I have been working hard all weekend to figure out my remarkable new lens, the Daguerreotype Achromat 2.9/64, struggling with the manual focus, the very unusual lighting challenges, and the very soft backgrounds and manual aperture plates. There is no such thing as pointing the camera and shooting, I have to think of three or four different things, most of them new to me.

Of course, social media being what it is, the photos from the new lens triggered some discussions about the photos I was taking, a number of people do not like soft focus photographs, they like the clear and literal nature of digital photography, that’s what they were used to. A good number of people said the photos reminded them of their vision problems, what is beautiful to me wasn’t beautiful to them.

This one is a challenge, and today I took the lens, some groceries and some sympathy over to my friend George Forss. His friend and companion, the artist Donna Wynbrandt, is in the hospital, George is both upset and bereft. He doesn’t eat most foods, we stopped at  the farmers’ market get him some onions, tomatoes, strawberries and potatoes. I also knew it would cheer him up to see my lens.

And who better to show my new lens. George was on the cover of Time Magazine and on the Today Show and praised by the great photographers of the world for his breathtaking shots of New York City and its’ landscape. He began selling his street photographs on Manhattan streets, and his work was discovered by David Duncan Douglas, the great World War II photographer.

He lives in my town of Cambridge, builds his own camera and optics and develops his photos in his Frankenstein laboratory.

George, one of the world’s most famous and brilliant urban landscape photographers in the world, never complains or whines, but I know how upset and stressed he gets when Donna is ill. I also realized that was no greater inspiration or good luck charm than George, just looking at him inspires my photography and encourages me.

He was going to visit Donna today and he expected her home tomorrow, but I know he forgets to eat when he’s excited so we wanted to make sure he had food for tonight. And I knew he needed some company. George and I have a powerful connection.

He knew what I needed and we moved all around his art gallery and dark room, trying different settings and lighting backgrounds.  I showed George each photo and listened to his feedback. He is a photographic genius.

There is no one better in the world to work with on a new and difficult lens. And this one is a whopper. More than 150 years ago, two optical geniuses, Charles Chevalier and Louise- Jacques-Mande Daguerre made history by combining their separate inventions in 1839, putting a Chevalier lens together with a Daguerrotype camera and creating the first optic lens in the world.

That is my lens, a newly manufactured revival of it from Lemography Inc., the lens, fitted with a Canon mount,  diffuses light in a very particular way, it is described as otherwordly and magical, often more like a landscape than a digital photograph. The lens is said to work it’s own special magic, it is like a donkey, I think, it likes some images and just doesn’t like others, and like a donkey, you can’t get it to do what it doesn’t want to do.

George and I click. We just get each other excited, and I am in awe of his genius.

I finally got George in the right place, by the front door, the sunlight from outside lighting up one half of his face, the portrait capturing George’s amazing duality, his brilliance as a photographer, his successful struggle with schizophrenia. I love George dearly and admire him, and he grabbed the lens and looked at it and held it, whistling. and fiddling with it

I think this is the best portrait I have yet taken of him, and the softness of the lens was a big reason.

“This is a great lens,” he said, “you can do great things with it.” I think so too, I said, but it was challenging. Good, he said, you get the best pictures that way.

And I did do something with it, right then.

I found one of the sweet spots for this new lens strong background light, soft interior light, the lens knew just what to do with it, and the image was clear and yet soft at the same time. It capture the character in  George’s face beautifully for me. I took a dozen different photos with different focus and aperture settings before I got the right one.

A breakthrough. I took 100 pictures with this lens in George’s studio before I got this one, and I deleted all but two of them when I saw them on the computer. But these two were worth it.

That is how creativity works for me. You put your head down and break the rules and try to do it so many times that you learn from it, lessons no one can teach  you but that you never forget. You never give up, and never listen to the people along the way who line up to tell you why you can’t do it or it doesn’t work.

You listen to the people who tell you to keep trying, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Thanks George, you are a genie and a fairy and an angel, and I love you for your big heart and wonderful creative brain. Your inspiration got me to see what I needed to see. A good beginning, lots of hard work and experimentation ahead.