New Toy: Lensbaby Muse

7/29/10 – Rebecca Getsfrid – Environmental Portrait Photographer in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon
I ordered two new toys last week. One was a 77mm R87 IR filter (which may have been a bad idea with the K20D based on further research); The other was a Lensbaby Muse with the Plastic Optic (which was a fantastic idea).

You’d be hard pressed not to have ever seen a lensbaby advert if you spent any time at all on any photography site. For those somehow not in the know, it’s a fully manual tilt shift lens. By pressing on the bellows like tube at different points and with different amounts of pressure, you can change not only your focus point, but your focus angle, allowing for some really neat effects. They have a ton of different optics available for the lens, and I opted for the plastic. While the fact that the plastic optic is the cheapest definitely helped my desire for it, the fact that I already have two amazing 50mm lenses (the 50/1.4 and the 16-50/2.8) made the need for ANOTHER piece of good sharp 50mm glass less present. Wanting to play with it immediately, I pulled out my favorite test dummy: A hand puppet Pip Boy from the Fallout 3 presentation at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo.

Natural Light

Being a fully manual lens means that achieving focus is an absolute pain with the tiny K20D viewfinder, but it’s doable, and I’m sure I’ll get better at operating the focus mechanism with more practice. The plastic optic means things will never truly be sharp anyway, and introduces a ton of purple fringing as well as a neat glow in both the bokeh and the “sharp” areas.

Lighting in this shot was achieved by shooting in an area of shade created by a fence, and getting the puppet high enough that the direct light from the sun behind the fence would create a nice glowing rim. You have to be careful, however, as the plastic optic is very very sensitive to flare, and it’s not the pretty kind of flare I get with the 16-50/2.8.

Example of lens flare with Lensbaby Plastic Optic

I’m looking forward to getting to play with the lens using my alien bees to create some cool lighting, though I’m not sure how well it will work its way into my normal commercial and portraiture work. It’s just a bit too “Art”y. It almost feels like I’m applying a photoshop “Art” filter directly to my camera. I hate that word, “Art”, by the way. Despite that fact, I’ll probably be using both this new toy, and the upcoming IR filter, to make some “Art”y prints to sell at pretentious prices. We’ll see what happens.

Check out more Pip Boy or even order your pretentious “Art Prints” at this gallery.