Petzval Amigo Xavier Boldú
6 9 Share TweetXavier Boldú is a London based photographer who has managed to perfectly capture the full potential of the Petzval 85 lens through his stunning portraits. He shares some of his favorite images and talks about his passion for this bokeh art lens.
On getting into photography
I am 26 years of age. I am a Catalan photographer currently working and living in London for the last four years. I can say I got into photography because of my dad. He loves to take photos and when he was younger he used to take so many lovely portraits of her sisters and, later on, my mum. One day I was going through old boxes in the attic and I discovered all his amazing work which I wrote about for this article. When I was in high school I got my first SLR which started everything. I was taking photos of everything I saw, some were terrible ( the majority of them) but others were brilliant. At that stage I knew all I needed was practice.
On shooting with the Petzval Lens*
Amazing!! People stop you in the street and ask you: what is that? Is that a camera? Is that a toy? How does it work? On the technical side I have to say that it isn’t one of the easiest lens to shoot with. When you are shooting around f2 the focus can be missed very easily. Just a slightly movement forwards or backwards and your subject is out of focus. That is the reason why I mostly use it with my digital SLR so I can zoom in to nail the focus. Said that, when you get everything in focus there are no other lens that can beat the Petzval lens. They make everything look magic and mysterious. The most boring looking forest appears like the most enchanted forest you have ever seen. It really makes your photographs pop! It works really well with patterned background such as trees, leaves, mosaics. The Petzval lens it is now always in my bag whenever I have to do a photoshoot or just to go and shoot for fun.
What do you love about film photography?
The look of it of course. The colors and the grain. Nowadays it is very common for a professional photographer to tweak his digital photographs to make them look like they were taken on film. But you can save all this time and effort just shooting in film in the first place. If you know how you want your photographs to look, you can choose the film that will give you those colors and grain you are looking for and use the film camera that will help you get the image you want. Sometimes you get great surprises from those ‘mistakes’ that happen when you are shooting film. A light leak can make your photograph go from ordinary to extraordinary.
Any upcoming projects?
Since last September I started to focus more and more on my photography as a profession. We all know that is quite difficult to survive being a photographer so we all need to start thinking of it as a second job. I have created my photography website and I have had a few projects from it. I hope it doesn’t stop here and I can quit my job and live off my photography.
Visit Xavier Boldú's Lomohome.
written by hannah_brown on 2016-02-04 #people #soho #bokeh #london #uk #portraits #lomoamigo #fafascinado #londonsoho #art-lens #petzval-85 #xavier-boldu
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