We know well how much expensive stuff you usually have to buy to do serious Wedding photo work. But how would it look like if you would take these pictures with a Toy lens and a cheap MFT camera? Elisabeth Busani (Flickr) shared his experience shooting a wedding with that stuff:
[shoplink 42873 ebay]$290 for the E-P2 at BigValue[/shoplink]
[shoplink 42872 ebay]$100 for the 26mm f/1.4 Toy Lens on eBay[/shoplink]
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“A special guest”
September, a wedding, an Olympus EP-2 and a f1.4, 26mm Toy Lens from SLR Magic. This is what brings me to this blog, telling you about pictures I’ve shot during a friend’s wedding.
The Toy Lens, as you certainly know, is a very peculiar lens. It’s called “Toy” for a reason, but after having used it extensively for over a year, it’s become much more than that, so I decided to use it as my primary lens for the wedding.
Please note that I was not the official photographer (actually there was no such thing as an official photographer) since my friends preferred to collect the pictures, made by friends and family.
The Toy Lens has a very strong character of its own, the focus is concentrated in the center and moving towards the borders the picture gets gradually blurred. On one hand this “vignette” effect is perfect for portraits and details, since it enables you to focus on one element by blurring the rest, but usually at a wedding you might want to use something more flexible. On the other hand though, you can always use so called technical limitations to your advantage.
The Toy Lens can yield some surprising results also for long and medium shots and if you’re lucky you’ll also be able to capture a spontaneous outburst of joy.
Another one of this lens’ technical defects, which I find very fascinating, is the way direct light get’s diffracted in certain situations. If you use it well it can create interesting effects that underline the sense of airiness and peace of the moment.
I found the lens to be very fitting for situations like these:
and these:
And finally, the lens has a pretty good aperture, so it works quite well in low-light situations (I didn’t use a flash for this shooting).
I am very satisfied with this lens: it saturates the colours and its low-fi character gives my photos a certain peculiar personality. I find it very fitting with my style of photography, which has its root in visual arts (I’m mainly an illustrator by trade).
When you shoot photos at a wedding you need to be quick, always ready to capture that one moment. Using a Toy Lens with a fixed focal length and manual focus makes things more complicated, but I can only recommend you to try that at least once, it’s an interesting challenge, and it’s also a lot of fun!
………Elisabeth Busani………
portfolio: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elisabethbusani/
41 Responses
A note on the “cheap stuff” phrase, not on the camera’s features. Yes, cheap stuff, indeed, now. When it was launched, it cost 949 euro. The same with E-P1 its price fell quickly in spite of its being revolutionary. Not quite the same with E-M5, which sold and still sells well at unreasonably high prices. However, I don’t think the E-M1 will sell this way. Yes, human vanity is relentless. But common sense ought to prevail soon, now that Sony are offering FF at similar prices and Pentax are offering a “cheaper” K-3. Olympus have good products but a terrible marketing strategy and no ethical attitude towards customers – they have been redefining many times now the meaning of the word “cheap”.
I agree with you. Just your last sentence where “ethical attitude” is mentioned is a little… funny. Olympus, as every big corporation worldwide has no ethics, period. Lets stop assign human characteristics to soulless big corporations whose only purpose is profit. So demanding such a thing is utterly unrealistic.
The only problem with that thinking here, in the U.S. is that the U.S. government mandates that corporations have-the-rights-of are treated as if they are people. (BTW I think this is appalling)…but at least in the U.S. Jankoff’s “expectation” is understandable, but he will always be disappointed, as terros’ assessment of corporations is correct. Some corps are more “people friendly” than others though. All that aside…
The photographer here and the toy lens created some FUN images!…regardless of the cost of the equipment.
Bullshit that companies cannot have an ethic, they have a corporate ethic which is how they behave as a corporate of individuals working together. Don’t talk about things you know nothing about.
A corporation’s ethics is to fake an ethic so that people will buy more from them. Their prime directive is still profit-making, otherwise they would be an NGO, not a corporation.
