I’ve felt a bit uninspired by my actual photography practice of late. I was ill for a week or so, but it went back farther than that, really, back to early January even. I think it had something to do with diet, maybe, or rest, or exercise, but none of that has changed much. Allahu Alim.

In any case, I wasn’t particularly feeling anything I shot, so I was really happy to have a stack of books to unbox and scribble about. But the time has come to just throw all this stuff out there, whether it’s any good or not… So today, I bring you:

The C.L.A.M. and the Rose.

Hana had been hunting for another couple of mini roses to add to the collection out front, and then on Valentine’s morning, I needed some milk for coffee, and Kroger needed to divest its stock of Valentine goodies, so we all got something we wanted.

Sadly, I dropped one of the roses on the way to the car and a couple of buds snapped off. Not to worry, though, one of them got to meet the C.L.A.M. Fun times!

I started out with the mamiya/sekor 50mm f/2, reversed (of course) and it did fine, as usual.

star

Nice and sharp where it needs to be and soft and dreamy where it doesn’t.

One problem, though, when you flip a lens around backwards, the depth of field shrinks dramatically… actually, at the distances I was working, the depth of field was tiny regardless, but still, I decided to switch to something else.

The 75-150 E Series also handled beautifully, as one might expect from that legendary lens, but again, depth of field was a bit wanting. I could get the rose in focus, or the water droplets in focus, but I couldn’t get the droplets in focus without completely losing the rose to the bokeh, so I more or  less gave up and just played around with light a bit.

emerge

And with a little bit of play while shooting, and a tiny bit more in Capture One Pro, and despite my apathy and disinterest in these pictures when I initially started the editing, I think this one came out especially nice…

bask

MashaAllah.

So the mini rose met the C.L.A.M., and they got along well.

I have some new toys on the way, but I won’t be ready to share anything from them for a bit, so next week look forward to some more film fun: Porta week…

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