A cure for lens-envy?

Lens manufacturers spend billions of dollars in research to develop faster, sharper, more accurate lenses. The amount of money and time that goes into eliminating natural artifacts of bending light like chromatic aberration and distortion is absolutely mind-boggling.

With high refractive index glass making multi-element lenses extremely light, multi-coated lens surfaces eliminating the flightest bit of flare, ultra-sonic motors making auto-focus lenses exteremely quiet in operation, and vibration reduction technology rendering even long lenses stable enough to be hand-held in long exposures, the state of the art of lens design could be considered to have reached its zenith.

The arms race between lens manufacturers has ben escalating for some time now, with each trying to outdo the others with ever wider, faster, longer and sharper lenses - resulting in photographers coveting ever more exotic lenses at ever increasing prices.

Then along comes the Lensbaby. Turns the entire world of lens-snobbery on its ear. The lensbaby does not have multi-element lens groups. It has just two lenses. It does not have an auto-diaphragm. Heck it doesn't have a diaphragm at all. No iris. Just interchangeable aperture plates that you drop in behind the lens. So the aperture is adjustable, but only with a lot of effort. No multi-coating. No auto-focus. No focusing ring even. You adjust focus by pulling or pushing the slinky-like lens body either toward or away from the camera body.

Vibration reduction? Sure. Hold very still and stop breathing. Exposure control? Brush up on the Sunny 16 rule: No TTL metering is possible.

But the lensbaby has captured the hearts of photographers everywhere who are ordering the lens as fast as the company can make them. And the Lensbaby isn't cheap either. At $150 for the Lensbaby 2.0 (with the interchangeable aperture rings) it costs about the same as the Nikon 17-55mm zoom that comes packaged with the D70 and the D50.

The Lensbaby's use of chromatic aberration and flare, long the bane of every lens manufacturer, creates dreamy pictures that defy description. The ability to tilt and shift the lens barrel allows the user to move the sweet spot of focus around the frame to emphasise certain parts of the scene and not others.

The Lensbaby plays the meat-cleaver to the surgical laser of the modern CPU equipped auto-everything hypersonic lens. A curious mate to your $5,000 16MP DSLR! But it's flying off the shelves at a fantastic clip.

Its detractors claim that the same bendy effect caused by the Lightbaby can be re-created by PhotoShop in post-processing. But there's something elemental about the combination of relatively ordinary glass, intentional distortion caused by the tilt and shift of the lens and the flare caused by uncoated lens surfaces that it is extremely hard to intentionally set out create the same effect.

So am I saying all the billions of dollars poured into lens design is wasted, when a cheap lens with a bendy body would do? No. Hell no.

But it just goes to show, as in all things that cause envy, that the biggest, fastest, widest, longest or most expensive is not necessarily the best. That you can create wonderful pictures, achieve magnificent things without expensive equipment.

And so I offer you this Lensbaby picture for your delectation.