[Kombisaurus]

All taken on a GF1 camera with C-Mount adaptor and a generic eBay 25mm f/1.4 CCTV lens. Processing in Lightroom followed by Poladroid.

[Toad]

Well, I have to say that is pretty cool stuff. Obviously any discussion of vignetting, or anything else like that is irrelevant. Nicely captured and presented!

[Kombisaurus]

Thanks Rob. I only discovered Poladroid last night and thought it was worth a bit of a play.... I'm not quite sure if I like it or not.

The lens I used (a 25mm f/1.4 C-Mount no-name CCTV lens, $30 new on eBay) is cheap, tiny, and full of flaws.
It is surprisingly sharp in the middle but quickly becomes rediculously soft towards the edges. It vignettes badly and when the aperture is stopped down the image circle is clearly visible with totally black corners. The barrel distortion is obvious. The bokeh circles distort more as they appear closer to the corners, giving a unique "swirling" effect to OOF areas. Point it anywhere near the sun and it fills up with flare instantly.
Overall it is optically pretty much what you'd expect from a $30 lens; the technically worst lens I can ever remember using.... and I love it! It oozes charm and character and turns the GF1 into a Lomo camera.
At f/1.4 it is fast, at 25mm (50mm equiv) it is a useful focal length, and you can fit two of these lenses and the lens adapter easily into a shirt pocket. It is the perfect lens to take on a night out!

Here are a few of the shots above without the Poladroid processing:


1. Click here for higher-res.


2. Click here for higher-res.


3. Click here for higher-res.


4. Click here for higher-res.


5. Click here for higher-res.


6. Click here for higher-res.

[matthew]

That must be an absolute blast - and I like the 'droid processing, too. It's one of those things where a few would be a bit much, but a lot is just right. My favourite has to be the fifth of the processed series, but there's a lot there to look at. I have to say that looking at the last of the processed shots at the higher resolution (ah, smugmug - gotta love it) makes for a really interesting shot as well. Neat.

[Don Schaeffer]

What actually happened here? Was this a polaroid camera?

[matthew]

It's a freeware polaroid-emulator program - you can find it here: http://www.poladroid.net/

[Toad]

It honestly doesn't matter what happened here technique-wise - the point is that something happened that challenged our perceptions of what a great photograph s and Kombi has stretched our envelopment - let's celebrate that!. We are a small group - let's revel in our victories...

[Irma]

I like very much the way you presented you pictures. I am not big fan of Polaroid effect but from all I have seen yours are by far the best. The one I really like a lot is the first one in the 6th row. It looks to me as a very representative. Those were the Polaroids I used to see, probably because my Dad was a bit slow and we always saw pictures like this one.

Your collection also got me thinking that the subject in the picture is a factor for this kind of effect...

Thanks for sharing...

[Zig]

Sorry chums; for me this is the soft underbelly of emulated retro; jolly nice romp though.

[Kombisaurus]

Thanks for the comments everyone. I find the varied responses very interesting.

Firstly I should point out that I created, processed, and posted these photos without a lot of thought. There are no hidden messages or deep thought processes here, I was simply trying to loosen up, play with a new lens, practice a style of "shooting from the hip" and enjoy the process of photography. And it was fun. I had no intention of uploading, processing, or even necessarily keeping any of the photos I was shooting.

But reading the responses to my original post got me thinking more about the mental process I went through and I wanted to dissect the "gut feeling" I was following.
Although I didn't think much about what I was doing while I was doing it, these images didn't just appear at random. Every step along the way was a deliberate one, and every photograph was deliberately framed. They may be whimsical, small or even insignificant moments in life, but they are chosen moments, not random.

One of the few conscious decisions I made on that day was to shoot with my GF1 and the opcially-challenged 25mm f/1.4 CCTV lens. In an attempt to rebel against my sterile modern DSLR kit with its attempt to achieve IQ perfection, I made a deliberate effort to go lo-fi. The 25mm CCTV lens makes no excuses about it's flaws, and I love that about it. It's like comparing a fancy restaurant meal to a home-cooked meal by my grandmother. Technically the restauruant meal might tick all the boxes, but there's nothing like my grandmother's home-cooking.

In the collection of 20 shots I posted, there are 10 shots I took from inside a car "shooting from the hip". I had a fairly tight aperture set and the lens pre-focused to about 10m in front of the car, then as a subject appeared I would point the camera in the general direction and click the shutter without even looking at the LCD. This technique works particularly well with a small camera like the GF1 with a manual lens because you can easily hold and operate it one-handed and easily see and adjust focus distance without looking through the camera. The keeper rate is pretty poor for this style of shooting, but I got some shots I'm really happy with, and it does improve with practice.
The other 10 shots were taken in the more traditional way although still with manual focus and aperture because that's the only way to shoot with this lens. The more I practice manual focus the more intuitive and useful it becomes. I sometimes forget the GF1 does actually support autofocus!
In total I ended up with 275 photos that day. Many of them instant throwaways, and of the others they are mostly dull photos that I wouldn't normally regard as keepers. To be honest, my day had been pretty quiet and uneventful, so a bunch of fairly dull photos was a pretty accurate representation of things. But how do I express uneventfullness in a way that isn't boring to the viewer?

As far as the processing goes, as normal I downloaded everything into Lightroom when I got home and had a flick through all the shots, flagging my favourites along the way for further processing.
Later that everning, for some reason I stumbled across a website that mentioned the Poladroid software. It sounded like a bit of fun so I downloaded it and had a play. Given the whimsical lo-fi nature of these shots I thought they were particularly appropriate. In fact, I think the reason I gravitated towards Poladroid for these shots wasn't to make them look retro (after all, there is nothing retro about the photographs themselves except the single shot of the Mustang). It was because to me Polaroids are associated with intimate, whimsical, fun, personal stories about small moments in life. Traditionally Polaroids are personal photos shared between friends or stuck on fridges, not photos of important events published in the media. The capture of small moments is what these photos are all about, so it made sense. However, like many stylized processing techniques, there is a line which is easy to cross beyond which such effects can ruin a shot or become cliche or cheezy. The heavier the processing, the trickier it is to use appropriately. I cringe when I view other people's heavily-processed photos, and as such I understand these shots might trigger the gag reflex in others.

Finally the choice to present them as a collection of 20 instead of individually or in small groups was also deliberate. Some photographs can tell a whole story in a single frame, but in this case each of these photographs is a mere fragment. They are words to be put together into sentences and paragraphs that tell a story. They provide context for each other to tell a story.

So that's about it. As I said, on the day I just followed my gut feeling about all of this and it is only in hindsight that I'm trying to dissect my subconscious thought process.
At the end of the day, it was still just in the name of fun.

ps: Matthew, I'm glad you mentioned that "Low Clearance" photo - when I saw that sign it made me think of your photography and I had to take the shot.

[Toad]

Thanks for sharing your process with us.

[nia]

Dear Adrian, these are all so interesting and nice works, I'll come back for to read more all about them, but in the first touches I can say, they are so impressive and well done, it is so nice to see and to learn different projects in photography,

Thank you,
with my love,
nia