Lens baby

For ‘trick shots’ and impressionistic work

Lensbaby

adds a sense of randomness

BY BRENT KITCHEN

P

hotographers often go around the corner for a new look on life. Stan Godwin, a nationally known photographer/ instructor, finds the new look comes with Lensbaby, an updated twist on a camera style he used decades ago. This time the twist makes it easier to enhance the quality of a photo with other lenses as he explains.

Photo by Wade Kelly, photographer, Edmonton, Canada There’s certainly an artsy component as well as you really don’t know what results it will illicit until you see the images full screen. It pushes amateurs to get out of Auto and try fooling around with the Manual setting. In that way it has a tactile, almost functionalist sensitivity to the lens that you don’t get with other lenses.

I always keep it with me in my camera bag.

I’ve taken lots of pictures of babies, and I always like to put it on the camera at the end of a session and see what mistakes I can make with it. Some of them turn out to be the most memorable shots.

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IN YOUR WORDS, WHAT IS A LENSBABY? Lensbaby makes a variety of different lenses. I mostly use one called the Composer, a device that can work with extremely shallow depth of field and produce high quality by using cheap glass to give that kind of an effect.

Back in the 1970s we had cameras called Dianas, which were used to shoot with film. The Diana camera was extraordinarily inexpensive, and it had a piece of cheap plastic for a lens. The Lensbaby that I use now has plastic or glass for lenses and gives a lot of different effects. Mainly it gives shallow depth of field.

What I like the most is that it does what is somewhat difficult with modern digital cameras unless you have a digital camera with a full-frame sensor — and I do not.

WHAT DOES A LENSBABY PROVIDE FOR A PHOTOGRAPHER’S ARSENAL OF TOOLS? It certainly is an extra tool that gives a specific kind of quality image that obviously is not to be used with every picture. In my personal work, I find it’s an alluring kind of device to create a little different sort of feeling for an image.

The tendency with the Lensbaby is to find a sweet spot, to find an area that’s important in terms of focus. You can focus on that very small area.

Essentially everything outside of that area is going to be seen in various levels of being blurry or out of focus.

The Composer allows you to shift the front surface of the glass left and right and up and down to slightly change the plane of the lens focus. It’s kind

STAN GODWIN EDUCATION: BFA, Rochester Institute of Technology MS, East Texas State University CAREER: Now retired from Texas A&M — Commerce where he was interim head of the art department and coordinator of photography.

CONTACT: stan@stangodwin. com

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Photo by Wade Kelly, photographer, Edmonton, Canada

Photo by Wade Kelly, photographer, Edmonton, Canada

Photo by Jacqueline Harte, photographer, United Kingdom

continued from page 19

of like we used to do with large format cameras in the studio with the Scheimpflug principle. With standard lenses on standard cameras, the plane of focus is parallel to the back of the camera.

When you can shift the front surface of the lens left and right or up and down, you are changing the angle of the front surface of the lens to the back of the camera so you can change the plane of focus.

COMPOSER

Available in mounts for Canon EF (EOS), Nikon F, Sony Alpha A / Minolta Maxxum, Pentax K / Samsung GX, Olympus E1 / Panasonic Lumix DMC cameras.

Double Glass (Multi-coated Optical Glass Doublet) included.

Focal Length: about 50 mm Focus Type: Manual Aperture Type: Interchangeable, magnetic aperture disks Apertures: f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22 Minimum Focus: about 18” (45cm) / Maximum Focus: infinity Size: 2.25”(5.7cm) h x 2.5”(6.35cm) w / Weight: 3.7 oz (104.9g).

Retail: $270 Lensbaby is a Portland, Oregon based manufacturer of award-winning Creative Effects SLR camera lenses.

Lensbaby was launched in February 2004 by Craig Strong, a professional photographer and inventor of the Lensbaby. www.lensbaby.com

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HOW DO YOU RATE COMPOSER VERSUS NEWER MODELS OFFERED BY LENSBABY? The newest lens now is the Tilt Transformer. It basically uses Scheimpflug techniques. It accepts Panasonic, Olympus and Nikon lenses on it so you can use an older bayonet-mount lens and play with the planes of focus. Of course, you’d still have a relatively sharp lens, but it’s basically turning it into a tilt-shift lens.

For over, under, around and through, the Composer is what does everything for me. They’re making the Composer now with a Tilt Transformer as well so we can add Nikon lenses to a Composerlooking body.

I still have my original Lensbaby, which was sort of a black, squeezable barrel. You used your fingers to pull the lens in and out and to tilt it up and down and left and right on the camera to put it into focus. You had to press the shutter button at the same time. The evolution to the Composer took away the little plastic bellows and put it on a ball mount so you could easily slide it into position. You also got a focusing ring, which made it considerably faster to work with. The new Composer with the tilt-transformer is the natural evolution from my standard Composer.

