Lensbaby: Make Friends with the Wind

Every macro photographer I know dreads wind more than almost anything else. Even low or poor light can be easier to work around than a gusty day when trying to take flower portraits.... That's because traditional macro photography normally calls for very small apertures to get the entire image in focus, resulting in dreadfully slow shutter speeds in many cases. I was faced with just such a day on a shoot recently. Fortunately the final client photos could be staged in an area shielded from the wind, but while the staging was happening I was hoping to do some of my own shooting in the glorious garden we had for our setting.

At first I thought I might be skunked as there was no way to get the depth of field needed for the shots I wanted and still freeze the flowers in the wind. Then I remembered that I'd brought my Lensbaby Composer. Since the Lensbaby relies on out of focus effects to achieve its objective, it gladly operates with a nice large aperture like f4 or f8. With that much light working for me it was easy to have a shutter speed of 1/4000s or even 1/8000s in the sun without resorting to an ISO higher than 800. And with my Nikon D700 an 800 ISO is a no brainer.

The result was some images I really liked, like the image of the beautiful blooming Hollyhocks along side this article. The client shoot went well in its shielded location but I never would have gotten this shot or many others without the Lensbaby.