Digital Photography has over the last 17 years brought about some amazing things. First we now have more people taking pictures than any other time in the history of photography. Back when we just had film, companies like Kodak and Polaroid tried to bring photography to the masses and while they had some minor success nothing has brought success to photography like the digital camera. Along the way we have seen an explosion in software packages that do everything from darkroom -esque type effects to compositing parts of one photo with another photo. We also now have the ability to shoot several photos in sequence and stitch them together in to one large wide panoramic image and perhaps one of more interesting things is HDR photography which is shooting the exact same image several times but at different exposures and then using software to combine the in to one high dynamic range image that has perfectly exposed highlights, midtones and shadows. We have also seen an explosion of interesting camera add-ons like filters, tripods, lenses and the like, but for me one of the most unique items is the LensBaby 3G from LensBabies LLC.
There have been several versions of the LensBaby the latest and I think greatest version is the recently released LensBaby 3G. The LensBaby 3G allows you to set your selective focus and lock it in to place using the focusing collar with lock so that you don’t have to hold it in place while you try to work the rest of your camera. It also has three new tilt fine tune controls so that you can get the sweet spot right where you want it. There is also the barrel focusing ring that allows you to fine tune the focus for sharper or softer sweet spots.
Sweet Spot: A Sweet Spot is an area that is near perfect. In the context of the LensBaby 3G the sweet spot is the area that is in near perfect focus.
The LensBaby 3G is designed to give you control over creative blur and softening effects that you add to your images at the time you take them instead of later in something like Photoshop. From my experience the LensBaby is just a faster way of doing this. Using Photoshop you would have to create masks to control the effects of the Lens Blur filter or the Gaussian blur filter. Neither of which come all that close to the effect that the LensBaby 3G gives you. Because the LensBaby doesn’t just soften or blur your image it also adds in motion blur like effects and interesting Bokeh effects.
Bokeh: (from the Japanese boke, "blur") is a photographic term referring to out-of-focus (OOF) areas in a photographic image.
For me the one downside to the LensBaby 3G is that it takes a good amount of time to learn to use it. It isn’t something that you can just put on your camera, let the camera set the shutter and aperture speed set focus and start taking pictures. For one thing there is no auto-focus, it is totally manual focus and you do this by pushing in or pulling out the LensBaby (it has a flexible bellows center for this) and then locking it in place and adjusting the barrel focusing ring to fine tune the focus. You can also tilt the bellow head of the lens baby to create different blur, motion blur and bokeh like effects. This also needs to be done for each image (in my opinion) as what works for one subject/shot may not work for another. So there is a lot of manual work involved. Add to that that the aperture is controlled by dropping in aperture discs, you get 7 aperture discs (8 if you count the f22 you get without any aperture disc in place), you get an aperture disc for f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f/11, f/16, f/22.
It took me a couple of weeks and several hundred shots before I felt I understood and had an idea of how the LensBaby works and even then I found it hard to get a sharply focused sweet spot in any of my images. I have included my best shots in the Image Gallery below. While they are interesting and not too bad, I really don’t have a sharp sweet spot. I plan to keep working with it until I get the hang of it.
The LensBaby is a complex accessory for your camera. It can only be used with dSLR cameras from Nikon (F Mount), Canon (EF Mount), Minolta/Sony (Minolta Maxxum / Sony Alpha mount), Pentax/Samsung/Sigma (Pentax K / Samsung GX / Sigma SD Mount), Olympus/Panasonic (Olympus 4/3rds (E1) / Panasonic Lumix DMC Mount) and Leica (R Mount).
This is a totally manual accessory it doesn’t communicate with the camera in any way. You simply remove your normal lens and put the LensBaby on just like it was any other lens. While I think the LensBaby has a lot of potential (Just look at the samples gallery on their site, there are some impressive images) it isn’t the easiest thing to master and I think if you have little experience in shooting photos in full manual mode and manual focus you will have an even longer learning curve. Is the LensBaby worth the learning curve? Yes, I think it is a lot of fun and creates special blur and motion blur effects that would be hard and time consuming to do post process. Is the LensBaby worth the price? I can’t answer that. For me yes, I like it a lot and will get many years of use from it. For you it depends on how much you will use it. If it is something you would use on occasion then probably not. The two groups of photographers that I think need a LensBaby are wedding photographers and portrait photographers. The LensBaby for these photographers could give you some great creative control that will set your photos apart from everyone else. |
