Lensbaby Composer: A Review and comparison test

I spent a few days in Ayuthaya this week and took a Lensbaby Composer and Optic Kit with me.

I’ve carried a Lensbaby in my camera bag since the very first version was released and although that early lens was little more than a plastic toy, it did occasionally produce some lovely effects. Getting shots with that early Lensbaby was often a hit and miss affair. The lens was set on adjustable bellows that could be moved in and out to focus and then compressed at an angle to move the focus sweet-spot around the frame. It required a certain amount of manual dexterity to handle a large SLR with one hand and to manipulate the lens with the other. Small movements would throw the focussing out so it was definitely a case of trial and error.

Lensbaby Composer

The Lensbaby Composer arrived recently with an accompanying, swappable Optic Kit and the first thing I noticed is that Lensbaby have clearly invested some time and energy into designing a product that looks and feels more robust whilst also retaining some of the quirky elegance of the early model. There seems to have been impressive attention to detail and even the packaging is elegantly constructed. When I first opened the box, I found the Lensbaby suspended inside, held aloft by a cardboard collar. It already felt like the Lensbaby had come of age, maturing into an accessory with an intriguing personality.

There are no electronics in a Lensbaby which gives it one of its most interesting traits. The aperture consists of a small, magnetic disc that sits above the front element. A small pocket tool contains a selection of different aperture discs, from f/2.8 to f/22 in steps of one stop. Changing the disks is simplicity itself, one end of the pocket tool carries a tiny magnet, slip this into the end of the Lensbaby to pick up the aperture disc that’s currently installed and then just drop a new aperture disc into its place. The new aperture disc is held in place by tiny magnets inside the body of the lens.

The Composer lens is based on a ball and socket joint that allows you to tilt and shift the front element, moving the focus sweet-spot around the frame. The best thing about this is that where the old bellows method meant that the lens would spring back to a central position, the Composer now remains in place. And if you want to make certain that there won’t be any movement once you’ve set up your shot, there’s a locking ring at the rear of the lens that secures it in place.

Optic Kit

The Double Glass optic that comes as standard is impressively sharp and is so much clearer than the old plastic lens. However, if you really want to mimic that old Holga look then the Optic Kit includes additional lenses: a slightly softer Single Glass optic, a Plastic Optic, which is softer still and, perhaps most interestingly, a Pinhole/Zone Plate Optic. The optics are easily switched using the top of the container that they arrive in, another nifty design solution.

But why, Gavin, why?

Now all this is well and good but you might be wondering, dear reader, why on earth anyone would spend heaps of money on a Digital SLR camera with megapixels coming out of it’s ears and then stick a relatively inexpensive plastic lens on the front of it. A lens that intentionally blurs your image and renders them in a similar fashion to a camera that you can buy for $20. Worse still, why would you want to produce pinhole photographs with an SLR, why not just make an actual Pinhole Camera?

From a professional point of view, I’ll admit that the uses are potentially limited. I fear that my Stock Library Art Director would recommend a course of intensive opthalmic treatment if I started to submit intentionally blurred images (she’s used to seeing my unintentionally blurred images but that’s another story). However, I know of food and product photographers who use a Lensbaby as a matter of course. Where the new Composer produces much more predictable results it’s easy to see how it could work in a studio operation. I also know wedding photographers who carry a Lensbaby and the Double Glass Optic gives sufficient sharpness to accommodate big enlargements whilst that blur gives a lovely, soft, creative feel to images. There are probably plenty of justifications for carrying a Lensbaby in your camera bag but the overriding reason, and the reason that I won’t be sending this one back anytime soon, is that it’s simply great fun.

A couple of hours shooting with a Lensbaby takes you right back to the basics of photography and the need to manually change apertures forces you to consider your aperture choices more carefully. It’s great to be able to switch apertures at the flick if a dial but when you have to think through your choice beforehand it prompts you to consider exactly what effects different apertures will produce. A Lensbaby will slow down the photographic process but that’s got to be a good thing, right? I’m in favour of anything that asks us to think first and shoot second.

Ayuthaya

Testing the Lensbaby

So, wanting to see for myself how the different optics and apertures compare, and knowing that you’ll probably find it of interest too if a Lensbaby is on your Wish List, I set up a (lightly) controlled experiment. There are a couple of quiet temple ruins on a back road in Ayuthaya that rarely see visitors. I set up a 1Ds MKII on a tripod shortly after sunrise and aimed the Lensbaby Composer at an accommodating Buddha statue. The slideshows below show the difference between shots taken with the Double Glass, Single Glass, Plastic and Pinhole/Zone Plate optics at different apertures.

Because the camera doesn’t detect an aperture with a Lensbaby attached, you’ll need to set your Canon camera to Aperture Priority mode and let the camera take care of the shutter speed. I think Nikon users will need to select Manual. As the light was changing fairly rapidly I avoided taking a single exposure reading and leaving the camera on full manual and allowed the camera to handle the exposure. I locked the Lensbaby Composer in place so that changing the apertures wouldn’t knock it out of alignment.

You can clearly see the difference that the various apertures have on the sweet spot. It’s very small at f/2.8 but quickly expands as the aperture shrinks until at f/22 it’s covering a large part of the frame. The Pinhole and Zone Plate optics are, as you’d expect, hit and miss and I found that the best way to get a shot was to guess the exposure and make adjustments depending on the results. I switched to full manual mode for the Pinhole/Zone Plate optic.

One of the drawbacks with using the smaller apertures is that it becomes difficult to focus accurately. Such a small amount of light is reaching the viewfinder that you’ll only see a shadowy image so picking the focus requires a bit of practice. However, you soon get the hang of where the Lensbaby is focussing and I imagine that a camera with a Live View display will help you to quickly overcome this small obstacle. The Pinhole optic obviously lets only a tiny amount of light through the lens so you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve left the lens cap on when you squint through the viewfinder.

I think the Lensbaby Composer is groovy and although it obviously isn’t a replacement for decent lenses, it isn’t supposed to be. It’s a good lens to switch to when you want to give your creativity free reign and it will force you to consider your shots more carefully. The Lensbaby Gallery showcases a whole host of images taken with different Lensbaby products and cleverly allows you to filter the images based upon the lens and optic combination used. If you become one of the growing number of Lensbaby fans then drop me a line with a link to the resulting images and I’ll share them here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Gear and tagged with ayuthaya, lensbaby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.