Lensbabies: Intuitive photography in an electronic world

The $270 Lensbaby 3G lens

(Credit: Lensbabies)

I've tried Lensbabies' 3G selective-focus lens, and I like it.

This lens, which looks more like a miniature Lunar Excursion Module than a traditional SLR lens, restores some physicality to a world of photography that's ever more electronic and automated. And the images it produces can be compelling.

The trend in photography in recent decades has been toward ever more automation. We have automatic exposure, focus, shutter speeds, white balance. As computers get smaller, the list of automated camera operations gets longer: newer Panasonic models can tell the difference between a landscape and portrait, and Sony's DSC-T200 can be set not to shoot until it detects a smile. In general, I'm supportive: autofocus fares better than I do in general, and I loathe setting white balance. And a lot of folks in the point-and-shoot area benefit from hand-holding.

But Lensbabies, a small company in Portland, Ore., is going against this grain, and it's refreshing.

A shot taken with the Lensbaby 3G

(Credit: Stephen Shankland)

Though images the Lensbaby 3G produced can be gimmicky, they also can be very effective. These selective focus lenses are so named because a relatively small patch of the image is in focus, and the rest recedes quickly into a blur. The effect is to concentrate the viewer's attention sharply on an in-focus point and, sometimes, to impart a sense of motion toward it.

Here's how the Lensbaby 3G works. There are two lens elements, one fixed close to the camera body and the other at the other end of a flexible plastic tube. You use your fingers to flex, compress or extend the tube, reaching around the camera body (and in my case, wishing I had longer, more dexterous dactyls). The position of the farther lens determines what exactly is in focus, and you can steer it so it's an off-center.

It's fun but tough to focus. It's very intuitive, and I got much better at it with practice as reflex gradually took over from conscious thought. Even so, I was grateful to be shooting digital, because the fraction of dud shots was much higher than usual. And I wished often for a larger, brighter viewfinder so I could see what was in focus better.

Shooting moving subjects was especially unreliable. If you've got time to set up shots in advance with a tripod, though, the lens can be fixed temporarily in a particular position then fine-tuned.

The Lunar Excursion Module

(Credit: NASA)

It's not just the focusing that's manual. The lenses have different apertures, but setting it involves pulling out a washer-shaped disc with a magnetic tool and replacing it with a different disc with a different-size hole. I stuck mostly with the f/4 disc, which lets a fair amount of light through. Using smaller apertures--the lens comes with a good selection--produces a deeper depth of field to ease focusing, but of course it also slows shutter speeds and reduces the selective-focus effect.

Exposure is set using the camera's through-the-lens metering, with no communication with the lens. I often found on a Canon Rebel XT that it was best to drop exposure down by about a stop.

The Lensbaby 3G has a 50mm focal length. It costs $270 for Sony, Leica, Canon, Nikon, Pentax/Samsung and Olympus/Panasonic SLR mounts and $390 for medium-format Pentax 67 and Mamiya 645 mounts. The company also sells a $114 kit with 0.6x wide-angle and 1.6x telephoto kits and a macro adapter for close-up shots.

[LarryLo]

I'm Sorry....

Maybe I just don't "get it"? It seems to me that 60 seconds in photoshop can give the same effect without all the hassle or cost of a new attachment.

I shot SLR before DSLR and it seems these are a throw back to days gone by. I see these lens advertised everywhere...and I still don't understand what's so special about them.

Must be me. :)

[SeizeCTRL]

No kidding

it takes all of 10 seconds to select part of an image and then select which blur filter to apply. why would I need to buy a lens to do that?

[One-Eared Gundark]

I agree

When I shoot, I want to capture the most neutral picture I can. Any filters or effects applied in camera cannot be removed later, however they can easily be added in post. This is why some people insist in shooting in RAW mode. They get less processing by the camera making what it "thinks" the image looks like.
It's an interesting attachment (the Lensbaby), but I do not think it gives us anything post processing can't.

[Shankland]

Not quite the same as Photoshop

It's true that you sometimes can simulate similar effects with Photoshop or some such software that's got masking and blurring. But there are times when it would be extremely difficult to give exactly what a Lensbaby does because of depth of field issues. For example, in the situation where the subject has a lot of depth, such as a flower close-up or splashing water, elements that are near each other in pixels can be distant in terms of the plane of focus. It's a masking nightmare.

Here are a few specific shots that perhaps illustrate the point:

http://lensbabies.com/phorum/file.php?1,file=24025

http://lensbabies.com/phorum/file.php?1,file=22450

http://lensbabies.com/phorum/file.php?1,file=23866

Also, Lensbabies can produce some wacky bokeh that would be tough to preserve with masking and motion-blur effects in post-processing:

http://lensbabies.com/phorum/file.php?1,file=23550

On a personal note, post-processing isn't the my preferred way to spend my photography hours. I already spend enough time stuck behind a monitor. And of course Photoshop, while flexible, isn't free, either.

[Photodream]

Can't do this in Photoshop

I went to a seminar with Jim DiVitale, who is in the Photoshop Hall of Fame, and Jim said that it's impossible to replicate the Lensbaby look in Photoshop. I have heard other people claim that 'they could do this in 60 seconds' but A) they almost never show anything and B) when they do show something it looks quite obvious that it was done with software.

In any case, when Jim was demonstrating the Lensbaby, he was shooting the subject 15 times from 15 different angles, with the sharp area in different places. Even if you could try to replicate the Lensbaby look, you could not replicate this creative process, which allowed Jim to get some amazing photographs.

Anyway, I like what Stephen says -- I'd rather spend my time shooting rather than pushing the mouse around. But each to his own.

David

[Jonathan Machen]

Now that's a cute lensbaby!

:)I thought this post was going to be about all the intuitive, easy-
to-use cameras for the three and under crowd. Babies these days
seem fascinated with their parents' fascination for snapping pic
after pic, whether it be from cell phone camera or video cam or
whatever..their learning curve for these devices will be faster than
ours...