Any hobby or pastime can get stale after a while without new challenges or ideas to excite you. The folks at Lensbaby have built their company around providing equipment to help photographers get out of a rut. They have continued to expand their optic-swap system and now have a fisheye optic to go along with the rest of the line. It’s wide, it’s distorted, it’s fuzzy and sharp at the same time and might be just what you need to create some images to help get you excited about your photography again.
How it Works
For an overall primer on the Lensbaby system, please read this Photo.net review here.
The quickest way to explain what exactly a Lensbaby is to read about what the company itself says about the lenses:
The Lensbaby is a unique SLR lens that has a sweet spot of focus with blur all around the sweet spot. Unlike a tilt-shift lens, which has a flat field of focus and a slice of of focus from end to end, the Lensbaby field of focus is curved, producing a circle of focus.
The Lensbaby Optic Swap system is a series of 6 different optic inserts that you can use with the Lensbaby body to achieve different effects and image styles. Think of it as taking the engine out of a car and being able to swap in one engine for good gas mileage and another the next day for trailer towing power. The optic choices are double glass, single glass, plastic, pinhole/zone-plate, soft focus, and fisheye.
The Lensbaby Fisheye Optic has a 12mm focal length and a 160 degree field of view. It can focus as close as one half inch and has an f/4 maximum aperture with aperture plates from f/5 to f/22. While Lensbaby does a great job of trying to keep their newer products compatible with their older products, but some designs make that more difficult and the Fisheye Optic is one of them. The Fisheye’s aperture plates aren’t compatible with the other optics and the Muse and Control Freak Lensbaby “lenses” will require adapters (purchased separately) to mount the Fisheye.
