A little over a decade ago, I marked the hire of a 50mm f/1.4 lens by taking some lovely blurry shots of my Christmas tree to see the big aperture in action. Nine years later, I briefly repeated the feat with a hired 24-70 f/2.8 lens (and I ended up buying both lenses). So it seems quite a bit fitting that I mark my first Christmas with a 50mm f/0.95 lens by photographing the Christmas tree again.
Doing the shooting this time was relatively easy, because the lens is fully analogue and manual – I just defocussed the lens as much as possible, and started shooting. I did have to override the AutoISO in order to stop my camera from overexposing the shots.
My first shot looked a bit more tree-like and not that abstract.
What does make this shot a bit more interesting is the distortion to the edges of the frame. This is not a full-frame lens but I use it in full-frame mode anyway for the analogue feel of the edges.
I quickly started getting a bit more creative, using presets that introduced fake light leaks and analogue photography artefacts into the shots.
My tree lights are colour-changing, meaning the colour combinations I was getting in these shots was random. Sometimes I needed to wait until the lights were a more pleasing assortment of hues.
A few of the presets I used deliberately invoked lower contrast or poor exposures.
The results of some of these shots reminded me of 60s/70s cinema.
For good measure, I did take one in-focus shot of the tree.
This next shot came out as one of the most interesting. I caught not only the light fairy lights, but some light hitting the tinsel, and at a distance where there was some interesting distortions too. It makes it a lot harder to see what it’s actually an image of.
Some angles left a lot of black space, which also made for an interesting look.
Especially when I added some fake light leak.
It’s not often I post such an abstract assortment of images, but I quite like them. I think the development in my photography from the first time I tried this 11 years ago is obvious – it’s always nice to revisit things later on to try again. That’s part of what this website is all about.
All that’s left at this point is to wish you a very happy Christmas, and a Happy New Year. I’ll be back with my next post in early January.
And the very last thing left is to present you with a gallery of shots. The images in this post are more subjective than normal, so maybe you’ll find an extra shot in there that I overlooked?
Creative Splurges 
