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Home >> Photography >> Film Equipment Lensbaby
When offered the chance by the makers of Lensbabies to take a closer look at something that just exuded fun, well, of course I jumped at the opportunity and said, send it on Baby! The Lensbaby
is the invention of Craig Strong, a professional photographer from
It was interesting reading at the Lensbabies web site to discover that Craig Strong invented the Lensbaby as a way to bring out the qualities of the Holga camera to the digital age. The Holga, whoa?! Yes indeed, that Holga, the plastic bodied piece of…ahem…that happens to be the cheapest way for anyone to dabble in medium format photography. You get a fixed lens, fixed shutter speed camera in the Holga, but that isn’t the so-called charm of the Holga. Holgas are like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates, with each exposure, you never know what you’re gonna get because of the quality offered by a Holga. You have light leak risks in the camera and lens that can fog up the film and the lens being plastic in origin can give you a decidedly un-sharp look to your images – as in you wrap up your expensive glass optical lens in saran wrap and then take pictures through it. It makes one wonder why anyone would bother with a Holga, even if it only costs US $20 for a medium format camera. But strange as it may seem, all of those light leaks and dealer supplied elastic bands to keep the body together while in shipment, are a part of the Holga charm and why it has a cult following. Take that charm, but get rid of the plastic lens for a quality glass optic and get rid of the light leaks, but add in a twist for focusing and what we have is a Lensbaby. The Lensbaby itself is a diminutive package, being not much more than 2 inches long and 2 inches in diameter. It comes in a variety of lens mounts for Nikon, Canon EF (EOS), Canon FD, Pentax K, Minolta Maxxum, Minolta manual focus, Contax/Yashica, and even in screw mount. With so many different kinds of adapters available, the Lensbaby should be able to be mounted on the majority of 35mm SLRs available past and present. Cost is a very low US $100, so it's an affordable lens for most people to purchase.
The basics of the Lensbaby is that it is around 50mm in focal length, but my own subjective comparison to a zoom lens indicates closer to 60mm. When directly mounted to the lens, the nominal focus is around one-foot, but my measurement from the front of the lens indicates 14 inches. Close enough, so why quibble too much. That’s the boring spec stuff out of the way, but where things get interesting is in the close focusing of the Lensbaby that can make for some pretty wild magnification based on how well you can extend the Lensbaby. Ah yes, focusing is entirely manual, and when I say manual, I do mean manual push or pull focusing of the Lensbaby. As you can see in the photos, the Lensbaby is a most intriguing lens that has no helicoids to aid in smooth focusing as one would receive from even the cheapest 50mm f1.8 prime lenses. There is but a single element and you either use foot focus or push the Lensbaby in for infinity focus or pull it out to focus close-up. At maximum extension (or as far as my non he-man fingers could pull the Lensbaby out) I got a minimum focusing distance of about 4 inches from the front of the lens and very subjectively, the magnification received appeared to be greater than a 600mm lens. So, you have a nominal 80 to 90mm lens on a 1.5x factor D100 that can magnify to maybe 7x; give me another Keenu Reeves-like whoa!
In case you’re wondering how I conjured up these comparison figures, I used my 70-200 zoom lens mounted to a 2x teleconverter on my Nikon D100, which with its 1.5x crop factor, turns that 400mm f5.6 lens to an equivalent 600mm lens. I compared the shot to the D100 and Lensbaby at minimum focus and saw that the Lensbaby shot was a bit more magnified. Again, all subjective, and my atrocious math will probably get me in trouble by someone counting all those mm in focal lengths more closely than I did – yes, there have been a few nights wondering how the heck I ever got into university with my putrid high school math grades, which would also explain why I'm an Arts major. Anyway, let’s not get too carried with specs and measurements, because that isn’t what the Lensbaby is about.
