Henry asked a few really good questions about the lensbaby I borrowed. Answering has helped me weigh up the merits of the lens and consider the appropriate usage of such a device. My response + more follows.

Henry:

I’m at an age where I can understand and appreciate a purist approach. I even built my own 4 x 5 to do similar things when I shoot film (until digital backs come WAY down in price). I’ve checked out their website and looked at your images and their sample images. Looking at their online gallery I see that most things seem like they can easily be replicated in Photoshop. Purist approaches aside, do you think the Lensbaby has real advantages?

This is not a challenge. I don’t have my hands on one and you do. What do you think? Is it something that while you are using it could really alter your approach to composition, etc. Or, could you do the same with some foresight and Photoshop?

Also, for clarification which model are you using? What do you think about their aperture things?

Thanks for posting this Jason, this looks pretty cool.

It had crossed my mind that everything can be achieved in photoshop. I even made some very similar photos for Kate’s blog the day before I shot the lensbaby images. The photos of the little panda drawings were shot at 60mm F2.8. Then I added a vignette in photoshop as well as a Gaussian blur which was gradient masked toward the center.

The main real benefit I can see with the lensbaby is conditional. The first image I posted could be replicated with ease in photoshop, it probably isn’t worth the hassle of changing lenses, let alone moving down to manual bellows focus and aperture adjustment. However a lensbaby is gonna work really well up close on things or scenes with a lot of variation in depth.

Often the lensbaby images appear to be a sharp center and blurred edges, this is a mix of the plane of focus + the aperture. The widest aperture creates a much narrower area of sharpness within the image. For less of that effect a smaller aperture is required. For a majority of images I don’t see any reason why that effect shouldn’t be done in photoshop.

Here’s a two images where I think the lensbaby really shines for a couple reasons:

1. The plane of focus is important to the image. Blurring while considering the plane of focus is possible in photoshop, I’m sure some people could even do it well. But nine times out of ten the images don’t look right to me (particular with false tilt-shift images), on a simple image you could get away with this, but on a more complex one it’ll be important to have the sharpness established by the plane of focus alone. Even achieved well, the work-outcome ratio would probably suggest that this effect should be handled in camera.
2. The blurring of the background. The lensbaby aperture is round which makes for nice circles of confusion in the background, but as it is tilted it also drags it off in strange directions and the degree of this is going to be dependent on depth. This is going to come down to personal taste but I’d imagine the outcome will often be significantly different if done in photoshop.

I’m using the 3G model, which is now updated and called the Control Freak. I had no problems with their unconventional aperture, it wasn’t a problem to use indoors, though it might be a relatively small concern when shooting in the field. On the plus side the aperture is as circle as you can get.

It will be interesting to see the what someone with much more lensbaby experience can achieve, or some more side by side comparisons like this one Lensbaby vs. Photoshop.

I’ll take requests for the next few days (as long as I can get away with borrowing the lens a bit longer). Want me to shoot something*? Outdoors, people, retro appliances, something close, something far, something small, something large, that little cafe in Lyall Bay? Drop an email or ask in the comments. *No flowers there’s plenty online.

Update: Just discovered this DIY tilt-shift lense. More my kind of thing, the results look great from what I’ve seen. (Plungercam via Lifehacker).