Lensbaby Composer
I recently bought a Lensbaby Composer to use at a wedding (I’ll post some pictures later when I’m done with them) and my short review is this: If you’ve ever been interested in a Lensbaby, the Composer is the one buy.
If you’ve never heard of a Lensbaby, take a look at their website: http://lensbaby.com/
I’ve always been tempted to get one ever since I played with my assistant’s. You can get some really cool results, but the original lensbaby was just too cumbersome to use. Having to hold the focus and tilt steady with your fingers while trying to hit the shutter was just too imprecise for my taste. The 3G version that came out later was better, but the fine control knobs was just too unwieldy for handheld use. Now Lensbaby has come out with the Composer and it is brilliant.
The Composer focuses like a regular lens with a focusing ring on the barrel of the lens, but the really cool part is that the front part of lens is on a tensioned ball joint. When you tilt the front end it just stays tilted. No longer do you have to try to keep the same tilt while compressing the lens to focus. You now just tilt it to where you want, then turn the ring to focus. In some ways it may even be easier to use than a full fledged tilt/shift lens. As an example of how easy it is to pickup and use, I received the lens on Thursday and took shots at a wedding with it on Saturday with good results.
The build quality is also quite good. The external casing is metal, feels like aluminum, and the internal components are plastic. Most importantly, the lens mount is metal so it should be able to take some rough handling. The focusing ring wiggles a little, but it doesn’t affect its operation. I won’t be too surprised to see it survive a drop of a couple of feet, especially since it’s so light (not a lot of energy in the impact).
With respect to sharpness, I bought the lens with the double glass element and I found that within the “sweet spot” it is as sharp as any good 50mm lens. Of course if you don’t like it that sharp, the lens element is now fully interchangeable. Lensbaby already offers a few different choices like pinhole and plastic lenses. I’m at the WPPI show in Vegas right now, and the Lensbaby guys told me they are thinking about releasing an element with a flat plane of focus (right now they have a curved plane of focus). This would in essence make it into a regular tilt/shift…. well tilt lens at a fraction of the price.
If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m quite excited about this lens. If you’ve been on the fence about Lensbabies, go out and buy the Composer now.
