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Playing with Prisms (2)
Different lenses... different effects
As usual with trick photography it’s easier to show the effect than describe or demonstrate the technique... so the lead multi-prism enhanced image on the previous page is of Elvis Costello on stage - taken with a 5-prism attachment on a 135mm Nikkor (not a 200mm telephoto as previously indicated on my weblog). On the impressionistic views of new and old architecture... the building in Swindon, Wiltshire (below left) was taken with a 5-prism attachment on a standard 50mm Nikkor, whereas the older building detail seen in Florence, Italy was taken using a 35mm Perspective Control lens (not used in PC mode) fitted with a multi-colored 3-prism attachment... simple really!
Any multi-image effect is increasingly distorted with lenses longer than the standard 50mm. I have regularly used lenses of up to 200mm focal length (all sharing the same 52mm filter thread of my various prism attachments). With the image of singer Elvis Costello his glitzy, electric blue jacket became partially superimposed over the background... which he didn’t much care for me doing at the time - today, of course, digital would have revealed the effect instantly. The leading image in my “Solar Flair” article, featuring the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in the UK, was taken using a similar maltreatment... on that occasion I used a deep red filter as well as a 5-prism lens on a Nikkor 200mm telephoto lens, also shooting into the setting sun to add impact to the scene.
It’s worth noting that multi-prism lens effects are not just gimmicks for amateur photographers. Admittedly, Parisian based photographer Francisco Hidalgo was being sponsored by Cokin at the time, but he made thousands of such images using all sorts of filters and visual-trickery which were seen by many in magazines and books as well as received by millions as eye-catchingly different postcards.
Even the highly revered war photographer David Douglas Duncan experimented with these visual effects using an extraordinary custom-made multi-prism wheel or disc (from memory there were something like 64 prisms on some of his lenses... rotatable using a geared hand-crank) from which the best examples were made into a coffee-table book “Prismatics : Exploring a New World” published by Harper & Row, New York, in the early 1980s. This was quite a departure for D.D.D. whose seminal work “War Without Heroes” showed an eye and passion similar to his book “Silent Studio” on Pablo Picasso’s place of work.
Whatever strange looks you get when using a prism attachment on your lens, remember that you are experimenting with and enjoying your creativity... for which anything and everything is valid. I do things such as 5-minute art that certainly rivals digital (taking into consideration the post-processing time) for outright speed to a finished result... and I also enjoy mixing or combining both photographic and art disciplines. After all, both photography and art are inextricably linked... and it’s unfortunate that Paul Delaroche is so often wrongly quoted as having said, “From today, painting is dead,” because he recognized and was an enthusiastic advocate of the new photographic art form called the Daguerreotype, and did not predict the decline of an old one using brush, paint and canvas.
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