Lens Baby

The Lens Baby is a very interesting device. Basically it is a very creative, highly maneuverable, low quality lens that turns your $5000 digital SLR into a $12 camera. So why would you pay money for such a thing? Because it will give you an enormous creative kick in the pants — even if you were to use it just once in your life.

One of the themes of this site is that often making a photo a little harder to see into makes it more interesting. Softening everything but a small area will always bring the viewer to that area. At the same time, the distorted area tends to bring a very strong aesthetic to the image — sometimes a wistful quality, other times a happy, giddy look.

Bottom Line: The Lens Baby produces a distorted image that is so compelling that it might make you rethink your approach to photography.

Why not just take the shot with a normal lens and then introduce the distortion in the computer, where you have the option of much more control over how you mess with the image?

I actually tried this right here: panel 6 is a Lens Baby shot, panel 7 is my fake-up of the Lens Baby look via Photoshop, and panel 8 is the original sharp image I used to create panel 7. So I claim that you CAN add a Lens Baby look to any photo.

So why the Lens Baby? Few of us commonly take a sharp photo and then distort it in computer to produce the Lens Baby look: it feels too manipulated, somehow. And putting the Lens Baby on the camera and taking distorted images feels much more genuine. I think this may change over time and I realize that some people DO distort their images in computer and that there is even software available just to do this.

Left

Right

A normal portrait shot with the Lens Baby set up to let just the face through: everything else is distorted, which adds a strong psychological tinge to the image.

Nicole leans on the hood of the nearest car, smiles, and gives us the thumbs up. With the fuzzed edges we are led to think about crazy summer nights and wild parties that we wish we had been to.

In this case the whole image is distorted, with what looks like motion blur.

In this case the entire image is soft — certainly it is unacceptably soft by normal standards, but in the context that the Lens Baby creates images work on a different level where perfect sharpness is just not required.

We tend to look for something sharp in a photo to hang onto, generally in a portrait, the eyes. And even though nothing here is THAT sharp, the eyes have enough sharpness to act as a focal point. (A more skilled and patient shooter than me can get some quite sharp areas from a Lens Baby.)

A Lens Baby portrait for comparison to the one I created in computer from a normal 50mm lens image.

This is a fake Lens Baby style image I created in Photoshop from the image in panel 8.

Depending on your approach to photography you may find creating a Lens Baby look after a normal shot is taken is fine — or not.

This is the original sharp image I used to create the fake Lens Baby look in panel 7.