Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I decided to go all retro with my lenses.  I went for a walk and took: 28mm 1:3.5 Super_Takumar, 35mm 1:2.3 Auto-Takumar, 55mm 1:1.8 SMC Takumar and the 200mm 1:3.5 Takumar.  All of these are manual focus manual exposure lenses that I mounted to my Pentax K-7.  It’s hard to define the look of these lenses but they are different than a modern one that is corrected for distortion.  Some of the distortion I think actually adds to the look rather than detracting.  The 35mm 2.3 has an unusual effect on out of focus areas creating a kind of swirling vortex of blur.  The 200mm has pronounced chromatic abaration creating a kind of halo around bright objects.  All these effects are what we see when we look at older photographs and there really is no way to re-create them with processing or apps. 

Well simplify, more than clarity.  Photography can be so descriptive and we expect a to see a certain level of detail that we consider real.  To paintings we apply a different standard of what is real, but what if we made photographs using the rules of painted reality?  I would love to claim the idea as my own but I’m about 125 years too late.  Pictorialism was a photographic movement that attempted to create images that were considered more artistic than the cold rendering photography provided.  A lot has occurred in photography since this time but it can be a fun diversion to create images along these lines.  All of these images where created by simply manipulating focus.  I’ve taken things further as far as blur and of course these images are in colour.  If you don’t have a camera that you can manually focus you may be able to fool the auto focus system by focusing on a close object and then re-framing to include distant objects that will now be blurred.

So there you have it, my photographic paintings.