Experimenting with Pictorialism

Last week I shared photos from my photography class portfolio. I selected abstracts to help train myself on how to see a subject for what it could be, not what it is. And it's helped a good deal to pick a project that changes how I see something. My next project is going to be pictorialism -- intentionally soft-focus images meant to evoke a sense rather than detail.

I don't self-classify as a pixel peeper in that I don't go into other people's photos and see how pixel-sharp they are. I do pixel peep my own work to make sure that I select images that are exactly how I want them to be.

My pictorialism project will take a little while to get fully under way (I need to make some lens holders, but for the interim I have some of the raw parts. I picked up three singlet lenses with focal points in the 100mm-range. They're all uncoated and my thinking right now is to make some lens holders for my 4X5 camera and use it as a bellow unit on my 35mm cameras. Sine none of the lenses have shutters, I can't just use my 4X5. I also need to make an interchangeable aperture assembly. So there's a little work to do, but my first experiments seem promising.

To get these shots, I free-lensed elements in front of my Pentax K-3. Mostly they had about 1.5 to two inches of space between the lens and the mount. All the lenses are in the f1.5 to f1.7 range without any mechanism for aperture control.


Pretty soft, but the image is still recognizable


Lost of ghosting and flare.


So much ghosting!