It's the lens, baby!

Look at today’s New York Times Magazine cover. Do you wonder why it’s so out of focus?

It is actually a trendy trick making the pro photography rounds, a Lensbaby. I’ve got one. I’m amused at the irony of putting this cheap lens on my multi-thousand dollar digital camera in order to intentionally degrade the image quality. The lens has a narrow area of focus, and is mounted in a plastic accordian housing that lets you manually move the point of focus and the range of focus. It’s like shooting with a view camera with the ability to shift and tilt, albeit one with a really bad lens. But, it’s so chic.

Sometimes, when I feel I need to take pictures differently, I’ll put the Lensbaby on. It’s fun for about a half hour, but that’s about as interested as I get in the look. I’m generally resistant to "tricks" that overdetermine the quality of the final image (infrared film comes to mind), and I haven’t found the Lensbaby to be a gateway to any vast arena of untapped creativity. Techniques and tools don’t get you there. The connection with a subject, and the connection with your internal response to a moment, are what will do it.

But I find interesting that it seems to now be a "look" in the commercial realm.