Seen in a New Way

Months back, I bought my first Lensbaby lens to celebrate my 30th birthday.  And just now I'm beginning to get it working the way I'd like it to.  The shining example is the aperture accessory kit that I bought with the lens to give me bokeh (the aesthetic quality of the blur) in the shapes of the aperture disks.  Up until a few days ago, I was disappointed with the results I was obtaining.  I wasn't getting any shapes in my backgrounds or in my light sources at first...  That is until I realize what I wanted depended on the field depth.  The way to get some shapely bokeh is to have bokeh in the first place!

  

These first two photos are taken with my stock Canon Rebel Xsi lens to show the standard lens look.  The next photos showcase the Lensbaby double glass optic in the composer lens body with the star aperture in place.

As you can see, the other plants in our yard give a nice blur with the lighter plants have star shaped bokeh.  I also offset the point of focus to the side to capture only the flower and at one point just the stamen in focus.

 

 

Then I decided to play a bit with the macro lens adapter I bought.  Putting on the +10 first and then the +10 combined with the +4.  I admit that it was quite a challenge to get a perfectly focused macro photo without a tripod.  Plus it doesn't help that I'm still working on tweaking my diopter to work with the Lensbaby.  I actually had to buy a dioptric adjustment lens to make my stock diopter more dynamic as I was maxing out the negative side of it to attempt to get focus.  The only thing I'm not really fond of is having to use my camera in Aperture Priority mode as I can't select the exposure time.  But as the Xsi doesn't allow me to indicate aperture size and the light meter ceases to function properly in manual with the Lensbaby attached, AP is better than a guessing game for exposure time.  Despite that, in the end I'm loving the little bit that I have learned about using my Lensbaby and I can't wait to play with it more so that using it becomes natural like my canon stock lens.

Anyone else out there try a Lensbaby yet?