at the top, just below the yellow), and with an f-stop of f4.5. Camera-wise, I was also at 300 ISO, with about 1/60 shooting speed. I was able to go that low because I was resting the camera on the floor. Literally.

So if you now look at the right photo... that is the distance I was in. The photo that you saw is NOT cropped. I was *that* far away, just to get that closeup of the dragons. Amazing, isn't it? I took that one with my phone, handheld, so please excuse the quality. Before the backstage photo you can see the before-and-after of this shot.

Now, another thing that I realised about this lens is that yes, photos look amazing but the originals sometimes are a bit dull: the colours tend to be on the muted side. However, it did NOT require a lot of effort on the editing side, and after that, the colours popped out! Look at the following from that set! I'll share the final on top, and then before/after just right after it.

Okay, just a single word. BOKEH! I know, I'm a sucker for bokeh, but it looks so pretty! That green-ish photo with all the bokeh has me so proud about it, honestly. And the point is that I wasn't at a fast f-stop (like f1.4) to get that. But between the zooming, and the distance between my subject (the dragons) and the background, I managed to get such a pretty bokeh. I'm so proud!

Another thing that is quite notorious is how you can't trust what you see. Those photos above look *nothing* like the originals. The colours are very, very different from one to the other.

Anyways, the last experiment I did was putting the dragons at a different distance between each other, rather than aligned. So Nyx was in the background (violet, far left), then Aion about 4cm in front of her, Theros 4cm ahead of Aion, and finally Eiar 4cm ahead of Theros. And I kept my settings and focused on Theros (the pink one). I love the effect! She is extremely sharp and in-focus, while the Aion and Eiar have similar degrees of blurryness, but Nyx at the back is very blurry. What do you think?

Okay, enough photography rant for a decade I think. Do you enjoy this types of posts? I honestly enjoy phtoography so much! If you want this type of post, is there something that you would like me to tackle? A particular setup?