There are two basic types of fisheye lenses, circular and full-frame. The full-frame lens covers the full 35mm or FX sensor size frame with image – no cut-off corners. The circular fisheye is designed to project a circular image slightly smaller than the height of a 35mm or FX sensor, with vignetted corners. The second type is now available for your Lensbaby Composer (or any of the other Lensbaby models that accept the optic swap system with a special adapter).

I recently obtained a Fisheye Optic from Lensbaby to use in my Lensbaby Composer. It installs like any other optic, and creates a whole new perspective on “wide angle” photography. The lens is complete with a set of apertures (the front element screws off for insertion of the aperture disks), a carry bubble which serves as a installation/removal wrench, and a nice soft cloth to dust off the front element.

(Read my 3 Part Review of Lensbaby Composer here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 : Read my review of Lensbaby Soft Focus)

When I first opened the package, I was immediately impressed with the build quality of the Fisheye Optic. It feels very solid in your hand when you are installing it. Nice construction and finish.

12mm is pretty wide. That’s how long the focal length of the Fisheye optic is… the coverage is 160 degrees in the field of view. That’s close to everything you can see (although with our peripheral vision, we can’t focus on anything close to that width). Focus is on the body of the Composer, and of course, shifting the lens to skew the image works just as well on the Fisheye optic as others. You can close-focus down to an amazing 1/2 inch! The f/4 speed of the lens without a disk in place is great for low-light shots. Use a supplied aperture to stop down to f/22 for everything from inches to infinity in focus.

Image tend to be very graphic. If your images aren’t graphic enough, you aren’t close enough. Filling the frame really means getting close if you are shooting, say, a flower. Think inches here.

So, why use a fisheye? Huge field of view, of course, so vistas with sunsets and landscape photos take on a whole new look. I know a photographer who used a fisheye lens to shoot airplane interiors – the inside was already circular, so the distortion of a circular fisheye was barely noticeable to the viewer. Need to shoot an environmental portrait of a person behind their desk with all their clutter around? Here’s a choice lens to do that shot. Want to make images that look like the IMAX theater? Use a fisheye. Portraits, like the dog shot mentioned earlier, can take on a very humorous look.

Here are some of my images from a recent trip to Mexico. I tried a few images wide open, but settled on f/8 for all the images published here.

If these fisheye lens shots inspire you, look up the Lensbaby Fisheye Optic at Lensbaby’s website and get one ordered for yourself today!

My 3 part review of the Lensbaby Composer can be found here… Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3. I tested this new Soft Focus lens element with the Lensbaby Composer that is always in my camera bag.

I got my first soft focus lens in the early 1980’s, a Sima Soft Focus 100mm f/2 lens. It came with three aperture disks (f/4, f/5.6 and f/8) that you could install as desired. I played with the idea of creating a Imagon-style aperture disk for the Sima, but I never got around to it. Craig Strong played with the idea, and built the Soft Focus element for the Lensbaby line. No “woulda, shoulda, coulda” for Craig… he just does it.

When I opened the box of the new Lensbaby Soft Focus, I was immediately struck by the weight of the element. That made me take a closer look. The fit and finish of this optic is beautiful, looking far more like its Rodenstock large format predecessor than a lens crafted for an SLR. Smooth black coating on the barrel, the name written clearly on the side of the lens barrel, and as always, a color coded band. The nicely made clear plastic storage case that houses the element looks like a smaller version of the lens storage case from Nikon some 30-40 years ago. The black plastic bottom of the clear plastic storage case acts as a wrench to change optics in the lens housing. You can carry a Lensbaby Composer and three elements in their cases in about the area required for a large zoom lens… not bad for the amazing range of imaging possible.

Technical specs are as follows… the Soft Focus optic is 50mm in focal length (read that as a short telephoto on a 2/3 frame digital SLR, or a “normal” lens on a full-frame DSLR or 35mm film camera). It is multicoated for best performance, and wide open (no aperture) it is a fast f/2. The Soft Focus element comes with a lot of apertures! There are three Imagon-style aperture disks… multiple holes surrounding a central hole. They are not marked, but are detailed in the manual as to their f/stop equivalents. A trick that I use on my Nikon D3 is to make a custom non-cpu lens setting with the aperture number… so that when I see the f/stop is f/4.8 (for example) in the image metadata, I know which aperture disk I was using. The optic also comes with a full set of apertures, allowing shooting at various amounts of softness down to f/22 (minimum aperture disk).

