I purchased the Lensbaby II after seeing a series of beautiful wedding pictures shot with this lens by a well-known photographer. The second version of this fun lens has better coating to avoid flare, and a larger aperture (f/2). Since it was just being introduced last spring, it did not arrive in time for my own wedding. Nontheless, I have been using it regularly over the past year, and I must say it is a terrific exploration tool, opening a lot of creative possibilities. I work in RAW, and the files usually need quite a bit of contrast sharpening to give them the "pop" I visualized as I was taking the pictures. Contrast sharpening is a very nice way to increase overall contrast of a scene by using the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop. While it is used only once usually (USM 20 / 50 / 1), my workflow can go through several levels of slight wide-area sharpening while keeping the deep highlights masked. This tends to give very deep contrast that suit the Lensbaby pictures very well.

Mark Goldstein at photographyblog.com has the following to say: "The Lensbaby is the brainchild of professional photographer Craig Strong, who invented the Lensbabies Flexible Lens Mounting System (to give it it's full name) in an effort to replace his Holga film camera with a digital equivalent. It is described on the Lensbaby website as "the hybrid love children of an old-fashioned bellows camera and an up-tight tilt-shift lens", producing photographs with " the same soft, roughed-up look produced by a Holga".

Back to http://rubinphoto.com