Alia Sheikh: Procession of the Undead with the Petzval 58 Lens Showcase

Alia Sheikh is a filmmaker & senior development producer for the BBC. She recently backed the Kickstarter campaign for the Petzval 58 Bokeh Control Art Lens and showed us one of her shots. We were intrigued to see more and find out about her professional work and her love for all things bokeh based.

Hi, Alia. Please introduce yourself to the community.

I’m a filmmaker and R&D technologist currently working on virtual reality, although I was a photographer before I was any of those really. I’ve been taking photos ever since I borrowed my Dad’s Pentax K1000 and never gave it back. Once at uni, I and my friends found a little ActionSampler in a gadget shop and that was the first I heard of Lomography. I’d already been busy buying Russian film cameras on eBay though, and I was finding that different cameras and lenses really did mean different photos. Not only because they changed the nature of the source material, but more because of how much they changed the photographer. To this day, I take my most careful compositions on my Fed4 rangefinder – I can often be impatient, but I find that particular camera is so heavy and so fiddly, that it practically requires me to slow down my heartbeat to use it.

A few years back, I fell down the Micro Four Thirds rabbit hole in a big way, mainly for shooting video. It’s a camera format that lets you play with old glass very easily, but even so, it would have been a challenge to mount something as esoteric as a classic Petzval. So I’m loving the new Lomography Petzval lenses – they combine the build quality and the specificity that I love about classic camera equipment, with the ability to mount onto modern digital cameras and still get a sensible image. Well, a really nice image actually.

Could you tell us more about this shoot?

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of fun shooting costumes and characters and unusual environments. The very first photo I’d taken with my shiny new Petzval 58 Bokeh Control lens had been a fairly – well, a human statue – on an Edinburgh street corner and I was really happy with how the result had come out somewhere between a photograph and an oil painting. I’d also found a photo I ’d shot at the Burnham Carnival a while back – which is this really incredible combination of light show and costume party – and it had reminded me how much I enjoyed taking photos of people who were having way too much fun playing a character. As there was a Halloween costume parade through Manchester town center last weekend, I decided it would be fun to photograph the undead.

Your thoughts on shooting with the Petzval 58 Bokeh Control lens?

It takes a while to get used to the focusing mechanism and of course if you focus before you’ve decided the bokeh control setting you want to use, you have to focus again, but once you have the hang of that, it’s really nice lens to use. Since it was after sunset, I’d picked a nice wide aperture plate in a shape I hoped would complement the pictures and just stuck with it. I didn’t want to be dropping plates down cracks in the pavement as I was moving pretty fast to keep up with the parade. This meant that for better or for worse, I had a very wide open aperture and there was only a thin slice of the scene that would actually be in focus – the rest was all blurs and swirls. This makes a great background for shooting a procession of the undead, but you do have to nail the focus. Once I’d gotten the hang of staying a few meters ahead of people and letting them walk into focus, I was only making minimal adjustments to the focus dial, and I even had time to play with different bokeh settings. I have to say, quick street photography on a Petzval can be a fiddly thing, but you feel like a boss when it works.

I’m loving the impressionistic blurs and smudges that the Petzval produces and I want to try cutting out my own aperture plates to see if I can control those even more. It’s nice to have a crisp, defined cutout like a star if you want the bokeh to have a distinct shape, but I think it would produce interesting results to make plates with more organic, less distinct shapes for the cutouts.

I shoot a lot of video in my spare time and in the past I’ve tried different techniques to produce a dreamy, analogue look. For one performance I filmed at a carnival/costume party in London, I used a lot of blurs and vignetting and shot in a very desaturated grading-friendly format before upping the contrast and very carefully putting some saturation back in. I shot another film – a test really – in a cave lit by scattered tealights. I ended up viewing it on a broken monitor that had somehow rotated the colorspace – instead of warm orange, everything was a strange icy blue. It worked so well that I applied those colors as an effect to the final film. Really I’m hoping to use the Petzval lenses to finally be able to shoot video that is more dreamlike, more surreal without needing as many post-processing tricks. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for taking part Alia, for more information and updates follow Alia on twitter here.

2016-11-11 #news #video #soho #lens #showcase #london #uk #petzval-58-bokeh-control-art-lens #alia-sheikh