I think the photos speak for themselves. The multiple hole aperture disks produce a silky smooth image with enough detail to be interesting, but not so much as to distract. On a digital SLR, you can make portraits that look as nice as images shot with the Imagon… without lugging a view camera and shooting large format film in the field. To me, this is a no-brainer!

Visit Lensbaby.com to find out more, and order your own.

I got an interesting e-mail today… a promotion e-mail from an architectural photographer named Dan Poyourow (www.danpoyourow.com).

Dan is based in Maryland, and his work is well worth looking at. At the bottom of his e-mail, he included this tidbit…

“Photography thought for the week:

Contrary to what some creatives may tell you; shooting digital and reading a book on Adobe Photoshop does not make someone a professional photographer. There is still no substitute for experience, proper lighting techniques, good composition and all the other skills pro photographers use/used when shooting film. Digital is simply a new way to record the image; not an end in itself.”

This simple statement really struck a cord with me. This year, I have lost freelance jobs to photographers with much less experience than I have. I lost the jobs based on my price, which I feel is quite reasonable. I’ve been shooting professionally for about 25 years now, and when a client tells me that they found someone to do the job cheaper, I simply smile and tell them that I hope they are happy with the results. I even wish them luck. I also tell them to keep me in mind if it doesn’t work out for them. This has worked out pretty well for me in the past, I seem to get the clients back somehow.

All experienced photographers are basically visual problem solvers. It takes varying years of practice and numerous failures along the way to get really good at imaging. I think it was terrific to learn the mindset of working with transparency film. I’m all for young photographers making their mark on the world, and I’ve mentored several who are working in the industry across the country. I wonder what the result will be of a generation of photographers shooting without the background of film and the many associated problems of working with it will be?

For working pros to lower their price in tough times is very tempting. So far, I’m resisting the urge. I think it hurts me in the long run to cut my price. OK, it hurts me in the short term not to cut my price, but at this point I can live with it. The digital era has made photography much more competitive. I think the best photographers will solve this era’s problems and keep on shooting.

Thanks, Dan, for the thought-provoking start to my rambling!

First, this conversion by Isaac Szabo uses an excellent filter (the infrared filter replaces the high-pass filter over the sensor inside the camera). The infrared images are wonderful, far better than any I got with my previously converted SLR. There is more color in evident in some of the images. With Isaac’s provided Photoshop action, the red and blue channels are swapped making very interesting images that retain the infrared look, but with more conventional looking skies in many cases. The action also has provided an excellent black and white conversion as well, you just have to activate the layer.

Skin tones are rendered very nicely. I shot a lot of candid portraits that look great. I shot most of my images at ISO 200 and got hand-holdable exposures, where I almost always had to shoot at ISO 500 to ISO 800 on my old conversion. The D200 has great characteristics to start with, and its current price point on the used market makes it a perfect infrared conversion choice… 10 megapixels makes a great 13×19 or larger print!

I recommend Isaac’s conversion… look at my images, and the images on his website. Then, decide which camera you want to convert, and start making infrared images!

Want to see these images bigger?  Click here. Its worth the bandwidth…

An initially unintended consequence of the digital photography revolution was that many digital sensors were very sensitive to infrared, to the point manufacturers put a filter over the sensor to block infrared light. With that filter removed and an infrared-passing filter put in its place, a new world was opened to digital photographers.

One of the main problems with doing infrared film photography was that there was no way to meter the level of infrared in a given scene. Exposure was a series of trials and errors (mostly errors for me). Many photographers bracketed exposures heavily, over and under exposing frames around what they thought was the proper exposure. There were a lot of other problems with infrared film that just made it difficult to work with. Handling was only in total darkness, the film was very heat sensitive, and it was very easy to fog the film.

I first became aware of digital infrared around the year 2000, at a workshop on Photoshop. The lecturer displayed a few images in their presentation that had been shot with a Minolta DiMage 7 camera. I was intrigued. I immediately bought a DiMage 7 and a deep infrared filter, and started on the road to digital infrared. One thing that immediately struck me was that I could see the infrared image – no more guessing if I got the exposure right. No more shooting six stop brackets to insure a good exposure. No more wondering how the scene will look – if the model’s clothing will render the way the eye sees it or not. Wow!

