The bendy lens

When photographing  we often are wanting to find felling in our photos and we can do many different things to try to achieve this. Some of the more traditional ways are for example using creative composition and angels in how we capture our subject. We can also use aperture settings to get different depths of field. Then we have a countless amounts of different less traditional products available to give different effects to photos.

One of those products that caught my attention for some time was the lensbaby. The lensbaby is a lens that unlike traditional lenses can be bent so that the glass (or plastic) is no longer parallel with the camera causing a distortion that is not achievable with normal slr lenses (a slightly similar effect can be achieved with a tilt shift lens but still not the same). Basically you could have somebody standing straight up and down and have the face in focus but not the feet. A very cool effect if you ask me . So of course being the camera freak I am I had to buy one. I also chose to purchase a plastic lens to replace the glass to give yet another effect to the photos. Shorty after I received my lensbabay I just had to put it to use, so on a shoot with Model Malin and makeup artist Therese I toke the opertunity to pull it out. Now I have to warn you, using a lensbaby is not an easy straight up and down task, it takes some time to manually focus on your subject and depending on how much you have bent your lens and where you want to focus it might not even be possible and that can be slightly nerve racking. In fact during our shoot Therese made the comment to me that she had never heard me swear at my equipment until that day But in the end I was very happy with the results we achieved and am proud to have a lensbaby in my collection of equipment.

Here are some of the photos from that day. They were published in Nolltvå some months back.

/Ryan http://ryangarrison.com