Besides the minimum focus attributes of the Lensbaby, the bellows used is free form, meaning that yes Virginia, Santa has given us a cheap tilt and shift capable lens, albeit with limitations and shall we say, a less than scintilla-like resolution and definition along the edges of the frame, but the center looks pretty good for such a low cost lens. Used on a full-frame F100 film camera and you’re not going to get much tilt or shift before major mechanical vignetting occurs, but there’s much more flexibility with the half-frame D-SLRs from Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Kodak, Pentax and soon to be, Minolta.
Canon users should be able to enjoy Aperture Priority metering with the Lensbaby on their D-SLRs, whereas we Nikon users have to utilize Manual mode and either a handheld meter, or else use the histogram display to fine tune exposures. This is because the consumer level Nikon D-SLRs are based predominantly on the F80 or F75 film cameras (D100, D70, Fuji S2 & S3, Kodak Pro 14n & Pro SLRn), which do not meter with manual focus lenses due to a lack of a mechanical pin that older, or more expensive Nikon cameras have to allow metering with manual focus lenses. A rather cheesy way of Nikon to force its users to buy more auto focus lenses, as many cheesed off users have lamented on various forums and discussion boards. My first use with the Lensbaby was on my F100, for which I could obtain center or spot metering in Aperture Priority mode. It was way cool to see the effects of shifting the focus point and working with a very narrow sweet spot for sharp focus. At close-up distances, you don’t have a lot of space to work with and my baby daughter wasn’t sitting still for me too much to try and get interesting shots even with my bribes of cookies to calm her down – fat chance, as toddlers can give Cookie Monster a run for his gluttony. On to more prosaic still life subjects then. The folks at Len Babies the company suggest that you use your two pinkie fingers to extend or retract the bellows of the Lensbaby for focusing, tilting, or shifting. I found using the pinkies a bit awkward and used other fingers to the do the job. You could try the traditional lens and camera holding method of camera solidly in the right hand and the left hand extending or retracting the bellows, but using fingers from both hands provides greater stability. Being a very manual kind of lens, even changing the aperture is a unique fashion in that one uses a plastic tool to pry a rubber stopper out and then extract the installed aperture disc out to insert another aperture disc in. Ah yes, there are three aperture disc choices of f4, f5.6 the default installed aperture, and f8. Using the rubber stopper by itself provides you with an aperture of f2.8. Actually, there is a fifth aperture available with the Lensbaby and that is to shoot it without the rubber stopper in. The aperture equivalent is probably around f2.4 and it makes for a very shallow depth of field with a pleasant haze over the subject. You can see the different discs in the sample photo below and the changes that each aperture effects for a static subject.
The method of changing apertures is, shall we say quaint, and while easy enough to do, not quite as simple as the manual states of the "aperture ring will fall out" when you tip the Lensbaby upside down after pulling out the rubber stopper. The f5.6 and f8 discs in my sample were rather tight and each time required a gentle and delicate pull from the fingernail of my pinkie finger to extract - not wanting to cause any damage to the lens with the supplied tool. Also, when using the tool to pry the rubber stopper out, the amount of force required usually results in the piece of rubber flying out and rolling around on the floor or ground. Because the Lensbaby already comes with screw threads at the front for its metal lens cap, I'm thinking that screw-in, or push on caps with appropriately sized openings would be a much easier and faster way to change the aperture setting. Now, I'm no lens designer, so I don't how much extra such caps would add to the cost of the Lensbaby and how the distance of a front aperture cap would affect the way the light enters through the Lensbaby (flare?), but this is my only major quibble with the Lensbaby. Maybe use plastic caps instead of metal to reduce costs, or offer original lens caps already drilled as an optional cost item - just an idea. Because of the sweet centre spot for focus that quickly turns soft at the edges, you’re not going to use the Lensbaby to take that shifted and tack sharp photo of a tall building, unless you wanted a soft and interpretive shot of the building that people will probably do a double take on to see what you’ve done. Hmm, on second thought, take that picture of the tall building with the Lensbaby shifted, what the hell. The fun for me is being able to shift and adjust that sweet focus spot