Project 4

Dan Mold turns a classic landscape on its head by encapsulating surrounding scenery in a spherical glass focal point

Use a Lensball to add a point of interest to your landscapes

This month we’re taking you through the looking glass by showing you a fresh way to shoot landscapes. I’m sure plenty of you are like me and love to shoot in the great outdoors, but there are only so many ways to shoot landscapes traditionally. But with a clear glass ball, from companies such as Lensball, you can unlock new and exciting ways to shoot vistas.

Due to physics, when you take an image of a glass ball, the

landscape inside of it will be flipped upside down. Back at your computer you can choose to leave it as it is, and flip the entire picture upside down by going to Image>image Rotation>180º in Photoshop. Or you could select the circular image inside the ball and rotate just that by 180º, that way both the ball and landscape behind it are in the correct orientation. The latter looks very striking and we’ll go into a detailed step-by-step method on the following page.

You can do this technique with basic kit, providing you have a glass ball. You just need a Canon DSLR or mirrorless camera with a kit lens. You can use a tripod if you like, but this isn’t essential.

With your kit lens attached you can either shoot at the wide 18mm end and get really close to the ball to capture the surrounding scenery better (like we have above), or you can go further back and zoom in to the 55mm end, which will make it easier to blur the background out.