Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

Undoubtedly, one of Brooklyn’s most iconic locations is Coney Island. I had a day to kill earlier this week, so I decided to visit the park and boardwalk to take some pictures. I took the D train from Manhattan and just enjoyed the ride to the end of the line at Brooklyn’s southern tip. It was my intention to capture Coney Island’s very familiar scenes of classic  Americana in an unusual way. I mean, almost everyone’s seen pictures of the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel, even if they might not have known exactly what they were looking at, so I brought along a super-wide lens and my bendy tilt-shift 65mm f/3.5 Hartblei Super-Rotator to try to put a slightly different spin on things. The skies were clear and the air was a sweltering 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees F), which made roasting on the pavement waiting for the exact moment to shoot an exercise in sweat tolerance. However, it was a lot of fun finding ways to throw the focus across different planes with the Super-Rotator, and to identify novel abstract angles with the super-wide lens. The direct sunlight created some lovely hard contrasts and bright colors. I think the unique bokeh effects created by the tilt-shift help to communicate the almost comatose state of heat stroke that I was experiencing out there!

It’s been a while since Laura Hollick and I created a new image for our Live Your Spirit series. We planned for an outdoor image, showing Laura posed like a white tree in a white winter landscape. We drove around through the country until we spotted the perfect location, just outside of a little church in Westover, Ontario. It had what we needed: a place to park nearby, a slight hill covered in snow, and a not-too-distracting background.

We did a few test shots to get an idea of the composition of the final image.

We had to work quickly. Although the thermometer read above zero, the wind was whipping in towards the camera, and quite violently too. I would estimate it was coming in at about 60-70 km/h, making it feel much colder than the true temperature. My light stands kept blowing over, and I had to dig them deep into the snow so that they would stay up. It’s a good thing hair and makeup artist Sue Upton affixed the wig very securely to Laura’s head, otherwise we could have had a real hair disaster that day!

Our plan was to wrap Laura tightly with white fabrics to create the tree costume. I moved as quickly as possible to clamp the fabrics around her using plastic clips. Canvas cones would create the “root” system of the tree. However, because the wind was so strong, the fabric kept blowing loose. We decided that we were going to work with what nature gave us, and I shot a number of frames of Laura dancing with the flapping fabrics. The tree quickly transformed into a winter wind angel. We couldn’t shoot for long, because it was extremely cold, and there was real risk of windburn and frostbite to Laura’s exposed skin.

After reviewing the images in the car, we decided that the canvas cones weren’t “reading” as well as we’d imagined, so we went out again to shoot some more photos of the base of the dress without the cones. I later blended one of these cone-less  bases into the image using Photoshop.

This image is technically a little different from my other ones. Usually, I shoot with lenses wide open so that I get shallow depth of field and can isolate my subject. In this case, because I needed a shutter speed of 1/200 to sync with the strobes, the aperture had to be set to the polar opposite, f/22.0. This was the about one stop underexposed for the natural light, and it gave us a very mysterious looking sky, with the winter sun struggling to gleam through the low clouds. I lit Laura using two Alien Bees B800 strobes at nearly full intensity, powered by the Vagabond II battery pack.

Here’s the final image.

I took a little road trip down to New York City with my improv team to perform in the Del Close Marathon. I thought it might be a great opportunity to spend some time with my new friend, the Hartblei 65mm f3.5 Super-Rotator. It’s a tilt-shift lens that can rotate the tilt and shift independently 360 degrees. That’s a lot of twisting and shifting, and it can be a bit tricky to handle.

It was a very hot and sticky weekend in Manhattan, and I had lots of opportunities to try the lens out. To me, the cool thing about a tilt-shift lens is its sometimes surprising depth of field effects. Because it essentially changes the plane of focus, you can throw focus in almost any direction. It feels like splashing focus across the frame like paint in diagonal slashes. Check out the focus on this shot of a carnival in Central Park.

Focus is on the Whac-A-Mole tent in the distance, but also on the branch in the top-right corner, which can’t be more than 10 feet from me.

Here are a few more examples of fun focus effects that I created on the weekend.

Good times. What I love about this lens is that it allows me to be very selective about what is highlighted in the photo. The rest of the photo is thrown out of focus in a silky smooth and beautiful way. Due to its hand-made Czech glass, images are sharp in the focus areas, and color transmission is great. I’ll be taking this lens to China with me in October. Stay tuned for more super-rotated images!