Happy Holidays and/or Merry Christmas to everybody out there, may 2010 be a success and a blast for all of us.

I'm not going to mention which lens did what shot other than to say that each shot was done by a diff. lens, and they're lenses which I've already talked abouton WideOpen.

Some folks will of course never see what the lovers of these lenses see, in these lenses, and what they do.  They're stuck on the word soft, in the moniker 'soft focus lens'.    Every one of these shots has a crispness/smoothness/sharp is as sharp can be, w/these lenses, and then a transition to the background as differing degress of the abstract/surreal and/or the impressionistic.

The word 'Bokeh' doesn't cover what these lenses do to a background, and doesn't take into acount the transition itself between the foreground and background. 

Looking at 'Traveling Iron', I see the front of the iron rendered as representational, with most everything there, and then transiting to the abstract w/a lot of information removed as you go back to the background................The lens I used on the iron created TWO VERSIONS of the SAME THING, that's what I see, and it doens't have anything to w/the softness that produced it, because one made the other. 

The whole thing to these lenses isn't that they're soft focus lenses,  because that's what they do, more to the point is using these soft focus lenses is in fact the 'HOW', and w/selective focus/type of lighting/closer or farther from the lens/a certain film/manipulation of tonality et al, the end result goes beyond soft, and bokeh, and why sharp is preferable to soft.

Said another way, I don't use soft focus lenses to make things soft, I'm trying to do some many more things, in fact I like manipulating my images w/the benchmark of 'smooth' in my mind when I play w/a shot, and I play around with the lighting and all the variables to see transitions and how they affect an object..................

I do like shooting SM w/a sharp lens, when it needs it to be that way, and it would be boring to insist on shooting only one way at the exclusion of the other. 

I don't worry about shooting in color w/these lenses anymore, some of 'em are so soft that color fringing as it would be delineated by a sharp lens just 'isn't there' when you shoot color w/these lenses as they tend to 'smooth everything over', plus if there's a shift in color from where it should be, I simply don't correct for it, leaving it where it is.

Reading Glasses is close to, or near over the top saturation wise, but I couldn't bring myself to desaturate the shot.