Articles and Reviews

“Photography is a funny old game. No matter what technological developments are achieved, everything is still based around basic principles. Take for example the Lensbaby. Some of you reading this article will have heard of them, others perhaps
not. But for those of you who may have somehow missed this gem, please let me enlighten you…The device is designed to produce a ‘sweet spot’ of focus, with everything away from centre forming a beautifully blurred effect. The collar surrounding
the front element allows for a fantastic range of swing and tilt movements – in any direction. This basic principle allows the user to position the sweet spot exactly where desired, whilst the rest of the image blurs majestically (and seemingly) magically out of focus. The softness surrounding the actual in focus plane is a wonderful effect, and suits a variety of uses.”
— Digital SLR User Magazine

“When we reviewed the Lensbaby 2.0 selective focus lens last August, we had only one real complaint. ‘The problem is that, even when you do find focus, it’s hard to hold it,’ we whined. ‘There’s no detent that locks in the lens position, so you have to freeze your grip.’”

“A couple of months later, the Lensbaby guys took care of that little issue with what can only be described as the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World. They, modestly, call it simply the Lensbaby 3G.”

— By Mike Pasini. Review courtesy of and copyright 2007 by camera review website The Imaging-Resource.com. Reprinted with permission.

“I’ve found some wonderful uses for the Lensbaby in my commercial work for clients, in my wedding work when it’s time to do the detail images and the venue leaves a little something to be desired (as Bambi Cantrell calls it, “The church of the Holy Cinderblock”), and in my portrait work after I’ve captured the regular images.”

— Bob Coates, for Professional Photographer Magazine

“After two hits with the Lensbaby and Lensbaby 2.0, photographer and inventor Craig Strong scores a home run with the Lensbaby 3G.”

—Stan Sholik, for Professional Photographer Magazine

“I’ve been using a 3G for a few months now, and it’s quite an impressive piece of equipment. It has a more substantial feel than the Original Lensbaby, less like a toy and more like a professional product. The locking and fine-focus additions make it easy to reproduce the Lensbaby effect, making it an excellent choice for studio photographers.”

— Rick LePage, for Macworld

“Perhaps the coolest third-party digital SLR accessory out there…”

“AJ Schroetlin from Fort Collins, CO took up photography as a hobby after an accident left him mostly blind in his left eye. The former homebuilder took a series of jobs, but quickly realized that he wanted to make his new hobby into a career. After seeing an ad for a Lensbaby, he bought one and began experimenting…”
— Kathleen Davis

“Often times, certain lenses really make you sit back and think about your photography because they are a challenge to use. If you are a photographer looking to spark your creativity, the Lensbaby is the kind of product that can do just that.”

-Jason P. Odell

“Selective focus can be a wonderful thing. One of the reasons why I love using a Holga or a pinhole is the quality of the focus (or lack of). The Lensbaby gives me more control. I can put it on my camera and play with the tube like a lens and decide what I want in focus and what I want out of focus. It is like the control of a view camera (almost!) on a digital camera.”

“I teach a lot of workshops. Sometimes, if students are going through a lull in their work, I let them borrow my Lensbaby and I give them an assignment to loosen them up. The idea is for them to try something new and get their creative juices flowing. What happens is they fall in love with my lens and I have to force them to give it back. The pictures on these pages are just a few from my collection. I hope you enjoy looking at these images as much as I enjoyed making them.”

- Jill Enfield

“Lensbaby 2 is a coated doublet, soft-focus, 50mm f:2 lens that breaks our preoccupation with image sharpness and introduces us to a world of controlled blur and softness. It’s great fun whether you use it for traditional soft-focus portraiture or to explore a world of ethereal landscapes and dreamlike imagery.”

-Steve Baczewski

“Craig Strong has successfully incorporated the optical style present in toy cameras with the added flexibility of better focusing and aperture control and in so doing, extended the creative possibilities available even further.”

-Philip Andrews

“If you’ve read a food, lifestyle, travel or health magazine in the last decade, you’ve seen that minimal depth-of-field look put to good use. That look has been a favorite of photo editors and art directors for a while. Previously, if you wanted to try it yourself, it required a hefty investment in special lenses or a view camera.”

“Then came the Lensbaby. Now you can be cutting-edge, cool, and contemporary without breaking the bank. Since food photography is a big part of travel work, I use my Lensbaby 2.0 to shoot all types of victuals, and it’s working out great. You get one teeny part of the subject in focus, and then there’s all that lovely out-of-focus area around the crab leg or lamb chop. It’s also useful for photographing flowers and portraits.”

-Bob Krist, Outdoor Photographer, December 2005

“Maybe it’s my art school background, but I like to use the camera like a paintbrush and manipulate my images in the viewfinder and in the camera.”

“Available for just about every popular lensmount, the $150 Lensbaby 2.0 isn’t for everyone, but the look can’t be duplicated. There’s something about the interaction between optical science and pure accident that makes for a unique photographic combination.”

-Photo District News, June 2005

In today’s excruciatingly electronic, high-tech, digital world, Lensbabies is an intriguing anachronism, a throwback to the bygone era when photography was simple, mechanical, and fun. A paragon of low-tech ingenuity… we predict a bright future for Lensbabies.

-Jason Schneider, Photo Industry Reporter, May 2005

“This little accessory lens is just beyond fun, beyond trick, it’s really addictive. Once you begin to play with it, you’ll find yourself making excuses to use it in your work. . . .

“The photographs that you’ll be making with the Lensbaby 2.0 are nothing short of magical. They throw away that idea that everything must be perfect and perfectly focused. . . .

“The Macro lenses are amazingly sharp for such inexpensive glass. They WILL deliver excellent results. . . .

Conclusion: 5 Cows” – Jim Harvey, CreativeCow.com, January 2006.

