As I have said many times, we are drowning in images, and many of them are quite good. (Lots are terrible, but they’re not meant to be works of art; the point-and-shoot, camera-phone photo is just for catching the moment, usually with people you know.) I have really good lenses for sharpness. (The Canon RF 24-70mm is top-notch for a range of purposes; the EF 70-200mm is a great long zoom; the 50mm f1.2 and the 85mm are great portrait lenses.) So if a client needs sharp, well-exposed images, with good lighting and imaginative framing and composition, I can do all that.
What turns my crank, I have to admit, are creative images, captured at the boundaries: low light, low contrast (low-key); high contrast black and white, with lots of structure; images taken with a slower shutter speed, and the movement of either the subject or the camera, creating interesting blur; selective-focus images, in which one part of the image is relatively sharp and higher contrast, and the rest is slightly blurred; or images that have a kind of diffusion over them, as though there is light mist in the air. I like playing with the post-processing, too, darkening, lightening, increasing the saturation of color selectively, and so on.
Some of these creative techniques work especially well with three subjects: clouds, flowers, and crowds of people. Here are some examples of selective focus (using the Lensbaby Spark lens, the Composer Pro II, with the Edge 80 and the Sweet 22 optics) from my January 2025 Caribbean cruise photos. Notice the subtle elements on the horizon in the top images: do you see the city skyline? In some of the images the clouds are blurred, and the sea, the catamaran, or the horizon is the main subject; in others, it is the clouds that are the subject and the sea is a mottled blur of color.
Flowers and Vegetation
I was carrying a 27-pound bag of photo gear on my back for some of our excursions. I didn’t feel like walking everywhere to take a shot here or there. In places like Grand Turk, there wasn’t much to see outside the beach area, and Holland America’s Half Moon Cay (Bahamas) was a very controlled environment: there was a beach, an outdoor cafeteria area, and places you could go to ride horses or look at stingrays, neither of which interested me. So in some locations I found flowers, and settled in to photograph them. I shot them from different angles and under different light (as the sun was sometimes hidden by clouds), using a range of lenses and apertures. Sometimes I was looking for sharpness in one part, and blur and diffusion (like a mist) in others. With these images, the key things are the composition, especially the balance of light and dark, and the texture of the bright, diffused parts. I also shot palm trees, palm fronds, berries in a tree. For some images, I deliberately did not focus the Spark lens on anything, but let its star-shaped insert create abstract photo designs.
Crowds and Individuals in Selective Focus
I have really come to love the Spark lens from Lensbaby. It is a really simple lens. You set the shutter speed. The aperture (the size of the hole the light goes through) is constant, so you can’t change it. You bend the flexible front of the lens around until whatever you want to be in focus is sharp. Then you press the shutter button. Unlike my regular lenses (like the RF 24-70mm), I never know exactly what I’m going to get, and that’s fun. There are lots of interesting (and uninteresting) failures. But every once in a while, you get a great image. (I consider one or two of the images of the catamaran in front of the city on the faint horizon, at the top, to be a great image.)
I found in an earlier cruise that I could get some painterly images of crowds on the quays in front of the cruise ships; the upper parts of the ships could be in focus, and the crowds below treated like smears or dabs of color. Here’s a sample from our January cruise.
If there is any image on my site that you would like as a print (any size), let me know and I will be happy to quote you a very reasonable price.
Till next time . . . [click].