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The Lensbaby 3G by David Sanders Add a fun, impressionistic-like quality to your photographs with the Lensbaby 3G Article rating: 9.83

Remember the feeling the first time you took out your first camera and began looking for pictures?

The everyday scenes around you were suddenly transformed into a world of vibrant colors, objects became graphic elements, and details appeared to glow with light.

Every once in a while a product comes along that reignites this feeling of taking the common view and modifying it into a different visual explosion.

The new Lensbaby 3G is small but the results are grand, as it creates impressionistic-like photography, ideal for landscape, commercial, macro, and portrait/wedding photographers.

Playing off of the old Holga or pinhole cameras with its tight focusing area called a “sweet spot” the Lensbaby 3G transforms your digital SLR camera into more of a view camera by using a flexible plastic accordion-like tube similar to a view finder’s bevels, which is attached to a lens in which you can rotate in all directions, creating a definitive area of focus on your subject, with the rest of the image out of focus.

Using different dime-sized discs to select the aperture (range from f/2 to f/22), the new Lensbaby  3G is a vast improvement over the older models with its locking and fine focusing mechanism easy to use once the desired focusing is achieved. The double coated 50mm lens makes for a sharper sweet spot, and magnets now hold in the aperture discs, making them much easier to interchange, although still not the ideal aperture selecting method.  Photographers that enjoy photographing flowers will love its fairly close (about a 12 inches from subject) macro abilities.

Because of the fine selective focusing, the Lensbaby 3G is able to create portraits on a whole new level by keeping specific points like the eyes in sharp focus while the rest of the body is soft, (like the photo of softball pitcher Alicia Holloway or artist Sue Johnson).

With a specific sweet spot, landscape or building pictures becomes surreal and toy like as color fringing occurs toward the outside of the photograph, as seen in this photo of an unusual building in Bowie, Arizona.

The Lensbaby takes some time getting used to, and with the easy buttons to lock down and fine focus knobs easy to use the focus, a tripod will help keep your scene in focus.

The results are worth it, as it will become another very useful tool to keep in your camera bag.

Note:
The Lensbaby sells for around $270-$390, depending on the mount of your camera. Go to www.lensbabies.com for more information.

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