Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

For me, the ability to control depth of field–the area that’s in focus–has been essential. It’s a major tool in my toolbox when I go about isolating a subject in the frame. Some of the other tools include negative space, color, and contrast, both visual and thematic. Depth of field is my favorite though. That’s why I’ve invested in lenses that give me the widest possible range of aperture to work with, and spent a lot of time learning how to control it. The latest toy is this Hartblei 65mm f3.5 Super-Rotator that I’ve talked about a lot lately. I bought it because I knew that I could use it to create very unusual depth of field effects, but when it finally arrived from the Czech Republic, I had no idea how it worked.

Before I start using a new tool on clients, I normally do some experimentation to get a handle on its operation. Usually, this involves taking pictures of inanimate objects and doing self-portraits before actually showing anyone the results.

The photo above is one of those experiments that I did with the Hartblei. It took a lot of fiddling under pressure, because this kid was biking around like a maniac, and I really wanted to capture him in front of the car before he gave up the game and went to do something else. With the Hartblei’s nearly infinite combination of tilts, shifts and rotations, it did take a few tries to get this effect predictably. Fortunately, on the kid’s last pass, I got the shot. The area in focus is thrown diagonally from the foreground to the background, with other areas rendered in a very pleasant bokeh, which is just a fancy way of saying “out of focus.”

Getting this shot of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan was a little easier, because I had all the time in the world to mess around with the lens to get the right areas in focus.

After a great deal of experimentation and failed attempts, I finally felt ready to use this lens with a client, in the studio. The client is a musician, who is releasing an album in the next month or two. We needed to shoot some portraits to use in the CD liner notes. My goal with this particular shoot was to get a kind of low-contrast feel which I felt matched the melancholy mood of his music, as well as the cover art for the CD. I envisioned everything being a sort of monotone beige, with the clarity of his eyes being the most outstanding features of the image. The eyes would already be isolated because of color, but isolating them further with focus and shallow depth of field really adds a lot to the laid-back mood, I think.

It was pretty easy to accomplish this with the 50mm f1.2 lens when he was more or less face-front to the camera. The area of focus is at a constant distance from the back of the camera, producing a very traditional shallow depth of field effect.

However, he had a great profile, and I wanted to be able to shoot this angle without losing the focus that fell mainly on the eyes and not elsewhere. This is where the Hartblei really came in handy.

By bending the lens so that it threw the area of focus across the front of his face, even though I was facing the side of his face, I was able to keep his eyes isolated in focus, while the rest of him softly blended away.

I remember sitting with a friend years ago, marveling at a book of Karsh’s portraiture, admiring his masterful control of depth of field. At that time, I wondered how he achieved this effect. Now I know it’s because he was using a massive 8×10 view camera with bellows that allowed him to similarly throw focus onto whichever plane he wished. Those cameras were cumbersome and difficult to adjust. These days, with small SLR cameras, it’s possible to get similar results, but in a more spontaneous and casual fashion. I’m looking forward to using this new trick more often in the future.

I love shooting at night. It’s quiet, peaceful, and the closest thing to meditation that I do. Tonight’s model was this little tree–a maple, I think–located at Spencer Smith Park in Burlington. I noticed the tree when I was out with Laura last night, and returned tonight to shoot it, for no other reason than I thought it looked cool and ghostly. I love the bending shape of its trunk, and how its leaves were at the point of bursting to life from tight buds. It was lit by a nearby street lamp, which gave it quite a strange orange color. The air was quite still, so even though some of my exposures were nearly 30 seconds long, I was still able to capture lots of tiny details.

You can get some really unusual results when you take long exposures. In reality, the color was most like the first of the three images below. Pulling the white balance way towards the “cool” end while processing the third photo made the tree look a bit more like its real daytime color.

Maybe these aren’t the most exciting photos in the world, or the most elaborate I’ve ever taken, but often I find the joy of photography in the act of pure creation, with no goal other than to see something familiar in a new way.

Hartblei 65mm f3.5 Super-Rotator lens.

I had some fun today. It was a beautiful spring morning, and the parking lot at my building was mostly empty. I decided to play with my new car and my Hartblei Super-Rotator lens. I picked up this lens on eBay last year, but haven’t used it a lot. The Hartblei is an f/3.5 65mm tilt-shift lens that can rotate both tilt and shift segments 360 degrees. What does this mean? It basically means you can put together some pretty crazy focal planes.

Tilt-shift lenses are great at creating a “miniature” effect. It’s the perfect effect to make a fun statement about how small Pepper, my little MINI Cooper S is. I parked Pepper rakishly in the middle of the lot, and climbed the metal ladder to the roof of my building, because the tilt-shift miniature effect only really works if you’re shooting from a high angle.

Because the Hartblei is a completely manual lens, it doesn’t communicate with your camera body at all. The camera’s display told me that my aperture was f/00. I dialed in f/3.5 on the barrel of the lens, and then used the camera’s meter to determine the right shutter speed.

I shot a few different angles, experimenting with different combinations of tilt, shift, and rotation. I have to admit, it’s a bit hard for me to predict how the different tilts and shifts will affect the final image, but half the fun is in the trying.

In the end, I found the miniature effect to be pretty convincing. The unexpected planes of focus and unusual depth of field created some fascinating results, and made Pepper look like a die-cast metal toy.

I have some more examples of this miniature effect in my photos from the bell tower in Xi’an, China.

I did a shoot a couple of weeks ago for my good friend Lissa Hill, who is launching her brand new line of motorcycle leathers. Lissa makes beautiful custom motorcycle and fashion leather garments, and it was great fun to find different ways to showcase them. Lissa’s made a few leather jackets for me, and I can vouch for how great it feels to have something custom made for you that fits your sense of style and your body like a glove.

We hired Sarah to model the clothes, and she did a great job. Sarah was a pleasure to work with. She’s an expressive model who is able to quickly find a pose and expression to match what needs to be communicated in the photos. Hair and makeup artist Sue Upton created a number of different looks for Sarah, so the photos would have some variety.

Sue Upton and Lissa Hill getting Sarah ready for the first photo of the day.

I went with high contrast lighting to emphasize the high contrast look of Lissa’s designs. I set up a single Alien Bees B800 strobe above Sarah on a boom, with only the standard silver reflector and nothing to diffuse it. I positioned Sarah close to the white background so she’d cast some interesting shadows.