There’s a new Lensbaby lens! Kinda tilt-shifty! Focus! Aperture! Depth of field! schlorp schlorp lick fingers
So I bought roughly the entire line of Lensbaby products a couple of years ago. Got the Composer unit that lets you shift your point of focus around, got the various low- to high-quality lenses (plastic for deliberately crappy pics; super glassy for the majestic awesomeness that only I can create); got the telephoto attachments and the macro attachments and the goofy aperture disks. (Hearts! Stars! Moons! I can make any landscape look like a bowl of Lucky Charms!)
It’s a fussy system that doesn’t lend itself to spur-of-the-moment shooting, but it’s well thought out and designed. Still, though, with my beloved 105mm Nikkor macro lens, when I come across something I think I can photograph well, I set the aperture to dial in the depth of field I’d like, lean in to compose the shot, take a quick look for distractions in the shot, and snap the shutter. It’s instantaneous and thoughtless.
Lensbaby? Not so much. OK, do I want the sharp edge of the double glass lens, the soft edge of the plastic lens, or the in between edge of the single glass lens? Let’s install that. What aperture would I like? That disc has to be in here somewhere. Got it! Let’s just use the magnetic wand to remove the old aperture disc and then use it to install the new aperture. Hm: Do I want a vivid closeup? Where’d those macro adapters go? How close do I want to get — do I need one, the other, or both? I think I’m all set. Has the light changed? Can I get it back? Aw.
I love to want things. And when I have a genuine interest, I love to experiment with something new. But because it’s so tedious to work out a shot with it, I haven’t even played with Lensbaby much. The three or so outings I taken it on, I’ve found only a very few shots that work for me.
Now, although I took a lot of pictures in 2011, I was pretty unhappy with most of them. A lot of those shots didn’t turn out well. Maybe it’s worth putting my usual glass aside and experimenting with something new, Lensbaby or otherwise. But as cool as the idea of a Lensbaby tilty-shifty lens seems, as much as I see the announcement and think, “Hey! That’s what I was waiting for!” I need to stabilize myself and decide whether the investment was a good or a bad one and commit from there.