I can't help it, this image seems funny to me. The bang and boom just belong beside the buzzer on this doorway. Reminds me of a place I used to live in.
I was searching around the net last week looking for others who are using a lensbabies lens besides me and stumbled upon a forum talking about the lensbabies on Photo.net. Half the comments were genuine and half seem to be from people who pride themselves on the price of thier gear and dare not try something that may pose a challenge. I was going to leave a post but then I thought I might just get on a rant, so I decided here was a better place to voice an opinion, after all that is what blogging is about.
First and formost I must say I love my lensbabies lens. It is well built yet simple and adds a creative style that I was trying, unsuccessfully, to achieve by making use of various toy cameras and home made stuff. I am addicted! The pictorialist movement is back!
When looking around I have found that many creative endeavors approached with such creative devices as a lensbabies or say a flatbed scanner duct tapped to the back of a view camera have merited shockingly good images. There is an article on a photographer in "Aperture" magazine about a photographer who made his own cameras using his creative talents and his work is unique and intriguing. Another article in "Popular Photography" shows a photographer who mounts a flatbed scanner on a view camera, and again the work is unlike any other I have seen. A further article on www.luminous-landscape.com by a pro who bought a $20 digital 640x480 pixel cam from a discount store and he produced images that he displays. There are many more examples of this if you look. Some still practice Daguerre's method, or produce calotypes and so on, many are featured in galleries and magazines as being on the cutting edge of the old and creative technologies.
My point here is that while it is nice to be able to fork out thousands on high end pro lenses that bear the markings "L", "USM", "VR", "IS" and have wide constant apertures and are sharp as a tack (when in the right hands), this is not all there is to photography. Not everyone wants to create deep colourful polarized landscapes. When put to the test, the defocused area in an image is as important to me as the focal point. I watch for this when I watch movies and while I am in galleries and even as I watch the news. The defocused area can say as much as the rest of the image when it comes to setting the mood and feeling for an image. That is why a lensbabies lens is so creative to me. It gives me new ways of looking at both the focal point as well as the ebb and flow of my work as a photographer. So when I am done using my lensbaby I can mount up my pro lens and make images that are new and creative instead of trying to copy what has already been done.
That's my thoughts on the subject of lensbabies and like it or not, dammit, I'm right....
Brad
