Adventures in Freelensing

Lately I've been experimenting with freelensing. It's a really cool photography technique that anyone who has a detachable lens can try. It's a fun way to "hack" your camera, and it creates the tilt-shift effect you may be familiar with from Instagram. (Only, manually, the effect is way more dramatic and cool looking!)

Basically, you take photos by holding the detached lens close to the camera and tilting it at different angles to change the focus. Whereas, normally what's in focus depends on depth (i.e. the foreground is sharp and the background is blurry), with freelensing you can change the focus between objects that are the same distance away.

I started with this great tutorial, which I'd recommend as a good jumping off point for anyone interested in trying the technique themselves.

It's one of those things that's a bit unwieldy and difficult to control at first. But that's part of the fun. I think it's a really good creative practice to give up some control sometimes and just experiment and see what comes.