Creative Portraits Day 2 - Vintage and Art Lenses (Beginner Level) Vintage and Art Lenses

There are many ways to create interest and intrigue in a portrait that extends beyond simply getting the sharpest and cleanest looking image you can. In fact we can produce creative portraits with only the lens itself and in this instance I'm talking about either vintage lenses or art lenses.

The images above are taken using 'art' lenses that create a very distinctive look. Vintage Lenses

A vintage lens is really just an older lens that doesn't have all of the modern optics that we all familiar with now. For example they will have features like a stronger vignette, unique looking bokeh or soft focusing towards the edges etc. Not only are there so many different lenses available to us today but we've also been making lens for well over a hundred years so there are so many older lenses we've never used but they're all unique. I've had a lot of fun playing with these vintage lenses and the great part is that they are generally incredibly cheap to buy. You should be able to pick up some vintage lenses for as cheap as £30/$50 on certain auction sites. The only downside is that they are all going to There are literally hundreds of vintage lenses available to us today. be old enough that they won't talk to your camera, so auto-focus isn't available, you can't operate you camera in automatic mode in fact nearly all the modern features are unavailable but that's ok because the shots you'll be taking will look fantastically unique and creative. Art Lenses

In my opinion art lenses fall into two key categories, they tend to either be modern remakes of vintage lenses or specifically engineered lenses that create artistic looks. The remake lenses are essentially lenses that were renowned in their day for taking gorgeous looking shots but are so rare now that it becomes very difficult and prohibitively expensive to acquire them. Lomography are known for making these lenses like the Petzval, Daguerreotype, Russar etc and they all have specific features like swirly bokeh, hazy highlights that film enthusiasts love. The second category of lenses are the more noticeably creative lenses and they're each designed to produce Art lenses fall into two camps, they're either remakes of classic film camera lenses or one specific look. For example the lens company modern lenses that are specially engineered to create a chosen look. Lensbaby makes a lot of these types of lenses that produce slices of focus, spots of focus and so on. Like I mentioned these create very distinctive looks and as such are only ever used for creative effect.