The Lensbaby experience

Recently the nice folks at Lensbaby sent me a Canon mount version of their Lensbaby Composer with accompanying Optic set, for me to put through it paces in the great outdoors. The first question in my mind was simple - Would the Composer be sharp enough for my critical picture editors?

Anybody who has heard about the Lensbaby are probably wondering why I am even considering the sharpness of the lens, after all the Lensbaby has become famous for it's ability to selectively blur the subject. In my opinion there is a fine line between an intentionally blurred image and one that is simply out of focus - And of course I don't want people viewing my images to think that the latter reason is why my images appear blurred. So, is the Lensbaby really sharp where it should be?

Considering that the original Lensbaby could almost be considered as a toy lens, the Composer is amazingly sharp. The method used to compose and focus a shot can be somewhat frustrating, with the composer utilizing an unique ball and socket system to refine the amount of blur (out of focus effect) applied to your composition meaning that once you have focussed the lens and then start to evaluate the 'lensbaby effect' you may well slightly knock the focusing of the sweet spot. I found myself composing, focussing, adjusting the blur direction, re-focussing, adjusting the aperture (via a rather simple yet highly effective method of placing metal discs in the front barrel of the optic), checking the focussing again and then actually tripping the trigger. Of course my camera was set up on a tripod all the time while I went through these motions - I did try some handheld shots but they were quickly deleted from my computer upon viewing them on the monitor.

Although the Lensbaby was sharp where it mattered (albeit with a drastic drop of sharpness outside the sweet spot - this is a Lensbaby after all), I did find the rendition of colours slightly muted and nowhere as vivid as I would expect from one of my 'L' series lenses. In the defense of the Lensbaby, I am comparing a lens costing less than £200 to a selection of lenses which retail for nearly 3x the price of the Lensbaby. The colours are muted but in a way they add to the Lensbaby effect. Personally however, they are not to my taste and I found myself converting a number of my images to Black & White.

Continuing along the Black and White theme, I experimented using the Lensbaby Composer with a 77mm size Kood infra-red filter attached to the front of the lens with Blu-Tack. The long exposures dictated by using a filter designed to block visible rays and only allow infrared light to pass combined with the selective focus (or should it be blur) of the Lensbaby seemed to compliment each other well and produced some memorable images.

Whilst testing the Lensbaby, I mainly used the excellent Double Glass Optic which is the standard optic shipped with the Lensbaby Composer and, as I mentioned above, I found extremely sharp. This can not be said of the optional Optic set although if you consider that a optic designed to replicate a pinhole camera is included in the selection it is hardly surprising! Unfortunately I found the Plastic, Single Glass and Pinhole / Zone Plate Optics to be little more than a selection of toy lenses which I would have absolutely no use for.

Perhaps the most important thing I found from trying out the Lensbaby Composer, is that whilst it will obviously let you down at times in regard to the image quality it will probably more than make up for any disappointment in the pure pleasure of use whilst actually capturing an image. This lens is not for everybody but, for those willing to persevere, it can produce some amazing results.