On 4/27/2012 12:56 PM, Igor Roshchin wrote:
Mark,
I like the 2nd shot.
As for the Lensbaby lenses, - I've tried to look at them a few times,
and never got "the sense" of them.
The first time when I got them in my hands was at a photo exhibit
in San Diego in 2007. That was a weird experience. The
lady that at the manufacturer's booth was not friendly at all.
I've read about these lenses on the web prior to that, so I curiously
asked her about what's cool about these lenses, and how they can be
used. I remember that she measured me with her look, and then in a
noticeably annoyed way started telling me something that was not very
appealing (if at all). I didn't stick for long at that booth.
To date, I stil do not know how I would use any of those (albeit, I
haven't looked at the new models).
Hi Igor -
Thanks for looking. Regarding the Lensbabies - they make a lot of lenses
anymore, but I have only tried the Muse and the 3g (which is essentially
the Muse in a harness.) It's a specialty lens for sure. I've only used
the plastic lens and it produces a soft and impressionistic image. It is
similar to a Holga in many ways - soft, impressionistic, nostalgic in
feel, soft aberrations, a "sweet spot" that is rather sharp with
progressively more distortion and softness radiating out from it. I
think that a lot of the magic of Holgas is that the sweet spot /
distortion effect makes it easy to isolate the subject. Plus, you get
the emotive / nostalgic effects from visual elements that mimic old time
box cameras etc. The lensbaby more or less lets you control all that
stuff, and let's you control the exposure (anathema to a Holga shooter.)
I say it 'more or less' lets you control things because the Muse offers
little control - you have to push and pull on the lens, swivel it
around, and shoot. You can never duplicate the same shot. I think that
was a feature initially and they wanted to include a good degree of
randomness in the lensbaby. But, the 3g lets you super fine tune and
control everything as much as you might want to. I hand-held the shots
of the cat, but to be able to focus using a helicoid focusing mechanism
was a vast improvement over pushing and pulling on the muse.
Like I said - I don't know about their new offerings. And the
lensbabies work better on full frame bodies where the sweet spot can be
a smaller part of the frame. But they work OK on APS-C digitals as well!
Maybe the lady in the booth was just having a bad day...
Mark
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