There is some confusion here. Ethics has nothing to do with pricing and making a profit – legally. The stuff Olympus pulled with faking buying subsidiaries is unethical. Designing desirable products and maximizing profits on them is ethical. Actually not doing that would be unethical, since Olympus is a public corporation with commitment to shareholders. The world tried communism and it failed.
It’s very interesting how these opinions on ethic are all true, although some mutually exclusive …
1. The E-P1 wasn’t revolutionary. If any mirrorless camera, then the G1 was revolutionary, and when Olympus followed months later, they introduced a crippled retro-lifestyle camera without viewfinder that wanted to be half point-n-shoot, half serious system camera, but achieved neither.
2. Most mirrorless cameras of all manufacturers were ridiculously overpriced when introduced, especially the E-P1 and E-P2. Which is especially significant since they are not very expensively built, it’s only plastic wrapped in tin.
3. A used E-M5 nowadays sells for $600/€500, sometimes even below that, which is a rather low figure, given that, except for the E-M1, the E-M5 is still the only full-featured mirrorless camera Olympus has ever offered.
4. The A7 is a very attractive camera and it may sell at the same price point as the E-M1, but sensor size isn’t all. With 35mm (equiv.) and if AF is needed, an E-M1 (or E-M5, for that matter) will even be *better* for shooting hand-held in low light, as long as there’s not too much movement in the scene: with the Olympus, you have a 17/1.8 lens plus extremely efficient in-body stabilization, which will make more than up for the full-frame ISO advantage if all you’ve got there is a 35/2.8.
Cheap lens maybe!
But!
It puts the subject right in the centre stage. It also seems to generate a bit of “character”.
Will make some good A4 prints. But if the whole album is from the same lens then could be a bit boring, two or four would be fine in a 20 set, looks pleasantly different.
Not bad, but spending an extra $100 on the lens for a used 20mm 1.7 or something instead would have made much better photos. And what is $100 when capturing a once in a lifetime event? And then if you still wanted that special/weird out of focus look on a few photos you could probably add it in post. Interesting post but not I’m tempted to duplicate.
Nicely composed and fun wedding guest photos, white balance looks excellent 🙂
http://www.flickr.com/groups/43weddings
Not really the kind of pictures I would take for a wedding. Better use a better lense than this crap and do some serious PP afterwards…
Remember it’s not about the gear, but about the state of mind.
State of mind, eh? Then I guess I haven’t done enough LSD to see the brilliance of this…
WOW! Way to totally ignore the ENTIRE point of this article. Seriously, are you trolling? Jesus, mindless twat
this is fun . I like the feeling to the images . I don’t think I would shoot the whole wedding with this lens….I always change lenses during a shoot…and I do not have this lens but I do carry a Holga and a Diana + with me at times.But I do have to disagree with those calling these crap photos…they just are not as sharp …does not make these images bad…I think they are quite good…and scattered in a 20 page album would definitely add interest in my opinion…I like sharp , lo-fi , retro , instagram
Leica made hasselblad made instamatic made images…to me…it’s not how sharp the image is…but what is the story…and I like the story told through this toy lens
nice pics! 🙂
There’s 2 different camps in the photographic world:
One which likes to show reality as perfect as possible, and the other that likes to show a feeling or emotion, not interested in technical perfection.
Let’s all enjoy and do what you like, but also respect the other approach.
The problem is that this lens does not add any emotion to the pictures, it distracts from them. All I see is that the point of view, the subjectivity, is defined by the lens, not by the photographer. I don’t mind lo-fi, I enjoy shooting with my grandpas’s 1950’s folding, but I don’t see the point in imposing oneself such a heavy handicap as a blurry lens that flares like crazy (but with a really horrible flare).
A good photographer with a crappy lens…
“The problem is that this lens does not add any emotion to the pictures, it distracts from them”
I see it as quite to the contrary.
Example, the last shot would not be warm and fuzzy and ‘with the party’ if it was sharp in the centre let alone on the edges as well. It is soft enough to ‘be there’ and with the mood, and enough ‘character’ to be instantly understandable.
The second, fifth and the sixth gain by the warmth of softness. The harshness of a sharp image would not kill them but it would diminish their soul.