around a bit and come up with some pretty wild soft focus effects. Straight on and with a wide aperture though and this might just be the ticket to take those wrinkle smoothing mother-in-law photos J The end result of the Lensbaby look is probably similar to a center spot soft focus filter, as available from Cokin and others, but then you'd have the hassle of the Cokin filter holder system without the shift and tilt capabilities of the Lensbaby. Just as I considered technical specifications of my Nikon 16mm fisheye lens to be redundant, I think the same of the Lensbaby. You don’t buy a fisheye lens because you want an accurate representation of the world, you buy a fisheye for the distortion it provides you. With the Lensbaby, it just isn’t that kind of tool that you use to take a close up shot of an insect and then try to discern all the hairs on the bug’s butt. Instead, what you’re gonna want to do is take an artistic shot of the bug’s butt. It’s all about letting loose and having fun. Any maybe that’s the secret that those Holga fans have over us straight laced photographers, they’re having fun, while anal retentive guys like me constantly worry about extracting that last nth degree of resolution from a given lens. Sit back and pop open that box of chocolates and enjoy what the Lensbaby will give you because you never know what you’re gonna get. As you may have guessed, I'm buying a Lensbaby for myself. Link to Lensbabies.com A Word on Straight Photography Photographers getting hot and heavy into the craft will eventually hear about some obscure fellow by the name of Ansel Adams. They may even hear about his even more obscure friend Edward Weston and how these two gents helped to create this piddling little group called Group f/64 way back in the dirty 30s. If you’re not sure of what that era was like, talk to your grandparents and they’ll tell you all about the good times they had back then, when as children they walked 10 miles, through 10 foot snow drifts, to get to their one-room school, in bare feet of course with mere rags on their backs. It seems that Adams and Weston had little time for fuzzy romanticized photos and preferred “realistic” photos, or straight photography as they called it. Romantic photos with soft focus being perhaps too painterly for our endeavoring pioneers, that blazed a trail for ultra sharp and ultra clear photographs of the American landscape that seemed to go on and on for depth of field. Now long dead, their influence on today’s photographers is still pervasive. Many seek the ultimate in sharpness from their images and to create a faithful representation of the world they see through their camera and lens. However, we should not overlook that Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were not only fine photographers, but also master darkroom craftsmen, who knew how to work magic with those chemicals and enlargers. Straight photography it may be, but much of their work was emotional and that influenced how they would create a final print. They wished to convey the thrill and exhilaration that they themselves felt when composing and releasing the shutter and certainly they succeeded, but to suggest that their photos were purely straight photography is misleading. The subjects were sharp, but the final print was as much interpretation and emotion, as it was just "straight". And let us not forget that Adams and Weston’s own photography was not above criticism, as some wags complained about the two going around the American southwest taking pictures of rocks and trees while the world was going to hell in a hand basket during World War II. What am I getting at? Well, again, we shouldn’t let the pursuit of Adams or Weston like perfection get in the way of seeing the world a bit differently than just straight on. Stylized photos that are romantic still have a place in the pantheon of photography and while a Lensbaby image won’t be something I do everyday, it certainly is a nice break from tradition and a way to just enjoy being a photographer without all the pretensions that often accompany “serious” photography. Heck, I can’t wait for my next wedding shoot to try the Lensbaby out for some really “romantic” photos J October 21, 2005 - LensBabies has introduced a macro kit to go with their unique flexible bellows-style lens. The kit consists of a +4 and +10 lens that screw onto the front of the LensBabies and costs US $29. While the original LensBaby could focus quite close, the superior quality LensBaby 2 does not, so the macro lenses could be quite an interesting option to pull you in closer and magnify more.
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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Every
now and then a new product arrives that makes you stop being a “photographer”
and just get out and take photos for creativity, for expressiveness,
for fun. Photography being fun? What a novel concept.
