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Any hobby or pastime can get stale after a while without new challenges or ideas to excite you. The folks at Lensbaby have built their company around providing equipment to help photographers get out of a rut. They have continued to expand their optic-swap system and
now have a fisheye optic to go along with the rest of the line. It’s wide, it’s distorted, it’s fuzzy and sharp at the same time and might be just what you need to create some images to help get you excited about your photography again.
The quickest way to explain what exactly a Lensbaby is to read about what the company itself says about the lenses:
The Lensbaby is a unique SLR lens that has a sweet spot of focus with blur all around the sweet spot. Unlike a tilt-shift lens, which has a flat field of focus and a slice of of focus from end to end, the Lensbaby field of focus is curved, producing a circle of focus.
The Lensbaby Optic Swap system is a series of 6 different optic inserts that you can use with the Lensbaby body to achieve different effects and image styles. Think of it as taking the engine out of a car and being able to swap in one engine for good gas mileage and
another the next day for trailer towing power. The optic choices are double glass, single glass, plastic, pinhole/zone-plate, soft focus, and fisheye.
The Lensbaby Fisheye Optic has a 12mm focal length and a 160 degree field of view. It can focus as close as one half inch and has an f/4 maximum aperture with aperture plates from f/5 to f/22. While Lensbaby does a great job of trying to keep their newer products compatible
with their older products, but some designs make that more difficult and the Fisheye Optic is one of them. The Fisheye’s aperture plates aren’t compatible with the other optics and the Muse and Control Freak Lensbaby “lenses” will require adapters (purchased separately) to
mount the Fisheye.
Anyone who is familiar with Lensbaby products will feel at home using the Fisheye optic. The optic installs in just the same way as any of the optic-swap optics. There are only two major differences from the other optics. The first is that, as mentioned, the Fisheye uses a
different size of aperture discs. In addition, they install slightly differently. You have to unscrew the Fisheye unit and install the aperture disc behind the lens element rather than in front of it as with the other optics. This isn’t a particularly big deal, though it is a bit more fiddly to juggle when trying to make a change while standing in the middle of a photoshoot. The second difference is that due to the wide field of view, the image circle is barely enough to cover an APS-C sized sensor. Meaning that you pretty much just have to use the Fisheye as a regular fisheye lens and not as a Lensbaby-style shifting-tilting-blurring lens. This is kind of a bummer, as it makes the lens a little less cool in my book. On the other hand, the wider
you make a lens, the harder it becomes to get a large image circle. And given that people aren’t looking to pay $1000 for these types of optics from Lensbaby, they are limited in what they can do. In addition, with the large depth of field that a 12mm lens has at even maximum aperture, the focus shift/blur that the other Lensbaby lenses have would be much less pronounced and probably not worth the trouble to try and offer. The ability to focus down to half an inch is probably the Fisheye’s most unexpected feature. While the distortion of the lens doesn’t lend itself to real macro photography, the ability for such close up focus can create some very interesting image options.
On the whole, I really like the results that the Lensbaby Fisheye Optic gave me. No, you can’t shift things around like you can with other Lensbaby optics, but the resulting images from the Fisheye still had a healthy dose of that “sharp in the middle blurred like crazy on the edges” look that make tilting/shifting the other Lensbaby lenses so fun. I will say, however, that the lens is much more useful on a APS-C (or other crop sensor) camera than it is on a full frame camera. On a full frame camera, the Fisheye optic becomes a circular fisheye. And you end up with an image that is just a circle in the middle of the frame. Please see the example image if you are confused about what I am referring to. Now don’t get me wrong, circular fisheyes are an interesting effect. But if the fisheye effect itself is somewhat limited in what you can do with it, a circular fisheye is far FAR more limited. I just tend to think that it’s a gimmick that gets old quickly. Using the Fisheye optic as a full-frame fisheye (meaning
“fills the frame” not “full frame sensor”) on a crop sensor camera is a much better plan in my book. No matter where you use it, the lens gives the severe distortion common with fisheye lenses. Objects i the center of an image stay fairly normal, but the further towards the
edges something is, the more it will be distorted. Sharpness is surprisingly acceptable in the center for a lens of this design and intended use, though it falls off quickly towards the edges and corners. It should also be noted that “surprisingly acceptable” sharpness needs to be understood to also be viewed from the position of the lens’s intended use and function. Nothing from Lensbaby is designed to make tack sharp images, that isn’t their goal.
Like all the Lensbaby lenses I have used, I enjoyed the Fisheye optic. But then again, I love wide angle lenses. I would shoot everything from 2-7 feet away if I could get away with it. If you aren’t as interested in wide-angle or fisheye photography, this lens isn’t going to be for you. But for the rest of us, the Fisheye optic is a great addition to a camera bag. I do wish there was some option for some of the tilting/shifting that is so much fun with the other Lensbaby lenses. But I understand why that isn’t really possible. Finally, I’m going to have to stick with my suggestion for full frame DSLR owners to think twice before buying. Unless you are in love with the circular image format, the Fisheye optic is probably less useful than you’d
wish. For those of us with cropped sensor cameras, and especially for those of us with other Lensbaby products, the Fisheye is well worth looking into.
Bottom Line
Pros
Interesting effects, cheap for a fisheye, works with existing current Lensbaby lenses.
Cons
Not as fun on a full frame camera, no possibility of Lensbaby style focus shifting/tilting, requires adapter for Muse or Control Freak.
Thank you for this helpful review. I use Canon's 5D bodies with full frame sensors, so I won't be getting one.
My reason for commenting is the striking similarity between the circular image in your example and the result I used to get from a 0.42x Converter on a 28mm lens. It even has the blue edge aberration.
I love fish eyes too, but historically I have only shot a couple of dozen images with circular types in 20 odd years.
I have on the other hand hundreds of full frame images from a Canon 15mm FE which are sharp to the edge. Oh sorry that is not the objective of these objectives.
Anyone else ever made shots with a door security viewer attached to an extension tube?
Re: Door peephole as lens, visit instructables.com and look through their many and creative photo hardware projects including doorhole fisheye lens conversions and LensBaby alternatives, crazy homemade pinhole cameras, dozens of camera mounting rigs, 12-volt- and bicycle-powered digital projectors ....
As far at the circular/fullframe thing regarding full-frame cameras (film AND digital), hey, isn't one of the fantastic things about having huge megapixel-count sensors is that you can crop and STILL have great image quality? Who says you have to use the entire circular image anyway?
For that matter, nothing says the undistorted focal point of a fisheye shot has to end up as the center point of the final image, either.
Of course, this article is focused on the release of a specific piece of hardware; we probably all should beware of becoming too focused on ANY specific piece of hardware.
