A week of Lensbaby

Thanks to the votes from all of you out there in cyber land, the first lens I used for my One Lens, One Week project was my Lensbaby.  The Lensbaby is a lens that I love but don't use as much as I would like, so this vote was a good thing.  I also knew it might be a challenging week; the Lensbaby is a manual focus lens and can be EXTREMELY hard to nail focus, especially at larger apertures, due to the nature of the lens itself.  In fact, it is the only lens where I have ever used live view on my camera to focus, so I cn zoom in and determine if focus is correct.  For those of you who aren't completely familiar with Lensbabies, they are lenses that allow selective focus.  I have the Composer model.  The lens has a ball joint in it which allows the front element of the lens to rotate up and down, side to side, and diagonally.  You can move your slice of focus where you want it. I also have the macro adapters for my Lensbaby, which are fun (but even more tricky!)

I took a lot of photos, but I wish I had taken even more.  I had ideas in my head for so many, but that whole only 24 hours in a day thing sometimes limits me.  I really want to take more portraits with it.  I have in the past.  You can stop the lens down and the area of blur is much less, so you can get portraits that are in focus but still have an interesting blur where you want it on the edges (or you can use a large aperture and add creative blur to your Enthusiastic Assistant's face, like I did).  I set up some shots specifically with the Lensbaby's effects in mind, and some were just shots I would've taken with a normal lens.  My favorite by far is the one of my nephew sleeping.  He will not let me take his photo anymore, so when I babysat him last week, I got my camera out after he fell asleep, put the camera in silent shutter mode, and prayed he wouldn't wake up.  Also, that photo was taken at ISO 10,000; I love my camera.

On to the photos, and thanks to all who voted in the survey!  I'll be doing this project once a month so look for another survey coming up in September.