For the last month, I have been testing out Lensbaby’s new fisheye and soft-focus optics, two glass cores which are drop-in replacements for the optic which comes inside the Lensbaby composer. The Lensbaby composer itself is a lens with a ball-and-socket arrangement which allows the front section to be twisted in any direction and place the focus “sweet spot” anywhere in the frame. This is combined with an optic which is heavily blurred away from this spot, leading to some dreamy, tilt-shift-like photos.
Standard Lensbaby Composer on Panasonic GF1 with sharpening and auto-levels applied.
The new fisheye and soft-focus optics replace this blurry-edged glass for some new effects. The fisheye is a 12mm ƒ4 lens with a massive 360-degree angle of view, enough to catch both your feet and the brim of your hat in the same shot. Trying it out on a Panasonic GF1 (via adapter, although there is a proper M4/3 mount version), it gives a mild distortion, and a very low contrast image. You can twist and turn the Lensbaby, but as the Micro Four Thirds sensor only see the center portion of the image from the lens, it doesn’t make much difference.
It also fooled the camera into underexposure when indoors. As the lens is all manual, for both focusing and aperture (in fact, you have to use a magnetic “pen” to drop in and retrieve separate aperture rings), this isn’t a surprise. Just watch out, is all.
Put the same rig directly onto a full-frame D700 and the world turns inside out. Even in a tiny room, you get nearly all of it in the picture, and the entire image is contained inside a dark circle. Swapping in apertures up to ƒ22 will increase depth-of-field, but there’s little point: With a lens this wide, it’s almost impossible to get anything out of focus.
Fisheye on Nikon D700, sharpened for screen on output. Notice the edge of my finger, actually just under the lens.
On this camera, twiddling the front end moves the circle around and you can obscure half the image this way. It’s better to leave it in the middle. Image quality isn’t amazing, but as you can see, it’s sharp and contrasty out of camera, and the effect is great fun.
The soft-focus optic is a little less interesting. The lens still focuses sharply, but gives the effect of shooting through a pair of white pantyhose (actually an old movie technique to soften an actress’ skin). Included are aperture disks which have many pinholes punched in them instead of a single central hole. These have a great effect on any highlights in your shot:
Soft-focus, multihole aperture on Panasonic GF1, sharpened on export for screen.
A few notes on the operation of the system. As I mentioned, it is all manual, although a modern camera will still expose properly in aperture-priority mode. Focusing is easy enough: DSLRs usually have some form of manual-assist in the viewfinder, and the Micro Four Thirds cameras (mine, at least) lets you zoom in on the image to check focus.
Actually swapping out the optics is a knack gained after a few tries. When you insert the removal tool (cleverly the lid of the plastic storage case), the focus ring of the main unit twists with it and therefore drops the part you are trying to unscrew out of reach. You’ll need to grab the fixed silver bands surrounding the focus ring and be bold with a good hard twist. The build quality is very good, and the optics are reassuringly solid and heavy.
The lenses are a photography nerd’s delight, but should you buy them? If you want a fisheye, and already have a Composer, $150 is a steal, and I’d buy one right away. The soft-focus unit is a little harder to recommend, despite being just $90, especially as much of the value is in the neat aperture disks (which can be dropped into the other optics, too). If you want it, you probably know it. I’d stick with the fisheye.
Fisheye [Lensbaby]
Soft Focus [Lensbaby]
Photos Charlie Sorrel:
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