First shots with the lensbaby composer pro

Last week I got a composer pro in the mail from the nice people at lensbaby.
The delivered it with the fisheye and soft focus options which I will review/test later in the coming weeks. In this blog post I will give some attention to the composer pro itself.
Cool box
I’ve seen a lot of boxes and packages over the years but the way the lensbaby is packaged has to be ranked with the most interesting and funny ones. When you open the small box (which is also very nice by the way) you will see a small opening under which the lensbaby is visible, you open up the carton and take out the lens, now you will see the booklet with the text…. MAMA? congratulations it’s a lens baby 😀 very funny.

Funny lens
Don’t get me wrong when I say it’s a funny lens because the lensbaby is without a doubt no toy. The first lenses I saw from lensbaby a while ago looked more like toys but the composer pro is a very well build lens with some unique looks up it’s sleeve. In this blogpost as mentioned before I will focus (pun intended) on the composer pro only. It’s difficult to label the lensbaby exactly, I think the best way to label it would be “a selective focus” lens, because that’s what it does. When looking through the viewfinder you can see one spot that’s in focus and with the focus ring you can make sure the focus is accurate and with the lens you can move the spot around the viewer area. So far so good, but first make sure you understand it’s NOT a tilt and shift lens.

The biggest problem with the lensbaby is that to change the aperture you will have to drop in different apertures, which on it’s own is not a real problem, the problem however you will experience when using it in the studio is the simple fact that you will loose a lot of light with the smaller apertures, I shot some images with the 5.6 and 8.0 in the studio and although I did have a few good images there were more that were just out of focus, so it’s not as easy as one would expect. Best way for me was to defocus the image, find the spot and move that to the place I wanted sharp and than focus. I did use some extra light on my model and that helped a lot. I have to add that outside focusing is much easier when it’s bright. And I also have to add that I’m actually only happy when I have the eyes (or front eye) in perfect focus and with solutions like this (including T&S lenses) it’s always a bit more difficult, most people won’t care that much and be more than satisfied when the face is in focus, I’m a bit more picky which with this kind of lenses is always a problem for me, the smallest movement of your model or yourself will change the focus spot. But practice will enhance your hit miss ratio considerably. I’ve shot about an hour with it today during a studio session and got several images I really liked with the focus exactly where I wanted it.

So enough of the technical babble, let’s first see how it looks. Do remember that for this session I shot against normal backgrounds, when you start using the lens outside or with more interesting scenes the effect will be much better, so wait for those, but to get an idea on how it looks here are the images.

Do remember that these are the very first studio shots I did with the setup and as always the first ones are not the best when looking back over time.

Being creative
One of the biggest problems I hear from my students is creativity, or better the lack off. The nice thing about lenses like the lensbaby is that it forces you to look in a different way, it makes you think about your styling and lightsetups, but also teaches you valuable information about composition and getting the attention of the viewer to the point you want it to be. This is something that of course is not only the case with the lensbaby but should actually be important in all your work, and add to this the fact that you have to manual focus 😀
Personally I love things like the lensbaby, it gives you a fresh approach to your work and you can use it in many funky ways that I still have to explore more, so expect some more images the coming weeks/months. In this setup I just used the standard lightsetups I normally use but added the lensbaby to the mix, and as you can see the effect is interesting and gives the images a totally different look. However I strongly believe that it will be really interesting when I take the lens outside, so I will also try to do that for the next post about the lensbaby.

Conclusion
The lensbaby is without a doubt something you should consider adding to your lens lineup.
It gives you the option to create something that is different and if used correctly can really make some stunning effects. I’m still in the practice period and already have some great personal snaps with the lensbaby and I can’t wait to test this some more with the models. Changing the aperture is fast enough but I think you will have to be careful with the aperture discs when on location I can imagine people loosing them on location when you switch between apertures a lot, I would rather see an aperture ring like on the 35mm lensbaby, but I think the system as it is now is already awesome and again should be considered if you want something different or just love to freak around with your images, Yes you can create effects in Photoshop…. but as you know my motto is “Why fake it when you can create it?” and the lensbaby let’s you create it and makes you work and that can be so much fun….

Highly recommended.

As added “bonus” to this blog post two other images from the same session with a normal lens.

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