Here is one of my first attempts with the Lensbaby 3G.

After reading up on this lens and the 1 & 2 AND having a couple of shots under my belt, I feel very happy with my 'upgrade' to the 3G (thank goodness for Summer Sales ;-).

I spent a good deal of my evening trying to get my Metadata in line. Since the Lensbaby has no brain, there is no lens-related Exif added to the resultant Raw files. I simply cannot live with this, I had to fix it. I messed around with Exiftool for a while and spent about 30 - 45 minutes on a tangent that ultimately had to do with me using "==" versus "=" (whoops). For those of you that care, here is the command line for tweaking your Lensbaby files (you can substitute the .CR2 for whatever format you use):

exiftool -LensType="Lensbaby 3G" -FNumber="2.0" -FocalLength="60" -overwrite_original -r -ext .CR2 .

Keep in mind that you will need to update the FNumber with the correct value for your Aperture in use (in this case, wide open, no disc).

With my metadata in order, I could start playing with the actual lens itself (well, I actually played with it first, then realized the metadata issue).

The 3G is great on a tripod AND on a 40D. Here is where Live View shines (yet again). I was able to get the sweet spot to just about where I wanted it, move my focus point in Live View, and then tweak the focus on the 3G until it was just right. No way the first or second generation models of this lens would work [easily] this way.

I shifted the camera around a little, changing the composition from yesterday's shot. Interestingly enough, I don't think the actual pile changed any. I did have to remove a few of my son's toys that got thrown into the mix, but the dolls look to be in the same pose from before.

I did try the 4.0 Aperture Disc (they aren't labeled, you have to know the values and compare them) which was already loaded into the camera when I got it. I wanted a much smaller sweet spot (just the face of the one doll) so I tried it wide open at f/2.0 and got better results, though a tad bit soft.

I plan on spending a lot more time with this lens in the near future (I have to work out the logistics of keeping it in my bag too).

Here is the link to yesterday's, non-lensbaby, PaD: