Lensbaby? Huh?

So first off, I’m going to bitch about Firefox briefly. I’ve had a problem for a while now where sometimes (randomly) whenever I would hit the apostrophe key it would think I wanted to do a search. Let me tell you — you really don’t realize how many contractions your use until you have that frickin search box take focus from you whenever you type one. Whenever it would happen, I would just stop using contractions in my head and write stuff out, but not only does that a) sound really dumb, but b) it also is really hard in some situations to remove the contractions completely without it sounding wrong. I guess that’s how languages evolve.

Canon camera with Lensbaby on
Anyways, enough on that garbage. If you want to fix that problem, check this article out. So, the rant of the night is about lenbabies. Now, I’ve heard some people swear by these things, but I just don’t get it. So I screw this thing onto my camera, and then I can move it around and selectively make parts of my photo in focus? And the rest of the photo looks all crappy and stuff? Some parts you can’t even tell what they were any more? I think the inventor of this used to hang out with George Lucas back in the day when he would giggle has ass off while smearing vasoline all over his camera lenses to get some weird funky effect. Maybe back then you had to, but can’t we do better than that nowadays?

I mean I guess it has this cool accordion thing on it so I can use my fingers and refocus on something not directly in the line of sight of the camera. I mean, that’s really cool since it saves me having to rotate my body 2 or 3 degrees in either direction to get that thing in the frame without the lens baby on.

I’m all for doing cool camera effects. I actually even went out to get a Holga once since I heard they were a lot of fun, and hey, I never had a medium format camera. Sure, the Holga images look a little weird too, but at least it will only set you back $20 or so, not the $179 that they are asking for the lens baby here in town. I’m no expert, but looking at all the photos I see of the lensbaby, I’m pretty sure I can do most of that in photoshop without spending any cash.

So, I would never knock someone else’s photograph (that hard at least), because I still have tons to learn myself. And everyone has their own opinion with what a good photo is. But looking at this photo doesn’t really make me want to head out and get one of these things.

I mean, what does your wife say when you come home and put that picture of your son up on the wall? “Look hun, see what I did with Jimmy?” You wanna know what happens? Your wife tells you to take that photo the fuck down before the neighbours see it.

If anyone has one of these things and can chime in about it, I’d love to hear what you have to say. I want to believe.