By David Gewirtz
Sometimes, being a reviewer is a tough job. Other times, it's easy. Being a reviewer is easy when the product you're reviewing clearly sucks, clearly rocks, or clearly fits into a particular box. Lensbabies, shown in Figure A, are not easy to review because they don't fit any clear category.
FIGURE A
This is a Lensbaby. (click for larger image)
If you look at the figure above, you'll see two lens circles, separated by a rubber tube reminiscent of the old photo bellows. As described by the company, "Lensbabies bring one area of your photo into sharp focus, with that 'sweet spot' surrounded by graduated blur. You can move the sweet spot to any part of your photo by bending the flexible lens tubing." In other words, Lensbabies muck up, blur, and distort your photos.
You can only use a Lensbaby if you've got an SLR camera. I tested the one provided to Connected Photographer on a Canon Rebel digital SLR. You remove your existing lens, attach the Lensbaby, and point, twist, bend, fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, and shoot.
"Point, twist, bend, fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, and shoot."
The results are bizarre, interesting, terrible, and fabulous. In other words, they're completely unpredictable and random, partially dependent on your skill as a photographer and partially dependent on the great six-sided dice the universe uses to torment us mere humans.
As a purist, this product annoys me. After all, it takes perfectly clear pictures and mucks them up. For example, I took a picture of the small palm tree out back of my house with the Lensbaby and got the mess shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
It's blurry, ugly, and distorted. Gee, wow. (click for larger image)
Why use a lens that distorts the original when you can do all sorts of effects in Photoshop? Plus, when you use Photoshop, you've got a quality original as well as a modified, filtered final image. So Lensbabies seem like a throwback to those pre-Photoshop days when you needed to do your effects before they hit the film.
So perhaps Lensbabies are throwbacks. Rather than digital technology, Lensbabies are 100% optical.
But does everything now have to be digital? What if we factor in the elusive, overrated, and sometimes perfectly appropriate concept we call "art"? We artists use different tools and mediums to create our effects. So, while we might often want to use Photoshop and its wonderful library of filters to get an effect, there are times we might want to literally bend light to get the results we want.
To illustrate how Lenbabies work when they really work, I'm going to show you a before and after picture. Figure C shows you the view from my backyard.
FIGURE C
This is my backyard. (click for larger image)
For those of you wondering just why we moved from New Jersey to Florida, take a look at the above image. That was taken in December and that really is a picture taken from my backyard.
In any case, I took a similar picture with a Lensbaby, shown in Figure D.
FIGURE D
The distortion is from the Lensbaby. The blue color was created in Photoshop. (click for larger image)
The blurring distortion is from the Lensbaby. The image was recorded by the camera as RAW, and when I opened it in Photoshop, I told the RAW processor to use tungsten light instead of normal light, which gave the final image the blue coloring. But I did no other modification to the image. What you see (with the addition of a color effect) is what the Lensbaby recorded.
Pretty slick, eh?
So, how do we rate this product? This was tough. The product is just plain dumb. I mean, why would you want to screw with a perfectly good lens to take blurry pictures? That is, unless you're an "arteest" and want to create really interesting art.
I really wanted to give the product a three out of five, because it's just damned weird. But I couldn't find any functional flaws to reduce the rating. I couldn't drop the rating down because of price. At about a hundred bucks, Lensbabies are priced reasonably for an SLR lens. And it's such a simple product that it doesn't do anything wrong. It's a totally unique product, so it's not like I could say it's the same ol' thing.
So, I'm stuck with rating this thing a five out of five. It works exactly as described, it has no particular flaws other than being weird, it's unique in its class, and it's priced reasonably. We're forced to give Lensbabies a really-friggin-weird five out of five. If you want to take some interesting pictures using a new and unusual tool, don't hesitate to adopt a Lensbaby.
RATING: 5 STARS