Lensbaby Composer Pro

The Lensbaby Composer Pro will cost you, but it's the company's most refined selective focus lens, and our Editors' Choice for special effect lenses.

There are different kinds of tools for different kinds of jobs. And the lenses being offered by Lensbaby are certainly one of those photographic instruments, that can serve you very well, if only you know very well what you are trying to achieve. For the last two weeks I have had a chance to test the Lensbaby Composer Pro with the Sweet 50 Optic attached to my Fujifilm X-T1 and here are my findings. If you are nor familiar with the Lensbaby system of lenses, here is a short summary from the Lensbaby website: 'Lensbaby offers several interchangeable optics for the Composer Pro lens. Each optic produces a different creative effect. Start with a sweet spot of focus surrounded by dynamic blur then swap your optic to experiment with a sharp slice of focus bordered by smooth blur, a soft focus, or fun bokeh.' Basically, what you have to do is attach the Composer Pro Optic Swap lens body to the lens mount on your camera body (finally a couple of Lensbaby products are also available as Fujifilm X-mount versions!!) and then, attach one of their Optics on top of the Composer Pro. The final configuration (in my case with the Sweet

Lensbaby is a company that's been steadily pursuing its own unique course for the past seven years or so, making what it calls 'selective focus' lenses for SLRs that exhibit a distinctive low-fi aesthetic. The basic principle is to utilise optically simple lenses which are deliberately uncorrected for many aberrations, and therefore produce a sharp zone of focus (or 'sweet spot') in the center of the image field with ever-increasing blur outside it. This is combined with a flexible barrel, such that the lens can be tilted and the sweet spot moved around the frame, to focus on off-center subjects. The size of the sweep spot can be increased by using a smaller aperture.

Review of Lensbaby Sweet 35