Lensbabies Selective Focus SLR Camera Lenses

Lensbabies bring one area of your photo into sharp focus, with that “sweet spot” surrounded by graduated blur. You can move the sweet spot to any part of your photo by bending the flexible lens tubing.

The Lensbabies product line currently includes two lenses, the Original Lensbaby and Lensbaby 2.0, as well as the Lensbaby Macro Kit, which allows either Lensbaby model to be used for macro photography. Lensbaby 2.0 and The Original Lensbaby bring one area of a photo into sharp focus, with that ‘sweet spot’ surrounded by graduated blur. Photographers can fluidly move the sharp area around the photo by bending the flexible lens tubing. The Lensbaby Macro Kit mounts onto the front of either Lensbaby lens to allow photographers to focus as close as two inches away.

Lensbaby 2.0 features an f2.0 aperture setting in addition to The Original Lensbaby’s f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6 and f/8.0. Lensbaby 2.0 features a coated, high refractive index, low dispersion optical glass doublet instead of the singled uncoated optical glass element in The Original Lensbaby. Lensbaby 2.0’s optic creates a much sweeter sweet spot of focus, which allows photographers to print large photos and see fine details like eye lashes or individual threads of fabric in the sharp area. Photographers will also find that Lensbaby 2.0 has minimal diffusion even at the f/2.0 aperture setting, while the Original Lensbaby becomes very soft and almost impressionistic at f/2.8.

Lensbaby 2.0 also features a levitating magnetic aperture system that makes changing apertures faster than with The Original Lensbaby, which uses a rubber gasket to hold aperture disks in place. Lensbaby 2.0 uses three shielded magnets embedded inside the optics cup to suspend metallicized plastic aperture disks just above the coated optical glass doublet. When a photographer drops an aperture disk into Lensbaby 2.0, it quickly snaps into position.

The Lensbaby Macro Kit includes a +4 and a +10 macro lens, with 37mm threads that allow either or both macro lenses to be mounted to the front of a Lensbaby. The +10 macro lens allows photographers to focus their Lensbaby from 3.5 to 5 inches away, while the +4 allows focus from 6 to 12 inches away. Photographers can stack the +4 on top of the +10 to allow focus from 2 to 3 inches away.

Lensbaby 2.0 is available for sale now at www.lensbabies.com for $150, in camera mounts for virtually all SLR camera bodies. It will be rolled out to specialty photographic supply stores starting in mid-April. Lensbabies continues to offer The Original Lensbaby for $96 and the Lensbaby Macro Kit retails for $29.

Both Lensbaby 2.0 and The Original Lensbaby combine several vintage camera technologies in a novel, patent-pending combination. The shooter focuses a Lensbaby using the same general principle used with a bellows camera, by moving the focusing collar in and out with his or her fingertips. The photographer moves the ‘sweet spot’ of focus around the picture by bending the glass optic out of a parallel position to the image capture plane, like a tilt-shift lens.

For more information:  www.lensbabies.com