Shooting wedding with cheap stuff: E-P2 with Toy Lens (Guest post by Elisabeth Busani)
We know well how much expensive stuff you usually have to buy to do serious Wedding photo work. But how would it look like if you would take these pictures with a Toy lens and a cheap MFT camera? Elisabeth Busani (Flickr) shared his experience shooting a wedding with that stuff:
[shoplink 42873 ebay]$290 for the E-P2 at BigValue[/shoplink]
[shoplink 42872 ebay]$100 for the 26mm f/1.4 Toy Lens on eBay[/shoplink]
—–
“A special guest”
September, a wedding, an Olympus EP-2 and a f1.4, 26mm Toy Lens from SLR Magic. This is what brings me to this blog, telling you about pictures I’ve shot during a friend’s wedding.
The Toy Lens, as you certainly know, is a very peculiar lens. It’s called “Toy” for a reason, but after having used it extensively for over a year, it’s become much more than that, so I decided to use it as my primary lens for the wedding.
Please note that I was not the official photographer (actually there was no such thing as an official photographer) since my friends preferred to collect the pictures, made by friends and family.
The Toy Lens has a very strong character of its own, the focus is concentrated in the center and moving towards the borders the picture gets gradually blurred. On one hand this “vignette” effect is perfect for portraits and details, since it enables you to focus on one element by blurring the rest, but usually at a wedding you might want to use something more flexible. On the other hand though, you can always use so called technical limitations to your advantage.
The Toy Lens can yield some surprising results also for long and medium shots and if you’re lucky you’ll also be able to capture a spontaneous outburst of joy.
Another one of this lens’ technical defects, which I find very fascinating, is the way direct light get’s diffracted in certain situations. If you use it well it can create interesting effects that underline the sense of airiness and peace of the moment.
I found the lens to be very fitting for situations like these:
and these:
And finally, the lens has a pretty good aperture, so it works quite well in low-light situations (I didn’t use a flash for this shooting).
I am very satisfied with this lens: it saturates the colours and its low-fi character gives my photos a certain peculiar personality. I find it very fitting with my style of photography, which has its root in visual arts (I’m mainly an illustrator by trade).
When you shoot photos at a wedding you need to be quick, always ready to capture that one moment. Using a Toy Lens with a fixed focal length and manual focus makes things more complicated, but I can only recommend you to try that at least once, it’s an interesting challenge, and it’s also a lot of fun!
………Elisabeth Busani………
portfolio: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elisabethbusani/