Informal Portrait with Plastic Lens Effect

[Paul Lange]

This is a shot of my wife and eldest daughter walking the dogs in a country park close to where I live. I thought it would make an unusual family portrait. I didn't think too much o fthe shot at first but then I found a tutorial on how to get a Plastic Camera Lens effect and the shot seemed to be one that would work with the effect.

 

[Pete Askew]

I agree, it does although I think it even better if you lose the LH quarter. What do you think?

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Plastic Camera Lens effect??

 

[Hamish Gill]

Lomography Chris, cheap cameras - "diana" "smemna-8" "lomo l-ca" "holga" to name a few mass produced in china and Russia made popular by thier poor quality lenses and bad light sealing that often produce high contrast bright images. Made popular by the "shoot from the hip" style of photography where the "photographer" doesn't actually look through the view finder promoted by "Lomography.com" a place where you can buy remakes of these cameras for highly overinflated prices... made ever more popular by countless iPhone apps that reproduce the effect. I quite like it, although it is getting a touch cliched now by over use...
I like some of these cheap cameras for thier softness,and low contrast, hence my modification of the chiaka lens to fit on my Epson r-d1 - but that wouldn't be so popular with the lomo people as it doesn't have he bight high contrast feel of the likes of the holga lens ... And of course my r-d1/gf1 don't leak light

 

[Hamish Gill]

http://www.lomography.com/

 

[Mathew Growcoot]

I like the shot, nice use of the vignette, not convinced about the plastic effect

 

[Paul Lange]

I have already cropped it quite a bit which seemed to be an improvement but sometimes you need to step back and digest what has been done so far before before you can refine it further. I think it could probably do with a bit more cropping or re cropping. At the moment though I'm having some bother with the colour profiles. My camera workspace is sRGB and so is my PC and my Printer. However when I import the RAW file to PS as a Tiff PS tells me that the workspace is AdobeRGB? All options regarding how to handle the colour profile seem to cause some problems especially with the over highlighted orange and red leaves.

 

[Paul Lange]

OK got the profile thing sorted, if everything is Adobe RGB then its all good an dit seems my printer can handle Adobe RGB as well. Seems like my crappy lapton screen is not too far away from it either.

I also imported the pic into PS again this time working in soley Adobe RGB (the photo was sRGB but somehow gets automatically converted to Adobe in Camera Raw, which may have caused some issues but cant change that). Had a play with the cropping and a few other adjustments. I think its better this time.