Flower Bouquet, old vs. new lens

[Dr Klaus Schmitt]

"old painter style" flower bouquet shots, comparing two soft focus lenses.

A modern 2.5/85mm Kenko soft focus lens:

A real old (ca 1920's) soft focus lens (Spencer Portland):

 

[Asher Kelman]

"old painter style" flower bouquet shots, comparing two soft focus lenses.

A modern 2.5/85mm Kenko soft focus lens:

Klaus,

Usually we might expect the entire vase with it's shadow and perhaps a lace cloth underneath. Having this close up filling the frame in landscape view is very personal.

A real old (ca 1920's) soft focus lens (Spencer Portland):

This is a nostalgic view of things that were. However, nostalgia isn't what it used to be, a pity! Everyone seems to want just the new, the shiny and for lenses, the most uniform, sharp and expensive! So I commend your work with this look. At least Canon still makes the 135mm soft focus lens to the benefit of portraitists and lensbaby and others have created a small fashion boutique sensibility that does show folk the esthetic options.

I might offer that one could remove one leaf on the left corner lower border and the lower 1/3 border on the right, as darkness might improve the images' strength.

Asher

 

[Asher Kelman]

Klaus,

Looking again,

I wonder if I'm seeing posterization of the colors. There seems to be a lack of soft gradations. Also why no sharp focus in the center at least? did you process these images as jpgs?

Asher

 

[Dr Klaus Schmitt]

Yes, it was jpg's and not shot in RAW, which would have given certainly mor eprocessing options and obviously the jpg compression level was way to high. Looking at it again I agree that some better cropping would have helped. The vase was way to modern for what I had in mind, so I suppressed it.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Yes, it was jpg's and not shot in RAW, which would have given certainly mor eprocessing options and obviously the jpg compression level was way to high. Looking at it again I agree that some better cropping would have helped. The vase was way to modern for what I had in mind, so I suppressed it.

People don't often remember that sRGB at 8BIT only has some ~ 3% of the 16 BIT RGB files.

Since you own the lenses, this is a project that can proceed further with new flowers!

Asher

 

[Dr Klaus Schmitt]

Thanks for the hint Asher. I will try and reshoot using full resolution at times!