Do Flowers Dream?

How a cheap lens inspired a photo series I’m excited about.

When I first started taking photos, the most important thing in my mind was trying to get enough money to buy better equipment.

I thought the best photos were the ones on the magazine covers and contest winners, and I so badly wanted a “cover-worthy” photo. Just like everybody else.

It’s only taken more decades to realize that perfect sharpness and $4,000 lenses aren’t keys to “great” photography, and being like everyone else is just boring.

So lately, I’ve been in enamored with an almost objectively “bad” lens: the 75mm f/1.5 TTArtisan that I converted to fit my GFX 100s.

The GFX 100s is a beast: 100 megapixels of pure megapixel glory. With the right lenses, the information it captures in even the smallest details is unreal. It’s designed to be used with the best lenses produced to capture razor-sharp, world-class shots all day long.

And when I first bought the camera, I spent more than $10,000 on the best possible lenses. On a trip to Minnesota, the GFX 100s and those ultra-expensive (and heavy) lenses produced solid, incredibly sharp and contrasty images:

Photos here are all with expensive GFX lenses.

But I don’t “love” any of them. They’re too perfect. Too sharp. Too boring.

However, I also randomly took along the super-cheap 75mm f/1.5 TTArtisan, manual-focus lens I found for under $300. I wasn’t expecting much at all. I just wanted to experiment and see what the photos would look like.

I got back to my hotel room one night and started looking through all my photos, and then I came across this one. HOLY WOW:

(All the photos from here until the end of the newsletter are from the GFX100s and TTArtisan 75mm f/1.5.)

I stopped and stared at that photo for a bit. Could this TTArtisan photo actually be any good?

On one hand, it’s a totally messed-up photo. Yeah, it’s 100 megapixels… but it’s not 100 megapixels of “sharpness.” Even the leaf is slightly blurry, either from the lens being soft or because I missed the focus a little bit (easy to do with this having razor-think depth-of-field).

On the other hand, it was the only photo out of hundreds of other shots that made me look at it for longer than a second or two. It’s a photo that still makes look twice, a few years later.

Sharp or not, that’s meaningful.

This is stopped down quite a bit, so probably f/11 or f/16. The sunstars are great, and even the detail is there - but more interesting is the way the ultra bright light scatters and warps the brightest aspect of the photograph.

Still, when it was time to show the client my work, I barely put any of these shots from the TTArtisan in the portfolio. I didn’t think the designers looking at the project would think they were “sharp” enough, and I thought they might think they are a little weird (they are).

I love the lens flare, but I wasn’t sure anyone else would! We usually pay thousands of dollars to get rid of “flaws” like this.

After that Minnesota trip, I put the lens in the cabinet and… almost forgot about it.

But this year I’m pushing myself to be different, and I remembered that lens and its unique rendering characteristics.

How times have changed - I WANT THE WEIRD STUFF NOW!

So, I fired up my dusty GFX, slapped on the 75mm f/1.5 (literally electrical-taped to the converter mount), and headed out to the garden. I put vaseline on the filter in places (at the edges), and did my best to let light flood into its lens elements by shooting at various angles.

What I got is a stunning new series of photos I’m naming:

My vision for these is for my final selects for the project to be printed the size of a wall. I’m thinking 8-10 feet on the large size.

This series is all about ethereal gardens as places of imagination.

Simple fields of grass become dream-like, all fitting into the idea of what flowers might “see” when they close their petals in the absence of sunlight. I know science can explain this process and tell me that plants can’t dream - but I’m choosing to view the world with more “child-like” eyes lately.

It’s both artistic expression and mental-health exercise.

My goal is to keep photographing new flowers with this lens and editing style.

I’ll also be printing some of these on watercolor paper so I can actually, physically, learn how to paint on my photographs. Creating one-of-a-kind works of art is something I’d love to experiment with.

On many of these, you’d never be able to see some of my painted details on a computer screen. These are meant to be experienced large and in REAL FREAKING LIFE.

It’s amazing how many of these look like paintings even without doing much in editing. This next one is a photo that’s almost a straight-out-of-camera jpeg (I just lowered the contrast):

Finding ways to work with the fun lens characteristics to make dreamy images has been fun, and a challenge.

All of my drawings-on-photos were done with ProCreate on the iPad. These are sketches and experiments… my interpretation of small mystical worlds.

I know not all of these work. Some are heavy-handed. But I’m still having fun and creating interesting things.

What about YOU? Do you have any flawed, weird, or crazy lenses that you’ve put aside or forgotten about? If so - go out and see how using it might expand your creative photography mindset!

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