Last year in December, I decided to make a Christmas card with a vintage look, in which also the city of Barcelona could be recognized. After giving it quite some thought, I took a picture of the city’s amusement park, at the mountain of Tibidabo…adding to the composition a tin Santa Claus!

Amusement parks are a recurrent subject in my author’s work, around which I have two series of photographs.The first one, entitled “Rodó Park”, deals with a fairground where I used to go when I was a child. A few years later went back to the same place to take the series “Bismarck, el Hombre Araña uruguayo“. For years I have been a keen collector of “tin toys” and thought that a tin Santa could look cool, as if it was another attraction in the park. I browsed in internet and found the perfect one. Once I had it, headed to Tibidabo to take the shoots.

I wanted to work with natural light and waited till dusk to get long shadows with a reddish hue that I needed. To take this picture it was key to match up the perspective in both captures in order to make the photomontage easier for the retouchers.

Finally, I wanted the picture to have a selective blur that would give it a rather unusual look. Because I didn’t want to leave it to be worked at post-production, I thought I would use a tilt&shift or perspective control lens. But, I didn’t have any, so I decide to build it myself!

I tried with different old lenses that I have at home. The best one was an old, but excellent Componon 1:5,6/80 enlarger lens. It’s medium format ring wouldn’t cause vignetting in a 35mm full frame sensor.

It was time to think on how to make a bellows like the one in optical bench cameras. I looked for it at Aironfix™, ConTact™, (I don’t know the name of their equivalents in every country). The most difficult was to wait until the different Canon adapter threads and bayonets arrived from Hong Kong!

Neither Light nor Photoshop.pdf

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