Photographers love accessories that help them create unique-looking images. With many photographers owning the same cameras and lenses, it’s exciting to find a product that provides us with the ability to create a distinctive photograph. The Lensbaby 2.0 gives photographers the flexibility to explore our individual creativity.
The Lensbaby 2.0 is a lens with a flexible barrel that, when pushed, pulled and/or bent, creates a dynamic-looking image with a relatively narrow plane of focus. You can create effects similar to those of a Lensbaby using Photoshop, but that takes you longer as you plow through various layers of filtering. A distinct advantage to Lensbabies is that you can experiment on location because you see the resulting distortion effect in your viewfinder.
The effect that a Lensbaby achieves is called selective focus, whereby a selected part of your image is in focus and the balance is less so. When we look at pictures, our automatic brain (as my university professor called it; not the technical term, I’m sure) searches for items that are familiar, comfortable and easy to understand. This causes us to quickly scan an image, searching for anything sharp and understandable. If nothing in the image is in focus, we eventually realize that the intent may be abstract, step back and evaluate.
The Lensbaby 2.0 lets you take advantage of the brain’s search for something sharp by providing you with complete control over the plane of focus, which is normally only available with large-format view cameras or expensive tilt-shift lenses.
A Lensbaby comes with a series of magnetic aperture rings (ƒ/2.0, ƒ/4.0, ƒ/5.6 and ƒ/8), which simply drop into the front of the lens; these aperture rings control depth of field. To focus a Lensbaby, use your fingers to compress the lens toward you or push the lens away from you. By pulling it toward you, the Lensbaby focuses to infinity; push it away from you and it focuses up to a foot away.
