soft-fuzzy-dreamy-2

Your DSLR lens are very sharp nowadays, especially when you drop in the neighborhood of a 1000 bucks for them. Sharp is great. Most of the time. But that's not how our eyes see. Sometimes you want to soften your images and get a dreamy, organic feel, but without resorting to post effects or filters. In the old days we used softening "portrait" filters but those produce generally uniform effects. Another more creative way was to smear vaseline or some kind of oil on a regular filter. That's just too messy for me. What I like to use now is a plastic bag wrapped around the lens with a rubber band. By bunching it up in different amounts you can get all kinds of nice effects. The flat part of the plastic will give somewhat sharper areas (like the eye in this photo), while the wrinkly parts will scatter light and create surreal light tendrils. Too cool! Experiment a lot...
From my series Inner Tiger.