Lensbaby 'Muse' lens with +4 macro lens attached
Sometimes hard can be fun. I enjoy my Canon camera and its auto-focusing ways. Twisting the manual focus ring can be fun too. But how about taking control of focusing with both hands?
Sometimes crappy is good. I buy camera lens that are fast and produce sharp pictures. These lens capture the world as it is. But maybe here too, I am missing the point.
Lensbaby thinks so. Their mission is to build crappy lens; Ones that take both hands to focus, and even then you can't focus the whole image no matter what you do. They're great!
The Lensbaby products provide various ways of making your modern SLR camera more like an old bellows camera. The bellows in this case of the 'Muse' lens is a spongy plastic tube. At one end is a regular lens mount, for a Canon SLR in my case. At the other is a metal ring you can use with your fingers to squeeze, stretch, and bend the tube. In the middle is a metal aperture ring with a hole in it. The lens come with several rings allowing aperture from f/2.0 (no ring) to f/8 (smallest aperture).
Taken with a Lensbaby 'Muse' lens at f/4 on a Canon 450D
Once you mount the lens and choose an aperture ring, it is up to you squeeze and bend the lens until the aperture position brings your shot into focus. With most cameras you can put them in aperture priority mode and the camera can pick the shutter time for you. Or on many camera you can do that manually too.
The fairly wide apertures up to f/2.0 means that like regular lens with wide apertures you can have a very narrow depth of focus. You half to careful squeeze or stretch the lens until the image is in focus, and then holding that, squeeze the shutter release.
If that wasn't hard enough, the lens is such that only a portion of the frame can ever be in focus. This part of the charm; you can bend the lens to choose which small portion of the image is in focus. This combination of short depth of field and partial focus allows for a lot of creativity.
Lenbaby 'Muse' lens at f/2.0 with +4 macro lens
Lensbaby 'Muse' with f/2.0 and +4 macro lens. This pizza shot shows just how small and shallow the area in focus can be.
It takes a bit of experimentation to get results, and that is a lot of the fun. Larger aperture rings make the area of the image that is in focus smaller, and the depth of field smaller. My camera is a Canon 450D, so the sensor is smaller that than full-frame DSLR. This increases the proportion of the image that is in focus, so I tend to use the wider apertures. The default focus distance is less than a metre, but you can stretch the tube a little to focus further away. If you want to focus closer you can compress the tube, or you can add one of the optional macro lens.
The macro add-on lens include two 37mm macro lens to screw on the front of the main lens. The lens strengths are +4 and +10 and can be used individually or together. The bring the focus distance down to inches. This is allows you to have partial focus on a small area of a very close object, so you can really direct the viewer's attention.
Lensbaby have more expensive versions with focus and positioning that don't rely on steady hands. And you can achieve some of the same things with a proper tilt-and-shift lens, but the Lensbaby 'Muse' is much cheaper fun.
[More images taken with the Lensbaby are in my gallery, and on the Lensbaby website gallery]
Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 7:20PM 
