Lensbabilicious: Soft Focus and Fisheye Optics for Your Composer Lens
The Lensbaby Composer that we previously reviewed has new optics out and we recently swapped out our old optics to try these ‘babies’ out. The Lensbaby Soft Focus Optic and the Fisheye Optic are part of the new optic swap system, designed to let you have a little more fun with your camera (and your Composer).
We were quite happy with the new Fisheye Optic. The last time we attempted to use a fisheye lens, we weren’t satisfied with the image quality, but this one was much better. The pictures we took showed a good deal of detail and it didn’t have much blur. It could very well be the design of the lens, which had this complicated two-part system that requires a little bit of time to switch in and out. We liked the adjustability of this fisheye, though it has it’s limits and does vignette.
You have to get quite close with this lens to take a picture or it will look even farther away than with a typical lens. Luckily this one allows you to get quite close. With a minimum focus of 1.3 centimeters, it’s almost like you’re touching your subject instead of taking a picture.
A minor detail, but an important one, is that we didn’t see an easy way to cover our Fisheye lens. There was no specific lens cap that would protect it if we wanted to leave it in the Composer (which we did, because we liked it and would use it more than the original optic). The lens cap that came with our Composer certainly didn’t work.
However, after speaking with the company, they’ve corrected that flaw and are now sending out special lens caps with new purchases of Fisheye Optics. If you’ve already purchased one, the company should be able to furnish you with one for free if you contact them.
We were less impressed with the Soft Focus Optic, but still found it quite a fun device. It’s best outdoors, we decided, and in sunlight, but we had taken a few indoor photos that worked as well. However, there’s a small tendency for results to become grainy, at least without some fairly detailed adjustments.
Perhaps most frustratingly, the picture on the camera in real time doesn’t match up to the picture it eventually takes, making it difficult to know precisely what we were going to get. The final picture it does take is quite a bit blurrier than expected. Nonetheless it can create some interesting smooth effects. It comes with a slew of different apertures to switch out and experiment with (they can be stacked as well).
Like with the previous Lensbaby lenses we’ve tried, you have to manually swap out the aperture rings if you want a different aperture, which is done with a cute little magnetic device. Bad for taking quick photos, but it’s pretty easy to just leave it on the same aperture and adjust the rest of the settings accordingly in a given shoot.
Both of these optics are designed to be swapped out, which we had to consult the manual in order to understand how to do. Once done, however, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to do it again.
The Lensbaby Soft Optic for Composer, Muse and Control Freak retails for about $90 on Amazon and the Lensbaby Fisheye Optic for Composer, Muse and Control Freak retails for about $150 on Amazon.
