Hasta La Gadget!

Lensbaby’s schtick is that you can twist and turn all the lenses in the range to grab selective focus from either a single, small circle, anywhere in frame, or photograph a sharp stripe the slashes through an otherwise blurred image. Until now.

Recently, Lensbaby added swap-in optics to the range, a fisheye, a soft-focus and a pinhole module which slide into the various bendy-shells. The new Scout is designed to hold these, too, but it doesn’t move. This lets you keep the optics dead-center to enjoy their various deliberate defects without the twisting. It also lets you focus so close the lens is almost touching the subject, and you’ll get a lot of lens-flare. This, if you were wondering, is a feature.

The analog nature of these tricks makes it faster and much more fun than tweaking things later in photoshop. Hell, you could probably buy the whole range for less than the Adobe Creative Suite.

But the Scout costs $250. This compares to $270 for the Composer, which also works with the all same optics but also adds the trademark twist. The Scout does at least come with the fisheye optic which retails for $150, whereas the Composer ships with the double-glass optic which costs $85 bought separately. Some quick math, then, tells us that the Scout’s shell is valued at $150, versus the Composer shell which is $185.

If you’re looking to buy into the whole Lensbaby system, then go with one of the bendier options and buy the fisheye separately. If you just fancy some flared-out, close-focus fisheye action, then get this, or the Lomo adapter with a plastic fisheye lens for around $50.

Scout product page [Lensbaby. Thanks, Jessica!]

See Also:

• Lensbaby Tilt Transformer Marries Nikon Lenses to Micro Four …
• Hands-On With Lensbaby Fisheye and Soft-Focus Optics
• Review: Lensbaby Composer Lets You Art Up Images Sans Photoshop …
• Destroy All Photos: Lensbaby Fisheye and Soft Focus Lenses …

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