Lens-Artists Challenge #332: Shoot From Above

Lens-Artists Challenge #332: Shoot From Above 

This week Ritva is hosting the Challenge, and her theme for the week is to 'Shoot From Above (https://sillarit.com/2025/01/18/lens-artists-challenge-332-shoot-from-above/). 'Let’s Shoot From Above this week!' she says. 'Let’s get creative with a top-down perspective. Let’s have fun.' Well, I'm certainly eager to have a bit of fun with the Challenge this week, so here we go.

A couple of years ago, I went through a patch where I would take a lot of photos from above. In fact if you search 'coffee' on my site you might find dozens of entries, many more than I thought. I can't remember how it all started, but I became fascinated by the abstract patterns that appeared in the surface of a cup of coffee after it came out of the machine. For the record, I'm talking real coffee here, espresso, not that black thin stuff in big polystyrene cups that you see in the movies. That can't be real, right?

Anyhow, I would pop a capsule in the machine, watch the coffee come out, and then quickly snap the pattern of bubbles and currents that would appear on the surface of the coffee with my smartphone. Incidentally, the patterns that appear when you make coffee with real ground coffee are different altogether, but we don't have one of those machines, so I can't do that. After I'd snapped an image I would take it into SnapSeed photo editor and edit it into an abstract, with pop effects, accentuate, desaturate, the works (I even created a couple of sequences called 'coffee' to process them automatically). 

So there was my plan for the week, to take a quick snap of the surface of my daily coffee with the smartphone,  and edit it accordingly. And then John made a comment on my last entry to the Challenge; 'I always love your creative take on photography and your use of tools that are out of the ordinary.' Oh darn, I thought. My daily coffee sounds far too pedestrian now, I'm going to have to do something else. But what? I wanted to keep it simple and the weather is awful so it'll have to be around the house.

And then it hit me: the Deakinizer. Back in 2007, cinematographer Roger Deakins created a lens that would fit on a film camera to produce an almost 'tilt/shift' image, with a sharp centre and blurred around the edges. This became known as the Deakinizer effect and has been used a lot in films ever since. You can recreate this effect in PhotoShop, but where's the fun in that? I had read somewhere that a cheap way to make a Deakinizer is to hold a reversed wide-angle converter in front of a camera lens, and I have an old Panavision wide-angle converter just for this purpose. And my entry to this week's Challenge was reborn.

During the week I wandered around the house, smartphone in one hand and the 'Deakinizer' in the other, looking down and taking close-ups of things that appealed to me. Images were edited in SnapSeed, and for added fun I glitched a few using the GlitchLab app.

Next week, Egídio from Seeing the World Through Brazilian Eyes will host the Challenge, so hope that you can join us. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag 'Lens-Artists'.

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