SoFoBoMoSTART!

I've been procrastinatingbut finally have begun photographing for the SoFoBoMo project. I'll be photographing 2 Bangladeshi artists, Fareha Zeba who is a painter and her husband Saidul Haque Juise a paper sculptor and mask/puppet maker. I spent the afternoon at their home studio, talking over endless cigarettes cups of black tea and chilled beer.... I'd take a photo or two and we'd resume our banter.

A Black Hooded Oriole perched on one of the shrubs in their garden so we all went out quietly to watch and I got a few frames of the bird and a few of the plants in the garden.  There is a bush of [apparently] very hot chili pepperswhich are almost white in color - Juise refuses to let these be plucked because there are some tiny birds who come to feed on these. Don't touch! The peppers are for the birds, only!

The plan is, to photograph and record their daily life, casually, while they work and go about doing what they do.... creating works of art....and they do it beautifully. This project will [eventually, hopefully] turn into a small book with a collection of photographs, some background information about the artist pair, and some excerpts from our conversations...

The first few processed images of Zeba and Juise are posted in the SoFoBoMo Log file.

Flowers with the lensbaby, soft focus.

2/12/08
AND, not so soft...
Here is one with selective area in sharp focus and let the rest fall where it may!

Taking another crack at the Lensbaby,  getting the hang of the focus.. lighting with a wireless strobe for a bit more «pop» in the images.

One helluva toy! The Lensbaby 2.0 is here. Could not wait to try it out. What a fun lens this is. Will write more about the lens later [some info is posted here]and will definitely post new images... right now it is time to post the first experimental images. I still have to get used to the focus «sweet spot» and the manual handling of the focus and tilt/shift type bellow... for now here is what I got in the first 10 minutes of opening the box.

The blur effect makes these photos look like paintings, the effect is done by tilting the lens up or down - the extent of the blur depending on the f-stop and extent of tilt.

More here.