As a longtime lens and camera reviewer, I spend so much time looking for perfect sharpness, sometimes I forget that making images should be fun. When I notice that I’ve lost the joy of photography, that’s when I reach for my Lensbaby Composer Pro II.
Using a Lensbaby lens is almost like playing a very simple video game with your camera. It lets you move a sharp area around the image frame and place it where you want, leaving the rest of the frame to fall off into a blur—not necessarily a calm, creamy blur, like you’d get from a more expensive lens, but a more feisty blur that stretches out at the edges of the frame if you angle everything just right.
Plus, you can trade out the optics in the Composer Pro II to get different effects or change the focal length with the company’s Optic Swap system. I’ve built up an assortment of focal lengths and effects in over a decade of using the system, and I often use it to break creative blocks or just reinvigorate my photography by looking into the strangely distorted world it presents.
