Rarely in the photography world does a new camera component come along that's not only useful and original but also cheap. When inventor Craig Strong released the Original Lensbaby in 2004, it met all of those criteria, quickly becoming popular among SLR photographers who care about art more than they do about technical perfection. Essentially a simple lens with a flexible barrel, the Lensbaby lets you manually select an area of sharp focus and leaves the rest of the image blurry.
This April, Strong unveiled the Lensbaby 2.0, a version with a higher-quality, two-element lens; an f/2.0 aperture in addition to the original f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6, and f/8.0 options; and a more convenient system for changing apertures. You can purchase both the Original Lensbaby ($96 list) and Lensbaby 2.0 ($150) with a mount for just about any current digital SLR and some film SLRs too. I tried out both optics on a Nikon D70 and quickly came to the conclusion that I'd like to add one to my lens collection. I'd splurge and get the 2.0, since it makes significant improvements to the Original.
The Lensbaby look
Strong came up with the Lensbaby while trying to create a digital version of a Holga, the cheap film camera whose plastic lens produces images that can be as beautiful as they are technically flawed. While the Lensbaby shares the Holga's low optical quality (although the lens is glass), its results have a different look, with more blurring and less vignetting. The Lensbaby is also often compared to tilt/shift lenses, which offer superior optical quality, linear distortion correction, and more precise focus area control, for several times the price. You can think of the Lensbaby as a poor man's tilt/shift--but that man will be staying poor if he's expecting to use the Lensbaby to shoot high-quality architecture photos, one of the primary uses of tilt/shift lenses. It offers neither the perspective control nor the sharpness needed for the task.
On the other hand, it can capture beautiful portraits and still lifes, another common tilt/shift application. That's especially true of Lensbaby 2.0, since it's sharper in its sharp area than the Original. To my eye, the difference between the two lenses' sharpness makes the difference between images that look like they were taken by a creative amateur with a toy camera and ones that look like they were taken by a pro who likes soft focus effects. That said, the 2.0 has relatively soft focus even in its sharpest area. If that's not to your taste and you have some extra time and glass on your hands, you can follow DigiHack's instructions for assembling a homemade tilt/shift lens. David Nightingale at chromasia.com did and has published some of his resulting photos, along with a few Lensbaby 2.0 shots here.
Have you tried the Lensbaby? Do you think it's a worthwhile creative tool or a gimmicky toy?
One of the strengths of the Lensbaby look is its
bokeh. That somewhat esoteric term describes the quality of out-of-focus areas in a photograph. Judging bokeh is subjective, but most people agree that soft, pleasantly shaped highlights in blurred areas make for good bokeh, while harsh highlights constitute bad, distracting bokeh. Its pleasing bokeh makes the Lensbaby a good choice for backlit photos, as well as for creative studio lighting.
Shooting with the Lensbaby
The Lensbaby makes you pay attention to the pictures you're taking in a way that current digital SLRs, with their autofocus and auto-everything-else options, have made unnecessary. I think that's a good thing, since looking carefully at the world is what compelling photography is all about. To select an area of sharp focus in your shot, you hold onto the rim around the front of the lens and wiggle it around. You compress the flexible barrel against the camera to bring faraway subjects into focus and pull it out to focus as close as 10 inches away. Then you bend it in different directions to choose a precise point of sharpest focus. You'll really appreciate a big, bright viewfinder when manipulating the focus; the D70's smallish view proved a little frustrating to me.
Exposure isn't usually automatic with the Lensbaby either, although aperture-priority autoexposure will work with it on Canon dSLRs. That's no problem in the digital world, though, since you can guess at manual-exposure settings, and then make adjustments after reviewing a test shot and checking a histogram display. Selecting an aperture is also a very manual process: With the Original Lensbaby, you have to pry a gasket out using a plastic tool, switch in the aperture ring with the f-stop you want to use, then put the gasket back--a fairly kludgy setup. Lensbaby 2.0 makes the process a lot easier by using magnets to hold the aperture ring in place. To switch rings, you just pop one out using the mini-Lenspen that comes with the camera, and snap another ring in. And then, of course, you can use the Lenspen to clean the glass.
Creative tool or gimmicky toy?
The Lensbaby is a little bundle of contradictions. On one hand, its simplicity is part of what makes it so appealing (and cheap). On the other, that same simplicity makes it a bit of a one-trick pony. Once you've seen a couple of photos with the heavy blurring and limited area of sharpness that distinguish Lensbaby shots, the look will be unmistakable. And once you've seen a dozen of them, it can start to look gimmicky.
But you shouldn't write the Lensbaby off as a cheap thrill. Another one of its contradictions is that, while it makes you work harder to get focus and exposure right, it can also make you lazy. The blurring effect is cool enough at first that it can make otherwise boring photographs seem compelling. If you rely on the blur to provide all of the interest in your photos and then toss the lens aside when you tire of the effect, you can't blame that on the lens. Pay the same attention to light, color, and composition that you would when using a $1,000 lens, and I'll bet you'll take a lot of shots worth printing.
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