“Shallow depth of field can be a beautiful thing, creating smooth, soft tones and patterns from detail that might otherwise distract from the main subject. But the effect is inextricably linked to distance, which is why in recent years photographers from fashion to fine art have resorted to tilts and swings — off axis rotations of the film or lens plane that selectively soften areas of the subject.

“Normally, this must be done with a view camera’s movements or, in smaller cameras, with expensive special-purpose lenses and/or attachments. But the Lensbaby 2.0 allows 35mm and digital SLR photographers to create similar effects with much less trouble and expense.” – Russell Hart, American PHOTO, August 16, 2005

“If digital put the fun back into photography, then Lensbabies put more fun into digital. All of my Art Director clients who have digital SLRs have now purchased Lensbabies and are having loads of fun with them.”

“The lens is mounted to the camera with a flexible barrel that allows the photographer to bend the focal plane to let certain areas become sharp and other areas go out of focus in a way that is totally different from Photoshop’s Lens Blur filter. The result is a one of a kind image with a very short depth of field.”

“Overall, the Lensbaby can add a whole new look to your images for a small investment. And the best part is that everyone’s images will look totally different depending on how they position the front of the lens. All of my digital photographer friends who use Lensbabies are having too much fun to call it work”
-Jim DiVitale, Photoshop User, June, 2005

“Rarely in the photography world does a new camera component come along that’s not only useful and original but also cheap. When inventor Craig Strong released the Original Lensbaby in 2004, it met all of those criteria, quickly becoming popular among SLR photographers who care about art more than they do about technical perfection.

“This April, Strong unveiled the Lensbaby 2.0, a version with a higher-quality, two-element lens; an f/2.0 aperture in addition to the original f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6, and f/8.0 options; and a more convenient system for changing apertures. . . . I tried out both optics on a Nikon D70 and quickly came to the conclusion that I’d like to add one to my lens collection. I’d splurge and get the 2.0, since it makes significant improvements to the Original.”
—Aimee Baldridge, CNET May 2, 2005

“The ‘Lensbaby’ pushes me to think outside all the boxes. The 50mm is a view I’m familiar with and appreciate. When using the ‘Lensbaby’ it’s kind of a 50mm on fire.” – Dennis Keeley, Petersen’s Photographic, February, 2005

Lensbabies is proud to be awarded one of Professional Photographer’s 2004 Hot 1 Awards which honor the most outstanding products for the professional photography market. Professional Photographer’s judging panel is made up of working professional photographers who are all respected and well recognized in the industry. To maintain the highest level of fairness, none of the judges are employed by Professional Photographer magazine.

“Personally, I’ve used the f/2.8 option for most of the time I’ve had the Lensbaby. I just love the way objects simply melt away at this setting. (Please don’t mention this to Ailsa, but it’s absolutely majic with colour images too — even the fringing caused by the colour aberration looks interesting).

“The odd thing is that nobody ‘gets it’ until they’ve had a go and then you can’t get your camera back.” – Jerry Lebens, Black & White, No. 36, August 2004.

“Lensbabies are made for photographers who enjoy creating images in their cameras, who are seeking ways to set themselves apart from their competition with a new look, and who are willing to have fun and experiment with picture making.” – Stan Sholik

- PEI (Photo>Electronic Imaging) May/June 2004.

“This lens can help you boost profits by providing a unique perspective in portrait, seniors, and wedding photography.” – Stan Sholik

5 out of 5 stars “Being able to control what is in focus in your photographs from left to right as well as back to front opens up a whole new way of seeing the world, especially if you’ve never used a Holga or bellows camera before. The Lensbaby is small enough, cheap enough and useful enough to warrant a place in any photographer’s camera bag.” – Mark Goldstein

“The picture of this months’ cover in ZoneZero was taken from my car with the Nikon camera and a Lensbaby. While at the i3Forum, my good friend Dan Burkholder was playing around with a new lens on his digital camera, a lens called the “Lensbaby”. I could not believe what I was looking at. Here he was using a lens very much like an old fashioned bellows camera and an up-tight tilt-shift lens, providing the look created by the Holga camera, but produced with a digital camera.” – Pedro Meyer

“They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some people like fuzzy “Holga” type images. Others just see them as out of focus shots taken with a poor quality lens. If you belong to the former group then the “lensbaby” may be just what you are looking for, while if you belong to the latter it certainly won’t be. There are those who can create art by using the “qualities” of the lens (or lack of them) to their advantage – and there are those who can’t.” – Bob Atkins

(Be sure to read the long, spirited exchange by Photo.net readers, which ends with these final words by Kristian Olson: “Best $100 I’ve ever spent for my dSLR’s hands down.” Thank you Kristian!)

“For center sharpness, the LB2 does well against the Nikon 50mm f1.8 lens. To my eyes the Nikon wins out by a tiny margin, but the LB2 is not embarrassed in any way and is certainly head and shoulders above the original Lensbaby. $50 extra to get this improvement in quality is a bargain and consider that in a lot of cases, the difference between a consumer zoom lens versus a profesional one is a lot less than this difference, but would still cost you hundreds of dollars more.”

“So, is the new Lensbaby 2.0 worth the 50 percent increase in price? Hell yes, and let’s keep in mind that we’re still only talking about US $150 here. I paid more for upgrading the cable (Zu Mobius) for my Sennheiser HD580 headphones. . . . The fella’s at Lensbabies have done a fine job of improving on the original product and the quality (in the center) is now on a par with a good prime lens. Get one and go out and have some fun!”

- Edwin Leong

“Sit back and pop open that box of chocolates and enjoy what the Lensbaby will give you because you never know what you’re gonna get. As you may have guessed, I’m buying a Lensbaby for myself.”

- Edwin Leong