Fast forward 10 years. I’ve been shooting a converted Nikon D100 for over 5 years now. I had a showing in 2008 of my infrared work at Angelina College. The infrared world has been very good… but now, I wanted more. More megapixels, and with the now greater selection of infrared filters available for camera conversions, greater variance on infrared vs. visible light captured, and more color.

Yep, color. The only way previous to digital to do color, or “false color” infrared, was to shoot one of Kodak’s emulsions like Kodak EIR Ektachrome Infrared. Green plants turn shades of red, and Caucasian skin tones turn shades of yellow. Images with this film were stunning… but you still had the problems of difficulty in handling and exposure. With the current crop of sensors and filters, some rendering of color is found in the images captured.

I recently had a second camera converted to infrared by Isaac Szabo, a Fayetteville, Arkansas photographer (http://www.isaacszabophotography.com/). Isaac shoots a wide variety of photographic subjects, and does all of them well. His infrared work is great. I found him while doing an eBay search for “infrared conversion” – I was pleasantly surprised to see his price for a conversion. So after thinking about it for a few moments, I clicked “buy it now” and shipped Isaac my Nikon D200 body.

Not only did the camera get converted, but Isaac set the focus for the lens I supplied with the body. Infrared light focuses at a slightly different distance from the lens than visible light, so this can make some real difference.

My D200 came back converted in about 10 days. I opened the package and immediately shot an image through the window of my office. I was pleasantly surprised to find that at ISO 100, I was able to get a hand-holdable shutter speed. Surprised because my converted D100 would have had to be on ISO 400 or ISO 800 to get the same image. I took the camera to lunch that day (it didn’t eat much…) and shot a palm tree in front of a restaurant… and was again pleasantly surprised. There were shades of color in the obviously infrared image. Back at the studio, I opened the image in Photoshop, and ran Isaac’s action (I forgot to mention that Isaac provides this action and instructions to customers who purchase a conversion) to switch the red and blue channels. The result was stunning… blue sky in an infrared image.

If this sounds like it is for you, check out eBay… do a search for “infrared conversion” and look for the infrared photo of the lone tree  – the auction will be titled “Infrared IR Conversion Service for Digital Cameras” and is currently priced at $200.  (or click on the image of the ebay listing)

And, look for a follow-up article in a few weeks – I plan on shooting my newly converted D200 heavily on an upcoming trip to Mexico.

First, the applications.

For photo buffs, there are three applications that you’ll enjoy.

• Calico Panorama helps stitch rows, even multi-rows, of images together with ease.
• Bracketeer takes your bracketed digital photos and merges them to form a uniformly lit scene – like HDR without the cartoon-like appearance.
• PhotoStyler is a quick and easy photo enhancer designed for the digital photographer who remembers the “good old days” of film and instant camera photos by providing tools to help your digital images take on an analog feel.

Want to make a video diary?

• The Video Diary helps you get your video captured and organizes it like entries in a diary.
• MovieSherlock can download and convert videos from the popular site YouTube.
• K Kitchen is a video burning and ripping program that converts video and allows you to burn to CD or DVD. And if you want to voiceovers or mastering of audio files, the TwistedWave audio editor is an easy to use program with powerful features.

For type geeks,

• use Veenix TypeBook Creator to take stock of your fonts… print type specimen and sample pages, and organize your fonts.

Ever want to personalize your Mac desktop?

• Berokyo does that and more. Customizable “cabinets” can hold your favorite and most used applications, documents, folders and webpages, and works in keep-visible, full-screen or auto-hide modes.

Email Backup Pro is an automated solution to making scheduled backups to of your email… hands off after setting up the configuration using the simple interface. R10Cipher encrypts email and documents – personal or business. It runs on Mac and, er, other operating systems. And if you wish to partially cross over to the dark side, CrossOver Mac Standard will help you by running Microsoft Windows programs on your Mac.

So, how exactly does this help animals?

Here is a quote from the MacFriendly website: “Your MacFriendly Bundle purchase helps initiate and support feeding programs for homeless animals. Stray and feral animals are fed in order to gain their trust, leading to their eventual rescue. Only when they are comfortable with human contact will their rescue and successful placement in an adoptive home be possible. We provide basic vaccinations, spay/neuter services, collars, and identification tags for stray animals in stable circumstances.”

