Lotus Flower Season

It is Lotus flower Season.

This morning, I decided to take a telephoto lens with me to Honghu Park to photograph some close-ups of the lotus flowers. But, I decided to take my old Nikon 200 F4 AI lens so that I can practice using my newly acquired fotodiox tilt/shift adaptor on the Fujifilm camera.

Initially, I did not use any of the features of the TS adaptor but found that the lens is really soft at F4 all the way to F8. It's getting better at F11 and F16. As it has an aperture setting from F4 all the way to F32, I should have remembered that this is a very slow lens. (this lens was manufactured in 1971...) So, the artistic challenge was to get dreamy photos of lotus flowers at F11!

And that's where the tilt of the adaptor comes in. As I was mostly pointing my lens slightly down for these photographs, I tilt the lens 5mm up, which change the focal place to a small horizontal sliver in the middle of my composition. It created the required effect of rendering most of the foreground and background out of focus - with even a soft glow effect just past the focus plane.

Oh, and I was lucky to also find a young Hanfu lady posing with some (fake) lotus flowers.

These photos are taken with a custom white balance using the full-spectrum Fujifilm X-T3. I could not get the white balance right in the raw converter, so these are the original jpg files with a Fujifilm Eterna colour profile.