It’s easy to make a pinhole camera. Making a good pinhole camera, on the other hand, is damn hard. And it’s even harder to make a pinhole lens for a digital camera. But wouldn’t it be fun to create the intriguing effects only a pinhole aperture can produce?
Lensbaby, legendary manufacturer of creative effects lenses, has invented the Lensbaby Obscura, a digital camera lens that accurately and precisely produces the same amazing results of not one but three different pinhole mechanisms.
We’ve all covered the front of a lens with sandwich wrap or a nylon stocking and created a DIY special effects filter at one time or another. Maybe you’ve even smeared an old UV or Skylight with Vaseline or crayon wax to produce creative distortion. Cool, no? Well, those are NOTHING compared to the incredible optical tricks you can do with the new Omni Creative Filter System from Lensbaby.
Lensbaby Spark lets your camera color outside the lines. It mounts directly on your Canon or Nikon and focuses manually when you squeeze it toward the rear while watching the sharp, sweet spot move around in the viewfinder. The affordable Lensbaby Spark deserves a spot on every photographer’s holiday wish list.
Unless you’re completely new to photography, you’ve heard about Lensbaby, the marvelously creative series of lenses that are best described as intentionally unsharp and stuffed with almost every imaginable aberration and distortion. The Lensbaby Trio 28 is the latest model, and it has a secret.
The Lensbaby Twist 60 is a very modern rendition of a 175-year-old optical design, and true to the designer, Joseph Petzval. But does it satisfy our creative expectations when used in the field?
Making a lens sharp and acceptably free of aberrations is hard. Very hard. Making a lens that can be both tack-sharp and intentionally soft, pleasantly unsharp and able to exploit the native beauty of certain optical aberrations is even harder. Then there’s Lensbaby.
Portraits, close-ups and numerous other creative compositions—the Lensbaby Velvet 85 does it all. Here’s a thorough review and several examples shot with this exciting lens.
An effective camera support that could be used as a pillow when you snooze in the back of your pickup truck in a pinch? Hard to believe? Take my word for it—this thing is as sensible as it is functional.
I’m way too polite and well-mannered to come right out and say that photographers lie, so instead I’ll repeat some of the things I’ve heard them say and translate their words into language we can all understand, i.e., the truth. For example, when my friend told me, “Very useful blog this week, Jon!” she really meant, “You couldn’t write your way out of a paper bag, you schlub, but I ran out of Nyquil and I had to get to sleep somehow…”
If it wasn’t so corny I’d call the LitraTorch a pocket full of sunshine. Instead I’ll call it the future of portable constant lighting for videographers and photographers.
The LitraPro is a compact, rechargeable, high-output LED light source that offers a broad spectrum of color temperature settings and is fully dimmable from 0% to 100%. The LitraPro operates up to 45 minutes at the highest power setting and, should you land on it when you fall into a 90-feet deep swimming pool, no problem—it won’t break or suffer water damage. Sounds incredible, no?
As a lover of all things unsharp, I was eager to get my mitts on a Petzval 85mm portrait lens. When I saw it at Photo Plus Expo here in New York, it was under glass, gleaming like a gilded idol. The fine folks at Lomography were kind enough to loan me a sample. What follows is my report.
Gadget bags and photo backpacks comes and go. There are many reasons; styles change, materials improve; competitors rip off designs and build cheaper clones. Sometimes manufacturers develop “cost down” models to lower production costs and increase profits. But sometimes bags stick around for years and evolve into stronger, lighter, cooler and all-around better products. Lowepro decided to improve a very popular and good selling line, the Lowepro Photo Sport AW (All Weather) Backpack series. It takes a lot of nerve to try to improve upon a favorite. Did they succeed? Let’s find out
Lowepro designers and engineers must gather around the workbench with a pile of camera bags and challenge each other to improve features—large and small—that are already pretty damn good to begin with. That’s the only way I can explain how their bags keep getting better and better. The updates to the Lowepro Pro Runner series, introduced in late May, prove my point.
An exaggeration? Not in my opinion. These two innovative Lume Cube lighting tools are definitely the most fun and most versatile I've ever used. And both are controlled by the Lume Control app and your smartphone, so operation is easy and straightforward.