Mirva - Natural Light Portrait

Very nice outdoor portrait. The lens creates nice looking bokeh.

This is a picture of my wife taken the second day after purchasing a Lomography New

Petzval 85mm F2.2 lens used here. It's a manual focus, or rather a manual

everything, art lens. Optical design of the lens is over 170 years old and apertures are

separate plates with holes that need to be inserted into the lens. It produces swirly

bokeh because of massive aberrations. It's not a fast (to shoot) lens. It's not the

sharpest lens either. Still I find myself being very exited and happy to shoot with it.

The day this image was taken was quite windy at times. Our 11 years old kid wanted

to assist us and I let her hold the diffusor. It was a struggle because of the wind and

because her height. There was also a lot of wasps around. My wife has a small fobia

of wasps and I guess I have the same problem. So we ran a lot because of the wasps

and I had to manually focus the lens over and over again. This shot was taken after I

told my wife to try to "look super beautiful". She bursted to laughter and I managed to

push the shutter button just the right time so she quite nailed the "super beautiful"

looks. :)

Editing was done with Capture One Pro 9. I added vignetting and did some dodge and

burn to skin and hair. The bokeh is not edited at all. All the bokeh in this picture comes

from the optical design of the Petzval 85mm at full open F2.2.

Critique and comments are very welcome. Due to the conditions I was not able to

frame this shot perfectly. I have pictures from the session with better composition and

with a better background. I just personally love this image because of the authentic

expression. Because of the swirl effect, I was not willing to crop this pic either.

Cheers

PDE

Quite the unique bokeh, an excellent candid portrait and a beautiful lady.  Welcome to PNet.... Mike

After reading your explanation I understand the reasons for you liking this image.  I did not even notice the swirl at first.  I made no adjustment to your image other than cropping it closer to remove distracting light areas of the background so as to give more impact to your model.  My preference is to remove anything that weakens the impact of the center of interest--even if it means kicking to the curb my cherished technical enthusiasms.

Thank you all so much for your comments.  "Fill the frame" is often the rule I like to obey in portraiture, but this picture and the Petzval lens are all about the peculiar out of focus area. If I'd shot this with my 85mm F1.4 or with my 135mm F1.8, I'd agree with the tighter composition and cropped it. But because the bokeh effect is all lost by cropping, I just left the picture as is.  As I said I had  better composed shots from this shoot, but model had too "posed" expressions in those images.  

The crop looks nice though. Just that it doesn't look like it's taken with a Petzval lens.