Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

In the late 1980s Canon introduced a 135mm f/2.8 autofocus lens that featured selectable softfocus. In addition to delivering dreamy out-of-focus images on demand, it’s also tack-sharp and extrapolates up to the equivalent of a 216mm f/2.8 when used on a crop-frame Canon.

A couple years ago I bought a used Canon EOS D30 for an article I was doing for Shutterbug. To be sure it’s an EOS D30, not a more modern EOS 30D, and it’s “only” 3.1-megapixel—it produces images that are a modest 2160 x 1440 to be exact. I paid around $300 for it secondhand. It cost $3000 when it was new back in 2000.

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.

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. 

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.

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.