One camp shows “reality” and the other shows “emotions”, as if to imply “reality” and “emotion” are disjoint. But actually, what is not “real” about emotion? In fact, what is more “real” than emotion, or less salient in wedding photography terms than the dessicated abstraction of endless streams of numbers that are the vaunted “reality” advocated. Except to the wedding party bent on appreciating their emotional experience, what would you wager is the “reality” they will endorse?
Lose that bet and you’ve missed the boat altogether. It’s not so complicated after all, powers of observations are far more potent than the imaginary (non-existent) universe you think you inhabit. Good luck with that.
It takes an artist to make good pictures.
$100 for this lens? Oh lord. That sounds rather expensive. In a few years no one longer can stand the look of social media photos processed with the toy lens effect, luckily there was an official photographer covering the event.
The camera has a price NOW that is lower than originally. The performance is not up to current standard. Getting it now for $290 seems like a waste. A good value for the money now is the e-pm2, just a real hassle to use and no useful video on it.
Such posts just show that MFT is on its last legs (I am a 5 year MFT user): insanely overpriced, hardly up to current standard, too few lens options.
“in a few years no one longer can stand the look of social media photos” I agree, but we have survived the “sepia” era, the Black and White Era (after we got colour) – we have survived a lot, and we will survive the “social media photos” as well. How come you thing that this shows the last legs of the MFT system? It would really great to know. I am also a canon user (1Dm4 and L lenses) dotweb.dk
My point is that the MFT system is the future. There are only a few people out there who still cant see that systems like MFT will work perfect for the masses of users.
I dont even shot stock photos with my 5DMarkII any more – I use EM-5, and guess what, my sales has not gone down. Too few lens alternatives? what world do you live in? All the zuiko lenses works nicely, at least for us who dont shoot sports or BIF. (I do shot BIF with MFT – but dont tell any one since I cant be done.
//Stine Lise
“insanely overpriced” nope, not seeing it but, hey, some of us aren’t tightwads or living beyond our means.
“hardly up to current standard” not really in any way, some things are a bit behind but it’s getting there, it’s not a stagnant system like the Canon EOS-M, Nikon 1, Sony NEX.
“too few lens options” no other mirrorless system offers the same diversity of lens (even without the numerous iterations of the kit zooms), you have to go to DSLR or Leica to have more lenses available.
It’s alright to be dissatisfied with the system because it doesn’t suit your needs, it’s alright to feel you’d be better served by something else, it’s alright to feel other systems suit your better.
It’s even also alright to try to justify your decision by conjuring up arguments with little connection to reality, if that’s what it takes to keep you sleeping soundly at night.
What isn’t though, is to start believing in and propagating them.
An E-P2 on eBay should cost nearer $150 and that CCTV ‘toy lens’ can be had for $30 if you forgo the SLR Branding.
I find Admin’s estimate of $400 for that setup to be pretty expensive. I would never spend $100 on a crap lens like that! (I spent $30 on my cheap CCTV 25mm f1.4)
I forgot to mention that the image set above are so romantic, and that will stand out well. Nice to see someone doing something creative! that is what makes photography interesting.
//Stine Lise
+1000
Yes, indeed! A nice set of images that communicate a lot of good feeling.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with technical perfection, but it often masks an utter lack of vision. And creativity.
There are so many “Practical” people making comments here. The “practical” people are all the above who write of cost and image fact/perfection. I wonder how these people ever got into photography. But there again there are such people as accountants as well so there must be room for all.
There are those who need rules and hard lines, control and rigid definitions. There is safety and comfort in hard facts, strict formulas, pie charts, spreadsheets, graphs and test scores…
Then there are what ifs and taking chances and making “mistakes” and non-quantifiables. Beauty AND Ugliness.
Very different worlds…
Hey Admin,
true, PEN P2 is still able to make good Pictures
any idea, when the new PL/PM is due ?
Following the previous Launch Dates, the new Version would have been due in Oct/Nov this year…
Well done Elisabeth. You have captured really good moments. Just had a look at your Flickr page and your photos from Marco and Mellisa’s wedding are also lovely. Great moments and the colours/post processing looks really good. You manage to capture what a lot of wedding photographers miss.
