FIGURE A

This is a Lensbaby. Click picture for a larger image.

If you look at the figure above, you'll see two lens circles, separated by a rubber tube reminiscent of the old photo bellows. As described by the company, "Lensbabies bring one area of your photo into sharp focus, with that 'sweet spot' surrounded by graduated blur. You can move the sweet spot to any part of your photo by bending the flexible lens tubing." In other words, Lensbabies muck up, blur, and distort your photos.

You can only use a Lensbaby if you've got an SLR camera. I tested the one provided to Connected Photographer on a Canon Rebel digital SLR. You remove your existing lens, attach the Lensbaby, and point, twist, bend, fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, and shoot.

The results are bizarre, interesting, terrible, and fabulous. In other words, they're completely unpredictable and random, partially dependent on your skill as a photographer and partially dependent on the great six-sided dice the universe uses to torment us mere humans.

As a purist, this product annoys me. After all, it takes perfectly clear pictures and mucks them up. For example, I took a picture of the small palm tree out back of my house with the Lensbaby and got the mess shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

It's blurry, ugly, and distorted. Gee, wow. Click picture for a larger image.

Why use a lens that distorts the original when you can do all sorts of effects in Photoshop? Plus, when you use Photoshop, you've got a quality original as well as a modified, filtered final image. So Lensbabies seem like a throwback to those pre-Photoshop days when you needed to do your effects before they hit the film.

So perhaps Lensbabies are throwbacks. Rather than digital technology, Lensbabies are 100% optical.

But does everything now have to be digital? What if we factor in the elusive, overrated, and sometimes perfectly appropriate concept we call "art"? We artists use different tools and mediums to create our effects. So, while we might often want to use Photoshop and its wonderful library of filters to get an effect, there are times we might want to literally bend light to get the results we want.

To illustrate how Lenbabies work when they really work, I'm going to show you a before and after picture. Figure C shows you the view from my backyard.