your opinions on lensbaby's?

[Poizen22]

so i have recently discovered what lens baby's are and they look kind of intriguing to me this is the specific one i would like to get Lensbaby - Muse but am looking at the Lensbaby - Control Freak.

they have interchangeable optics and can do many things there wide angle fish eye and macro photos seem to be most impressive, what i am liking and is tempting me most to these is the level of creativity they offer. that and the amazing macro performance the control freak has. they can also be very sharp and i am quite surprised by this as well.

Lensbaby - Photo Gallery some of the macro photos i have seen compare to that of 1000$ lens's

my main question is do you guys think these lenses are worth the potential investment?. i think for alot of starting photographers with the options they offer at the price and quality i couldn't go wrong but i do feel some level of gimmick to them also and am surprised i have never herd of them until today.

 

[Gilles]

I think they're pretty gimmicky, and I don't think they compare to a $1000 lens. However as you said, at that price it might be worth it for a hobby photographer.

I find the macro shots are too blurry, and it's distracting. My eye gets pulled to whatever the photographer wanted, but then gets distracted quickly. On top of that (or perhaps this is why it's distracting) the area of focus seem really small. It honestly looks like someone smudged the image in photoshop like there was no tomorrow.

 

[Poizen22]

im looking soem stuff up on flickr with these and you can turn out some really good stuff. and the photos naturaly looked shopped also the size of the sweet spot as they call it is dependant on the apature ring you put in it. if you put f22 for example the entire image is in focus. in these photos they use alot of large apatures.

 

[Gilles]

Ahh, in that case I'd definitely do with a ~f/8 to get a larger sweet spot.

In the end it's preference. Personally it's not my taste.