Pentaxian Registered: December, 2016 Location: London Posts: 1,079 | Review Date: December 23, 2016 | Recommended | Price: $43.00
| Rating: 8 |
Pros: | Small, light, and a nice effect | Cons: | Manual, aperture change is slow | Sharpness: 8
Aberrations: 5
Bokeh: 4
Handling: 6
Value: 9
Camera Used: Nikon D50
| | This one of the lesser-known lens/mount combination from the Lensbaby stable, now discontinued, but a relatively cheap way to play with fisheye photography. The lenses are often on sale second-hand around £50 in the UK, and while they're fairly limited, they do enough to tell you if you want to spend serious money on a better lens. They work reasonably well within their limitations, of which the most annoying is probably the aperture ring system. Changing rings is a little fiddly, and it's way too easy to drop rings or the lens element while doing it. But since depth of field is ridiculously good there isn't much point changing rings anyway, I found that my initial results with the f8 ring were a little overexposed, so I now tend to leave the f11 ring in all the time and vary the speed instead. There's obvious chromatic aberration around the edges of the image, but Lensbaby would probably tell you that's a feature, not a problem. Bokeh is negligible since the depth of field usually means that nearly everything is in focus.
This was designed to give a circular image on 35mm film; on a digital camera with APS-C sensor the corners are cut off but most of the frame is filled. This is less dramatic but possibly more useful.
I took it to Hyde Park in London with my Nikon D50 and a standard 18-55 VR zoom for comparison. At the time the camera was in need of a clean and there are some marks visible in the sky.
Zoom at 18mm, 320th second f9
Lensbaby 12mm, 500th f8
I should probably point out that the 12mm lens is not recommended for use with any of the variable-angle Lensbaby mounts such as the Composer, since it doesn't have the "sweet spot" offered by other lenses of the series. I haven't tried this, possibly someone else could comment?
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