noise to signal

Lensbaby baby!

For many photographers, switching to digital has no downsides: it's faster, there's no ongoing expense of film, etc. etc.

However, for those of us who like, perhaps, a slightly more "interpreted" image, there are many things we miss about film. Film grain is one -- with the option of either still shooting on film (which I do) or adding it after the fact in Photoshop (which will send you to hell, not that I have any opinions on it).

Another is the option of shooting with a Holga, which is a Chinese-made plastic camera with a beautifully crappy lens. Michelle Bates has some particularly good examples of what that camera allows one to do -- soft, surreal images that are photographic and painterly at the same time.

One option would be to try to mount the lens from a holga camera onto a body cap from a digital SLR, which I've spent some time contemplating, but never got up the gumption to do.

Even better, though, is a new option that Barbara Stewart-Thomas pointed me to a couple of days ago, called a Lensbaby. I'll let you go to the site for the full explanation, but briefly, it's a crappy lens mounted on the end of a piece of flexible plastic tubing, which is in turn mounted on a digital SLR body cap (see, I wasn't so crazy). It has the same kind of weirdo focus characteristics of a Holga lens, but goes the Holga one better by allowing the photographer to move the sweet spot around while shooting.

So of course I had to order one ($96 + shipping, from Portland so it got to me in two days), and of course I had to try it out this morning. Here then are five examples. The first one just shows off the weird depth of field. The next two show the "sweet spot" moving around. And the last two show the same image in color and black and white. I'm probably going to be using this mostly in black and white -- I think the look is more effective that way -- but it's interesting to see the almost impressionistic color effects.

The lens comes with several different "aperture rings", from f/2.8 to f/8, with f/5.6 the recommended "most versatile" aperture; I'm using the f/2.8 one here, because I wanted to see what the most extreme effect was.

Shooting with it is a very weird and cool and organic experience, especially at this wide aperture -- it's like hunting around in 3-d space for your subject.