Hollywood A lister Ariel Anderssen gets her kicks at the slave-girl ranch, willingly submitting to a harsh regime of sex and discipline. But one of her "owners" can't resist the temptation to capture her on film!
This set was an experiment with a set of Sirui anamorphic lenses. I've been trying to find the right combination to get good results with anamorphics, which squash the image horizontally - originally used to get widescreen images on film for the cinema. The visual cues we get from them can be subtle, but they have an interesting distortion to the
way they render the out-of-focus areas, they tend to produce more "snap" between the subject and background, and they also produce the distinctive blue horizontal flares from light sources in or near the edge of frame. What it says to us subconsciously is "this is like in a movie".
The Sirui series are really interesting because they are sharp (most "cheap" anamorphics are a bit muddly at best, and I can't afford actual cine lens anamorphics- they cost as much as a house. Each.) They only have a 1.33x squeeze, so the anamorphic character is subtle, but they open up to wide apertures, so you can make the most of what they do have fairly easily. That also helps a lot with manual focussing -
it's much easier to tell when they are in optimal focus than the SLRMagic set of lenses. They are designed for APS-C sensors, which means on my Sony's that I can either use full-frame and get some vignetting at the edge of the shot which looks like someone spying on the subject, or can turn to crop mode to get a more regular composition.
I played around with all of those options shooting this set, and experimented with the three different focal lengths I have: 24mm, 50 mm and 75 mm. It comes as no surprise that my favourite is the 75 mm- short telephoto is always my go-to for shooting pretty girls. I also love the warmth of its rendition for skin tones, and it was really easy to manually focus. The 24mm is very sharp but has a much harsher vignette or full-frame. The 50 mm feels less dramatic, but is still useful. And because I was paranoid I shot some shots with regular lenses at the end too.