WHERE AND WHEN WOULD YOU USE A TRADITIONAL TILT-SHIFT LENS VERSUS A LENSBABY? Pick out a camera bag because you need it. I have wide-angle lenses, telephoto lenses, macro lenses and a Lensbaby in there. I couldn’t come out and say this subject lends itself best to a Lensbaby, but I do know people who shoot only with a Lensbaby.

I shoot with a variety of different lenses, and it really is kind of time-dependent. Whatever happens to be coming up that day, I make a decision. I’ve used it for everything from landscape to studio work. I’ve also used it for macro because I have some macro diopter lenses that screw on to the front, but that effect does not fit everything you’re looking to do.

I’ve shot Lensbaby with HDR (high-dynamic-range imaging), and SUMMER 2011

Photo by Olivier Dalmasso, photographer, Paris, France

Photo by Olivier Dalmasso, photographer, Paris, France

I’ve shot with the Lensbaby to make black-and-white and to make color. It’s kind of subject specific and what you’re looking for. It’s another tool in your box. Lensbabys by themselves do not make art. You have to have a need for that tool. It’s like the filters in Photoshop. Just because you can put the watercolor filter to it does not make it a better picture.

SHOULD EVERY PHOTOGRAPHER HAVE A LENSBABY IN HIS/HER CAMERA BAG? That’s like saying every photographer should have a 15mm fisheye. Not every photographer is going to want a Lensbaby, but almost every photographer … likes the idea of having that little extra tool (to achieve a) little different result for either their client or for their own personal work.

IS THE SAME EFFECT POSSIBLE WITH PHOTOSHOP AS WITH A LENSBABY? The Lensbaby gives a decidedly different effect than blurring in Photoshop does. Even though you can do pretty significant blurring in Photoshop, you’re not blurring by depth in Photoshop whereas with a Lensbaby you are. When you blur by depth optically, it changes the size and relationship of the objects in the view of the camera. When you blur things in Photoshop, everything sort of stays the same size. Objects in the frame change size as you focus on them in relation to other objects in the frame.

A Lensbaby gives a different blur result than I can get by doing a blur in Photoshop, whether I use the blur tool or whether I use something like a mask and a Gaussian blur in the mask even if I have a fade-off gradient to the Gaussian blur in the mask. It still gives a different kind of effect. I can make interesting depth of field semblances in Photoshop, but I’m making them for real with the Lensbaby.

HOW DID YOU DISCOVER THE LENSBABY? I ran into the company people at a convention quite a few years ago. Later I started liking it so much myself that I became an affiliate with Lensbaby. Now I teach Lensbaby classes so that people can learn how to use this new tool.

I show my students images I’ve shot with it, and it tends to get them interested. When adding photographic stuff, you head to the store to buy it. You don’t ever get to test it.

What I like to be able to do is let students try things before SUMMER 2011

they have to buy them. That’s why Lensbaby has been so good.

They’re one of the best companies in America that I’ve ever worked with.

WHAT ADVICE DO YOU GIVE YOUR FIRST-TIME LENSBABY STUDENTS? I tell them to think clearly about what they want to have in focus. That object in the beginning probably needs to be something that is relatively dominant and probably relatively forward in the picture plane. It seems easier to figure out the focus and to make the thing work.

Later we start playing with where else in the picture plane we can put the focus point and see how we can draw the viewer’s attention to that spot as opposed to some essentially dominant thing.

WHAT IS THE MOST MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE YOU HAVE HAD WITH YOUR LENSBABY? I don’t know that I’ve had a greatest experience, but I did shoot a lot of pictures with it at Zion National Park last year.

I was doing the anti-landscape, shoot all the beautiful things in the park that day. The Lensbaby allowed me to escape from what I thought was the standard approach to being in a place of that kind of beauty.

It was one of those times when I was standing there looking at something and said, “Wow, this might look better if I used a different optic on it.” I played with the different optics to see what worked best for me that day.

WHAT’S BEEN THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE WHEN SHOOTING WITH A LENSBABY? The biggest challenge in shooting has been dealing with the relatively small sweet spot. Seventy-five percent of the time I’m using the f/2 aperture, the wide-open aperture, on the Lensbaby because I really like that shallow, shallow depth of field. It works differently from a macro lens in that situation because you have to pick carefully where your point of focus is going to be so your viewer gets to see that. n

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Gallery

photos by Stan Godwin

I

use Lensbaby when I think what I’m looking at would be best served by the Lensbaby choice. When I first got the Composer, I put it on my camera and left it there for two months. I shot only with the Lensbaby because I wanted to learn what would work and what didn’t work for me.

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I have had a tendency to do that with almost every new piece of equipment. I figure that is one way to get it into my head. I buy it, stick it on my camera and use it exclusively for the next month or two so I feel like now it’ll be a tool I can pull out of the drawer when I need it.n

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