Today I chose the Velvet85 for my camera walk and headed out to the Talent Pollinator garden, which is small but usually has something in bloom. I wasn’t too thrilled with my results and decided to walk around the block to where I had seen sunflowers in someone’s front yard. Right next to the Pollinator garden is a vacant lot and imagine my surprise and delight to find it filled with wild sunflowers.
The Velvet 85 and it’s sister lens, the Velvet 56 are designed to have a slightly soft velvety look with a hint of glow around the edges. With a minimum focusing distance of 9.5″ the short telephoto Velvet 85 can hold it’s own in macro situations and is well loved by portrait and wedding photographers. At 1.2lbs the Velvet 85 is a challenge to hand hold. Did I mention that all the Lensbaby lenses are manual focus? But with a maximum aperture of 1.8 you can get some pretty fast shutter speeds even at 100 ISO. I had the lens mounted on my EOS R which is the only full frame camera I own so maybe not the best choice for flowers as the crop sensors on my other cameras would maximize the telephoto effect for macro shooting.
In post processing I started by opening the shadows and added clarity, vibrance and saturation in Lightroom. Then I took it in to photoshop and did some color balance adjustment as being in shadow was making it appear too blue to me. Next I added a preset from 2 Lil Owls which helped to bring it out of the shadows a little more. Finally I added a texture which gives it a little bit of an old timey look.