Not a lot of fun people around tonight, folks. Diversity increases your chances of evolutionary survival. I’m talking about mFT. If “hipster” toy camera fans start picking up mFT after adamantly shooting film for so long, great. New market for mFT. Better chance of survival.
And thank God not everyone wants to shoot weddings pretending to be Riccis Valadares (who has his place, but snapshots like these have their place in the ecosystem, too).
Elisabeth:
Awesome use of a creative lens. When I first saw the Toy Lens announcements, I could not see much value. But you have captured so many fine moments with such creative flair, I can finally see their value. I also like the way you use just one lens of the set (very decisive, creatively disciplined). And I love how you fit some of the subjects into the (essentially) circular frame so well (e.g., the bride in 2nd and 6th photos).
Thank you for the sharing your flair for creative photography.
Like the pics, just don’t like the price paid for the toy lens. Got my 25mm 1.4 CCTV lens and recently started shooting with it again to get the creative juices flowing.
For $30, the lens is great.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bicyclelad/tags/toy/
Or, you could just take the shots with a real lens and then dick around with your Instagram/Photobooth/whatever filters of choice. At least then, you’ll still have decent-looking originals available to use.
cheap lens perfect to low quality sensor
Hi everyone!
First of all I want to thank 43rumors for letting me write this post. At the beginning I wasn’t so sure about showing my photos here because I’m not a professional photographer; actually I’m quite new to this art. I had my first camera (an Olympus EP-2) only last year. Previously I was using a lousy 4 megapixel Canon Power-shot (eh!) and later a 35mm Nikon F60 film SLR. So I’m experimenting a lot, making mistakes and learning as much as possible. I thought this was a good occasion to learn something.
My background come from visual arts, I’m a painter and illustrator and my vision of the world is always filtered by the things I learned from art school and, after that, from my professional experience in those fields.
This is why I choose this lens, because I find the way it filters and gives this sort of romantic vision of reality really interesting. I don’t see the handicap of the heavy blur or the low quality of the lens. I see a different way to say something about a moment and that the weaknesses of this lens can be a challenge for a photographer.
I understand every point of view and I thank you all for the passionate comments here. We choose the best way to communicate our art to others and so this is how I work and experimenting right now. I hope that my photos can inspire people, who are still learning like me, to try something new.
Elisabeth, you made a good display of it. I thought I saw some artistry background, natural, formal or both. I liked the way you picked the central feature using the lens to reflect your wants for the image. You have shown yourself to be able to use a lens to its strong (and weak) points and have made the camera work for you as was its makers intention. Far more pleasing than looking at DOX charts on the wall.
Keep up the work.
It’s fun to see that these kind of photos pretty much split the readers of this blog in half. One half appreciates the artistic quality of the photos, the other half criticizes the technical defects of both the camera (and its sensor) and the lens.
It also shows how bored a lot of people are (and rightfully so I’d say) by this whole vintage-mania and superficial hipster phenomena like instagram. Though I don’t feel like the author of these photos was primarily motivated by this kind of thing. I can really relate to somebody who does not seek technical perfection, or endless possibilities. Creativity has a lot to do with limiting yourself, self-imposing yourself rules. I see too many people spending huge amounts of money to have the latest and best and end up producing very little.
This said, I totally agree that the Ep-2 really isn’t a great photo camera, and the toy lens is probably not really worth the money you pay for it (much better to buy a CNC lens and get the same thing for a lot less), but I also think that it’s really important to see past the simple tech specs. Otherwise photography will become something terribly sterile and boring.
“but I also think that it’s really important to see past the simple tech specs.” The technical specs allow the photographer to do things that they want to do. They do not define the way or the method and not necessarily the outcome which is driven by the user.
The camera is, like IT and a pencil, an enabling tool. Enabling the photographer to achieve their personal requirements of an image, nothing more. Though some have managed to turn it into a list of specifications, charts to hang on walls and the ubiquitous neck ornament.
An artist can make an image on paper with a single pencil. A full set of coloured chalks is not always required, but they may enable a different expression. Simply using a single pencil does not make them ‘less’ of an artist.
Same with cameras.