PhotoDude.com

Fri. Mar 19, 2004

LensBaby + PhotoDude = Good Time!

LensBaby + PhotoDude = Good Time! – Wednesday was a Big Day for New Glass here at Bunker PD. I finally replaced my 1987 model Canon EOS 70-200mm f/4.0 EF zoom lens (R.I.P.) with the Canon 70-200 f/4L, and 17 years sure makes a difference. In addition to the improved image quality of a ”L Series” lens, by comparison my old lens sounded like a small kitchen appliance when the autofocus motor kicked in.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to sharp, sharp, sharp, I got soft, soft soft, in the form of a LensBaby. It’s a very unique lens, best described by the press release:

March 3, 2004 Portland, OR. Lensbabies, LLC, introduced The Original Lensbaby, a flexible camera lens that creates a ’sweet spot’ area of focus that photographers can move around the image area by bending the flexible lens tubing. The Original Lensbaby brings the imperfect Holga look to digital and film SLR photography, but with greater versatility and new effects.


”The beauty of these lenses is in their calculated imperfection,” said Lensbabies founder and professional photographer Craig Strong. Strong invented the Lensbaby in an effort to create a digital equivalent to his Holga camera.


The Original Lensbaby combines several vintage camera technologies into a novel, patent-pending combination. The shooter focuses a Lensbaby using the same general principle used with a bellows camera by moving the focusing collar in and out with the fingertips. The photographer moves the ’sweet spot’ of focus around the picture plane by bending the glass optic out of a parallel position to the image capture plane, like a tilt-shift lens. Finally, reminiscent of Waterhouse stops, the photographer swaps apertures by removing one aperture ring and replacing it with another.


The Lensbaby creates tantalizing and gorgeous effects, but does the work in the lens rather than the photographer later applying software filters to add a creative look to their images. ”With a Lensbaby, you can do things you cant do in Photoshop,” said Jerry Hart, a professional photographer.

I’ve only begun to play around with it, and only at one aperture. But it’s been a lot of fun so far, and well worth 96 bucks. You can find a collection of ten shots of my usual home test subjects, in the newly created ”Galleries” section (all created using a customized Web Photo Gallery template in Photoshop CS).