gear

THE DIGITAL SOAPBOX OF ANDY CLEAVENGER

LENSBABY 2.0

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Email:  graycard18@gmail.com

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“Dude... your lens is like, totally jacked up”

“Yeah, pretty much”

If you buy one of these, you should mentally prepare yourself for the above conversation to take place every time you use it. The most common question I get after explaining what it is is “so, can it shoot around corners or something?”

Uhhh... no.

To put it simply the Lensbaby is like turning your DSLR into a digital Holga. It is essentially an uncorrected lens fixed at the end of a vacuum cleaner hose. The uncorrected lens creates what the inventors call a “sweet spot” that is in focus which then quickly fades off to blurry/bendy textures. This “sweet spot” is moved around the image plane by bending the vacuum cleaner hose in different directions. To focus it you push/pull the end of the lens until the “sweet spot” is...  well...  sweet.

There are several versions of the Lensbaby. This is the second incarnation of it (hence the “2.0”). It comes with several discs that you can insert into the end of the lens to adjust the aperture. I used to use it with no aperture disc in there at all in order to maximize the blurry effect, but that also made it extremely difficult to achieve focus in the “sweet spot”. So I’ve started putting the widest aperture disc in there and just leaving it in there. That kicks up the depth of field just enough that I get more shots in focus, but I still have most of that blurry/bendy texture around the edges.

Some people dismiss these as gimmicky, and I think there’s definitely the potential for them to be overused in that capacity, much the same way one might overuse a fisheye. But I tend to think that you’re really only in danger of that if you use one of those tools as a crutch. If the particular special effect is the only thing the image has going for it, you are officially in gimmickland. Throwing a fisheye, or a lensbaby, or a tilt/shift lens on your camera is not a free pass to disregard the need for good composition and proper exposure.

My Lensbaby has become a standard thing I bring with me everywhere now. I probably don’t use it as often as my 20mm or 60mm micro. But I do enjoy it.

Anyway, here are some samples: