I’m currently reading again Steven Pressfield’s wonderful book “The War or Art”. In the second part of the book, he describes what differentiates the amateur from the pro. One example Pressfield gives is the mastery of the craft, and the drive to constantly perfect one’s skills. Playing with specialty lenses is one way I look to expand my visual repertoire and I was quite eager to experiment with my Lensbaby,
Lensbaby is a Portland, Oregon based company that produce a line of camera lenses for special effects. They now have quite a number of such lenses, but the one I have is the double optic glass combined with a ball and socket mechanism (Composer Pro). The lens creates an circular area of focus that can be placed anywhere in the frame by tilting the ball and socket mechanism.
Depending on your camera and Lensbaby model, only manual exposure mode works (at least some of the time), and there is definitely no autofocus. I have my camera on manual mode the vast majority of the time so that is no problem. On the other hand I do rely quite extensively on autofocus. It took me a while to get to grips with using this Lensbaby and focussing it properly.
I first tried it on a trip to Blackford Hill, one of my favourite spots for nature photography. The photograph below is the best amongst the few correctly focussed I have from my first go at using the lens in the real world.
The Clerk Estate in Penicuik is another wonderful location for nature photography or other kinds of photoshoots. This is where I took my Lensbaby for some more experimentation.
With specialty lenses, you need to develop some intuition about what kind of subjects work well with the effect the lens gives you. So I tried quite a few possibilities to augment my visual library, as you can see below.
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