The total cost? If you add up these applications, you will find them to total about $400. Buy the bundle of joy, and get all these apps for only $49.95. That is a lot of utility and warm, fuzzy feelings for only fifty bucks.

But don’t wait… this offer ends February 26, 2010.

This is where it got really boring. It just worked. I hooked up the firewire 800 cable, rebooted the old Mac Pro to firewire by holding the “T” button, and selected the items I wanted to transfer from a short list. I clicked OK, and wandered off. It sat there and chugged along, transferring everything I had selected down to my browser and network settings. It took about two hours, but that is a huge time saving over installing and setting up a new machine. Normally I would expect to spend two days!

Next, I opened my CS4 upgrade and installed it… it just worked, too. After this install, I dragged the CS3 stuff to the trash to free up that disk space.

I guess, really when you get down to it, that boring can be good. I have a few applications that need updates. I updated to 10.6.1 OS X, and then grabbed the Snow Leopard HP printer drivers… my first print job, a 20-page brochure from InDesign CS4 opened from a CS3 document, printed flawlessly. Next I updated my Epson drivers from the Epson support website for my R2400. The page says in red letters “This file contains everything you need to use your Epson Stylus Photo R2400 with your Macintosh.” Perfect.

So here I sit, less than four hours from putting it together out of the boxes, working on a brand new system with everything from my old system. Now the old system can be re-configured to be a capture station for new images, and hopefully run my now discontinued Epson 4870 scanner. So far, that doesn’t want to work, but that is on the old system. Bottom line? Migration assistant rocks!

    Britt: Speaking of going down the road and what you’re doing now, what kind of a personal project are you working on currently?

    Craig: Well, I’m working on a project that I started in 1995. There’s a couple of wonderful, salt of the earth people that I know, Bert and Colleen Elliot who live down in Trujillo, Peru. They have been there for sixty years serving the people of Peru. I spent about eight or nine days with them in ’95. Right out of college Bert and Coleen got married, got on a boat and went down to Peru, and they’ve been there ever since, doing humanitarian aid, doing Christian work. They’ve started a couple schools, they’ve helped about a hundred or more communities to develop thriving, healthy places for people to live, and communities for people to plug into. Peru has been a war-torn nation for many many years and they’ve been through a lot of that, giving a lot of strength to those people. They are in their late eighties now and I look forward to continuing that project. I hope to going back down and spending some time with them. I’ve got a lot of chromes that I’ve shot of them that I look forward to going back through when I feel like I’ve got what I need and combining it with the digital stuff that I’m shooting now to document their lives. They’re really beautiful people.

    Britt: That’s great. On your website there is a phrase that I really like, you talk about “feeding your soul” – is that how you feed your soul?

    Craig: Yeah, it is, and it doesn’t happen enough. Being the president of Lensbaby I spend a good portion of my time working on solving problems, and that’s great and to some extent can feed my soul. But certainly it’s close to my heart to be out and documenting the lives of people who I really believe in who they are and what they’re doing. I look forward to more of that.

    Britt: I’m just curious, when you’re wandering around the world, what triggers your mind and gives you an idea for a photo? Is there a special place in your brain where you go to get ideas for creative photos or do you have a creative process, or is it all gut instinct?

    Craig: I would say that the creative process I have is really clearing my mind. I find that I am most effective, whether it’s at a wedding or doing street photography or on an assignment, when I’m able to be fully introverted, fully in a zen-like state where I am able to observe the world around me and really take it through the filter of who I am and what matters to me. It’s really important to know, critical to answer the question what do I care about, what matters to me? What changes is the the answer to the question how do I see the things that matter to me. If its a connection between a father and son I tend to gravitate to those moments.

There’s so many moments in life to choose from, especially at events and weddings. You walk into a reception and there’s a hundred potential moments that you could be drawn to in that scene and that situation, and so choosing and deciding ‘OK, what part of this am I going to own, what part of this am I going to document, what am I qualified to document?” If I go on a list and try to meet somebody else’s expectations of me I’m going to go in and some of the things are going to resonate with me, but the vast majority aren’t. My process is fairly quiet, where I want to be introverted, I want to be quiet, I want to be still and see what it is that hits me so that then I can really move into that space and document what matters to me.

