Portraits with the Velvet 56

My shots of my grand daughter using the Lensbaby Velvet 56…

I honestly don't remember the aperture setting, but I'm guessing it may have been 4 judging how hard a time I had getting both eyes in focus.

Other that a little exposure boost of .75 and a little eye brightening, the only thing I did to this one is remove nose boogies. AND I did change the camera calibration to camera portrait (in Lightroom). I just heard that tip this weekend and what a difference!

Being a photographer you'd think the first thing I'd do when I got her home from daycare would be to clean her face!

I used to loath using the clone/heal brush in Lightroom but with some practice you can make it work on the worst of the worst. 

Here is a close up of the before and after with all the adjustments dots I used.
(For all the other shots I used Photoshop healing brush and clone stamp tools.)

A few tweaks with Pretty Presets Clean and Creative Advanced Workflow.

Then my own adjustments to create the monochrome below.

Pretty Pastels Raw LR4: Alabaster 

Original slightly tweaked and cleaned up.

Pretty Pastels Raw LR4: Pink Skies

Pretty Pastels Raw LR4: Matt B&W

I decided to try a couple of Kim Klassen's presets on these.

KK_onair

KK_gentle

And one more…

I really was surprised I got as many as I did having to manually focus with this lens.

'They' say if it doesn't add to the photo, crop it out. Maybe that would be the case here. I thought the hair on the right was a bit distracting so I really do like this square crop.

I just love this sweet girl!

You can see my floral edit using this lens here.

It's Texture Tuesday at Kim's where there's a lot of editing with Lightroom presets. Go check out the loveliness there.

I'm also joining Lisa at Life Thru the Lens.

Adventure with the Velvet 56

This week I found a fun lens in my friend's camera bag! It is the new Lensbaby Velvet 56. (I must admit I love the name.) She loaned it to me for a few days and here is what I found through this lens in my garden.

The only thing that is an issue with me is that this is a manual focus lens. It's very hard for me to see that detail and I tend to get eye strain in the process.

All these photos are unedited except on a few I did a little exposure boost (noted). Otherwise, no crop or anything because I wanted you to see what the lens actually did.

I love that dreamy look but this shot was one of my favorites.

There are 7 aperture settings from 1.6 to 16. The three apertures 1.6, 2 and 2.8 give you the ethereal dreamy look. The distance settings range from 5" to infinity.

Here are my daisies beginning with 1.6 aperture.

Another of my favorites!

(slight exposure boost)

(slight exposure boost)

This morning was so windy I did a little experiment inside. The aperture on this dried flower was set at 2.8 and I just adjusted the distance setting and moved a bit to get the different looks.

It was cool to play with but my pocket book has another lens on it's priority list. I did manage a few shots of my grand daughter, even though she doesn't stand still, that I'll post this weekend.

Happy Friday everyone!

Linking up with Kim for Friday Finds.