Free Lensing

I heard about this trick a couple of years back, and I think its so much fun! Free lensing is the idea of taking your lens off your camera, flipping it around and holding the end against your camera body while shooting a photo. 

Why would you do this? It gives a really unique effect, and it is great if you don't have a macro lens! These are the photos I took during a hike up in Washington a few years back when I tried it for the very first time. 

(remember these are photos from 4 years ago, before I was doing photography as a business--this is not a professional technique, anyone can do this! All of these were with my very first rebel, that was about 3 years old and taken with my kit lens)

I've used my kit lens (18-55) and my 50mm doing this, both have worked great!

This was just yesterday with my kit lens. I literally grabbed what I had on hand (my ring) to show you how much closer you can get. The 2nd photo is about as close as I could take it with the lens on the right way.

How do you do this? Before detaching your lens, you need to set up your camera to the right exposure (yes...this means I'm saying you are forced to shoot in manual mode).
If you're curious how to do this--look into taking my Photography 101 class. Just $30 for one person, or you want to take it with a friend, $50 for two of you! Read more here!
You'll want a little higher shutter speed because you'll have to be very still.

Next, turn off your camera. 

Take off the lens and flip it around. 

Turn on your camera.
Hold the "wrong" side of your lens up to your camera. You're just going to hold it there, it wont reattach this way. 

Then you need to move your body to get the object in focus, rather than focusing through the camera. You're going to be getting pretty close to whatever it is your shooting. You need to hold the camera very still for this, as you're really getting a pinpoint focus here. Look at the ring picture above, the metal prongs are in focus, the diamond is mostly in focus and the band is out of focus, think about how little distance there is between those items, that's how accurate you need to get your focus...so you need to be very still. If you're lens isn't fixed (it zooms in and out) try zooming one way or another to see what is going to work best.

And that's it! Play around, try different things and enjoy your little photo trick!

Below is as close as I could get with my lens

With the the lens flipped around using free lensing


Tilting the lens a little to let extra light in and faking sun flare

All of the above are unedited straight out of the camera (SOOC)