Hello. My name is Jonathan Canlas, and I am the one who's work you are talking about.
Let me explain how I got this look and what I did. It is rather demystifying so get ready.
FIRST. There is no LensBaby. I do not own one and no offense to anyone who uses one, I find it quite gimmicky. The reason you have such crazy depth of field is from shooting on a Contax 645 with an 80mm f2 Zeiss lens. Shooting f/2 on this camera is like shooting 1.2 or 1 on a 35mm lens. The focus is REALLY tricky but when you nail it, it is unreal and CAN NOT be reproduced any other way in my opinion. The look of a Contax 645 with the 80mm lens is so distinct.
The other thing I want to clear up is when you over expose on your film, it does NOT make it more pastel looking. Here is the rule, the more you over expose your film the more CONTRAST and SATURATION you are introducing into your images. And I don't know about you, but SATURATION and CONTRAST are NOT pastel looking to me. The over exposing is my post production done IN CAMERA.
These images were all overexposed about 1.5-2 stops depending on where I was shooting. All color images were shot on FujiPro 400H. The bw stuff was on Kodak BW400CN and the cross processed Holga stuff was shot on Kodak E100VS and obviously cross processed.
I develop and scan everything in house. I own my own Noritsu QSF-V30 with a FujiHunt (fuji chemisty) conversion and a Fuji Frontier SP2500. I don't do the scanning myself, I have an employee do that, but that is where the images are scanned, corrected for denisty and color corrected. That is it. There are various setting to bump contrast or retain highlight detail (if you notice I NEVER have blown highlights, EVER). This machine literally lets me have a dynamic range of up to 10 stops in 1 image. Unreal.
There is no post production of these images. What you see is what you get. No cropping was done. If you have not figured it out, I HATE post processing and sitting in front of a computer. This is one of the main reasons I love film. I show up, shoot, develop/scan/clean dust, and upload the images and I'm done. They are "straight out of camera" other than taken into photoshop and cleaned for dust and scratches. The frontier does not have digital ice so dust is a constant battle.
I shot 4 rolls of 220, 1 roll of 120 and 1 roll of 35mm. That is usually what I shoot at a family session and then edit it down to around 50 images. This event was edited to 75 as it was 2 families.
The way I get this look is by shooting Fuji film on a Contax w/80mm f2 shot wide open. That is it. There is no gimmick, there is no crazy post production, there are no actions run, there is nothing but straight out of camera honest images. I used no flash, no reflectors, nothing but my Contax 645 w/ 80mm f2 lens (for color shots), Nikon F5 w/ 50mm 1.4 ZEISS lens and 35mm f/2 Nikkor lens (for the bw shots), and a Holga 120S (for the square cross processed images).
Film is a magical thing people, you should try it
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