Posts Tagged lensbaby

One of the most-carried pieces of travel gear is a digital camera. And if you’ve moved up from a point-and-shoot to a DSLR—or are thinking about it—Lensbaby can help take your photography to the next level of creativity.

Lensbaby makes a series of lenses, and optic inserts for those lenses, that can turn ordinary photos into extraordinary works of art. I’ve been spending some time with the Composer lens and the Soft Focus Optic on my Nikon D90 and enjoying the results.

First stop was an old-fashioned carnival where I got so busy with the Lensbaby, I forgot about the cotton candy.

The Composer is a selective-focus lens. One of the best ways to call attention to a subject is to have it in sharp focus, with the background or even the foreground blurred. This is a great-looking effect. And it’s where the Composer shines.

Lensbaby Composer's view of the Fun Slide

The focus area can be in the center of the picture. Or, with the Composer’s ball-and-socket design, the sweet spot can be moved to the right or left and up or down.

Then, just focus and shoot. A built-in locking ring, if  needed, will hold the spot.

It’s possible to get a similar type of selective focus with a regular lens by using a wide aperture, giving the picture a shallow depth of field. But the Composer makes it easy and can create a more dramatic effect with a movable sweet spot in only a portion of the frame.

The Composer also includes changeable aperture discs ranging from f2 to f22. I used manual exposure settings for my D90. Some other cameras allow light metering in aperture-priority mode.

The Composer is available with mounts for most popular digital SLR cameras.

Lensbaby offers two other selective-focus lenses—the Muse, with an accordion-like design, and the Control Freak for tabletop and macro photography.  The Composer, Muse and Control Freak can each be used with interchangeable optics for different looks.

Carnival ride with Soft Focus Optic

One of these interchangeable optics is the Soft Focus, which I’ve also been testing. It gives pictures a softer, velvety look. This effect is seen evenly throughout the image, without the sweet spot of the standard optic in the Composer.

It’s great for portraits and landscape shots and can do some really interesting things with lights as you can see from the photo of the Wipeout ride.

Lensbaby has an online gallery of photos. There’s also a Flickr group for enthusiasts to share their favorite pics and tips.

The Composer sells for $270 at Lensbaby’s online store. Street prices are very close to that. It’s available from Amazon and other retailers nationwide. (The Amazon link is for the Nikon model—be sure and choose the correct mount for your camera.)

Carnival ride with Composer

The Soft Focus Optic sells for $89.95 from Lensbaby direct and is also available from Amazon. Note that a Composer, Muse or Control Freak lens is needed to use one of the changeable optics such as Soft Focus.

Of course, setting up a Lensbaby takes a bit longer than using an automatic lens. But the small amount of extra time invested pays off with stunning photos.

Point and shoot cameras are great when you want a small, easy-to-use camera to carry around during your travels. But for serious photography—minus the shutter lag, fixed lenses and other annoyances of the point-and-shoots—a DSLR is definitely the way to go.

Then, adding a Lensbaby can help you look at the world in a new way.