Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Cam­era: Nikon D70s
Lens/Filters: NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8 D AF
Focal Length: 50mm
Expos­ure: 0.00625 sec
Aper­ture: f/1.8
ISO Speed: 200
Fill-in Flash: 32
Post-Processing: Minor brightness/contrast adjust­ment, res­ized and tagged for web

Folks, I’d like to intro­duce you to the latest addi­tions to my kit bag: The Lens­baby Com­poser and The Lens­baby Optic Kit.

They arrived in the post a couple of days ago and K said it felt silly to wrap them up and save them for a par­tic­u­lar day (she’s agnostic, so for her Christ­mas = Presents, food and fuck-all else) when she could give them to me now and I can have longer to enjoy using them. I can’t say that I put up much of a fight. In fact, I may or may not have had her hand off.

The Com­poser is a mem­ber of the new gen­er­a­tion of Lens­baby lenses out now and dif­fers from the Lens­baby 3G [shown right] in that in place of bellow-like tubing that allows you to move the sweet-spot of focus around, there’s a ball and socket joint. How­ever like the 3G, the lens stays in fixed/posed pos­i­tion without need­ing to be hand-held, which makes it great for macro and tri­pod work and for those with woolly fine motor skills (i.e. me).

The other big dif­fer­ence between these new gen­er­a­tion ‘babies and the older ones are the intro­duc­tion of inter­change­able optics. The Com­poser comes with a double-glass optic as stand­ard, but if you buy the kit, you can swap that out for a single-glass, plastic or pinhole/zone plate optic, instead. It’s like hav­ing four dif­fer­ent ‘babies in one!

I’m really excited about the new pos­sib­il­it­ies that are now on the cards in terms of what sorts of images I can cap­tures straight from the cam­era. I think these new optics are really going to open doors in terms of stretch­ing and devel­op­ing my pho­to­graphic style. Hope­fully, I shall be post­ing my first exper­i­ments with them soon.