Lensbaby has crammed an embarrassment of new features into its tiny Tilt Transformer. The little sliver of metal and plastic lets you mount any Nikon lens onto a Micro Four Thirds camera and use it for tilt-shift* effects. And with the (optional) Composer Focus Front, you can use any of Lensbaby’s own optics with the new toy.
The existing Lensbabies let you twirl the front section of the lens to put the point of sharp focus anywhere in frame, not just the boring old center. The Tilt Transformer gives a strip of sharpness instead of a dot, and lets you get those crazy tilt-shift pictures that make your subjects look like models (scale-models, not fashion-models, unfortunately).
This would be exciting enough, but this new adapter also lets you use the full range of Nikon’s great lenses on your Micro Four Thirds camera (Sony NEX mount coming soon). That not only gives you much sharper images (the Lensbabies aren’t designed for top-notch image-quality), but it also lets you change apertures without swapping little magnetic disks, and it offers a whole range of focal lengths. God knows what psychedelia would ensue if you combined a fisheye with this thing. You can even use g-lenses, those without an aperture ring, as the Lensbaby has a” mechanism [that] allows the aperture to open and close by manually rotating the lens.”
The market for this may at first seem rather niche: you’ll need both a Micro Four Thirds body and at least one Nikon lens. But that, if you look around Flickr’s forums, turns out to be rather a large niche. I’m luckily in that niche, and one of these Tilt Transformer’s is winging its way to Gadget Lab’s Spanish HQ for testing. I shall be attempting to immanentize the eschaton by putting my Nikon-mount Composer on the front of the Tilt Transformer and fitting that onto a Lumix GF1. Lock up your daughters!
The Tilt Transformer and Composer with Tilt Transformer are available now, for $20 and $350 respectively.
Lensbaby Tilt Transformer [Lensbaby. Thanks, Jessica!]
*Technically it is just tilt, not tilt-shift, but you get the point.
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