My new toy……… A Lensbaby Composer Pro

So some of you may have read my post from the DFW Photo expo the other day, Whilst attending on the first day I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture on the use of lens made by Lensbaby.
To cut a long story very short, at the end of the lecture we were told to look under our seats to see if we were a lucky door prize winner. Guess what? Yep that’s right the person who never wins freebies, had just won.
So I collected a new Lensbaby Composer Pro

Now this afternoon I chose to open the box and attach it to my Canon 1D mark III, first off there are a couple of things you need to know about using a Lensbaby lens. You don’t have auto focus, Manual focus in needed for everything. Secondly, actually this should be firstly, make sure you set camera to Manual mode. Then I choose to take a few quick shots and looked at the back of my screen at the histogram to get an idea of my exposure settings, then once I was happy with the exposure, I got down to playing with my lens. Yes I did what any true impatient photographer would do, I yanked the lens hard to one side, focused on something, pulled the trigger  and wow, what a shit photo I took. No I won’t post it (artistic licence). It looked like one side of the photo was travelling at wrap speed like the USS Enterprise and the other side was kind of sitting in a Halo of white light. Straight away I realise hey you just did what the guy at the lecture told you not to do….. NICE ONE.

So on the follow up shots I tweaked the lens just a bit until I was happy with the sweet spot position (that is the point where focus will be achieved), I then manually focused the lens and tried again. With more success this time.

I will say that it takes a little bit of practice. But once you get the hang of it, I loved it. No it won’t replace my 85mm lens, but I will use it for other things, especially still life, flowers, waterfalls and just playing around.

So this image is taken using the Lensbaby Pro Composer @ f4.0 (manually dialled) ISO 1000 1/125 in natural light. The image is of my beautiful wife Raquel.

Sorry Raquel I forgot to get your permission hope you like the image

xxxxxxx