Second Shooter // 23 // Musket Ridge Wedding
The last time I photographed a Musket Ridge wedding was for my sister. It will always have a special place in my heart because it’s where I started dreaming of working with weddings.
Needless to say, I was so excited when Dani said we would be photographing a wedding there.
But I was also really excited to play with my new free-lensing lens. Free-lensing is when you float a lens, unattached, in front of your camera to get a tilt-shift-like effect. I love it because it gives the resulting image a magical and unexpected effect.
I’ve played with free-lensing before, but I always struggled to get consistently good results. It’s pretty difficult (I’d say impossible, although maybe someone has proved me wrong) to do with newer Nikon lenses that don’t have an aperture ring because Nikon lenses default to a closed aperture that’s no good for free-lensing. Older Nikon lenses with an aperture ring, like my 35mm f/2, work much better because you can manually open the aperture while the lens is disconnected from the camera, but are still really difficult to use as-is.
The problem is the limitation of movement. When you float a lens in front of your camera, the angle of movement is hindered by the size of the back of the lens. It can’t get any closer to the sensor of the camera than it would if it were attached, which makes selective focusing really difficult at a distance. However, someone much smarter than me figured out that if you remove the back half of the lens casing and the aperture ring from an older Nikon prime lens, you can get the rear glass element closer to the sensor and it works so. much. better. And because I didn’t just have one of those lying around, that meant buying a new-to-me lens and breaking it right out of the box. It took me a good 30 minutes following my visit from brown santa (aka the UPS man) just to find the courage to do lens surgery. (If you want to get even nerdier about it and really find out how to do it, check this out.)
Do I think that free-lensing and it’s sister-from-another-mister, tilt-shifting, are trendy? Absolutely yes. But I still think they can be cool. It’s a challenge to know the right times and places to use them. I’m still working on that, because right now I’m so blinded by my new love that, of course, I want to use it on everything. And it takes practice to work out the kinks. But I wanted to show you just how fun this technique can be and the fabulous results it produces in-camera.
And really, this wedding was stunning, so if you want to see more non-free-lensed images, check out the slideshow linked below!