[Portrait of Thomas Hawk San Francisco Photoblogger] Chicago Portait Photographers – Continuum Photography

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to join a group of Chicago photographers in a photowalk organized by the San Francisco blogger Thomas Hawk. Thomas is well known for his activism for photographer rights. In the post 9/11 world photography often gets the short straw, and there are a lot of misinformed security and law enforcement folks out there who are detaining and harassing photographers who are practicing photography within their legal rights. If you need specifics Thomas’ blog is full of them.

In addition to getting to meet Thomas, I was there to try out our new Lensbaby Composer. Lensbabies are simple lenses that use a bellows system to obtain a sweet spot of focus surrounded by a graduated blur. They are all manual lenses with no electronic communication with the camera body, so results can be somewhat tricky and sporadic. One might argue that similar effects could be obtained in post process, but personally I’d rather pull it off in the camera, it just has more magic to me that way. We had one of the early 2.0 variations (now called the “Muse”), and it honestly was a pain to use. The newer Composer is much easier to deal with and I have a feeling I’ll be using it a lot more. If you like intentional blurs and that weird dreamy effect, the Lensbaby is for you.

- Josh

Oh, and the first two shots were taken with a standard 50mm lens, the ones following are all Lensbaby material.

Thomas Hawk.

The Crown Fountain in Millenium Park is back to full operation after the winter season and I can tell you that it was PACKED full of kids going nuts in the water. It’s always a fun place to shoot as everyone is having a good time.

A Metra train passing by.

The Crown Fountain. Now would you want your face blown up that large?

I love alleyways.

The lensbaby is essentially a 50mm focal range (i.e. not so wide), so it was really impossible to get Calder’s Flamingo in it’s entirety unless I stood pretty far back, so I just decided to focus in on the details of the sculpture. A wide angle lensbaby attachment is on it’s way to us soon though!

It’s Sears (er, Willis) Tower peaking through a couple of buildings. Our Chicago loft is very close to Sears Tower.

Chicago Board of Trade building.