Photographically, one of the most poignant times for me was in college. I was driving across the country having just left my father at my grandparents house in Colorado. It was an extremely cold winter and I was driving along a canyon and I thought ‘I think there is a reservoir up here, I’ll bet there’s going to be ice fishing, it’s going to be right around sunset and I want to capture the emotion between a father and son that I remember from being with my dad fishing.’ we didn’t go ice fishing but I wanted to recapture the feeling of being in the outdoors and that special time I had with my father as a child. About two hours later I’m driving along the reservoir and, sure enough, there’s people spread out all over the ice with fishing poles. I stopped my 1968 Volkswagen camper, pulled out a tripod, a Canon T-90 and a Tamron 180mm f/2.5 lens – I had to make a quick decision as the light was disappearing so I just grabbed that combo.

The T-90 was loaded with Kodachrome 25, and standing out on the ice toward the edge of those braving the sub-zero temperatures waiting for fish to bite, I zeroed in on a father and son. The mountains and the sunset were behind them, and I was able to document this very tender moment of the boy leaning back against his father as they stood beside their fishing pole in the beautiful evening light. What that really showed me, probably for the first time, was that I am filtering reality. I’m seeing the world around me through my own lens, and taking that realization and using it to my advantage has ensured that, as I go through life, I’m ready when those moments that are most important to me show themselves. Surprisingly with Kodachrome 25 and a 180mm lens at sunset I was able to get the beautifully detailed image with a one-second-long exposure of this tender moment between father and son. The process is a very quiet one for me.

    Britt: I love that answer. Thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me and our DigitalAppleJuice readers. Do you have anything you’d like to add?

    Craig: I would just like to reiterate that I look for new ideas in my frustration. When I’m faced with problems, that’s where I find the best ideas come to me. As unpleasant as it is to experience, for me I’ve found that frustration is essential. As the father of three young children I see them lose their wallets and they’ll just get really upset, or they’ll drop their camera and it’s not working anymore… I just want to take them and say ‘Yeah, but this means you won’t lose your wallet when it’s really got a lot of money in it, in ten, fifteen, twenty or thirty years. And this means you’re learning from this experience.’ I think there’s so many times in life when we just focus on that frustration. I know I have. Really learning for me is to say ‘Oh, I’m frustrated here, what can I learn from this?’ And how can I solve a problem being on the inventing side has really come out of that frustration. Cherishing, acknowledging and nurturing frustration has been key to discovering who I am and what it is that I want to do, to be and how I can best contribute to the world I live in.

    Britt: Sounds like you have some very lucky kids. So at the end of the day, do you work on a Mac or a PC?

    Craig: I work on a Mac. I don’t care to be that frustrated.

    Britt: Photography is always evolving… today, we’re dealing with a lot of digital natives. Our kids in high school now probably never shot film. It’s interesting to me to see what kind of changes there are in an analog photographers move to digital, such as you and I have done. How do you think that is going to affect the photographers that never shot film? Do you think that will have any impact on them in the future?

    Craig: Instant feedback brings with it excitement for photography. Shooting digitally is similar to us getting our images developed at the one hour lab (although I don’t think there were one hour labs when I was in ninth grade). I was taking my 35mm print film to the lab and they were doing their magic. They would take this piece of exposed film and turn it into prints and negatives. It wasn’t until college, and I started learning from people who were serious into photography, and especially newspaper photographers, it was a lot cheaper to roll your own film and develop it and print it than it was to send it out, and a lot quicker for a newspaper. It was a natural progression for me to get intimately involved in the process of photography through working in the darkroom.

The process of photography is changing to where a print comes off an inkjet printer if you’re doing it in-house or you upload the file and it comes off of a printer that prints it optically with a laser. That’s obviously very different from what you and I experienced, but the end result is potentially the exact same. I don’t think there’s a huge difference. What may happen, and I can see it to some extent with the Lensbaby, is that people are getting much more interested in the process. In the same way that my journey led me to the darkroom and staying up until 3:00 in the morning making prints, as they become more serious many photographers are spending time learning and influencing the process that had previously been out of their control. It’s bringing people to say, ‘Well, that’s great if I can do this or that in Photoshop, but how else can I do this?’

Photographers are exploring how it used to be done, what really made prints look so organic, and in answer to these questions, many of them are going back to film. They start with their 18-70 zoom and their digital SLR that they are making great photographs with. As they become more excited about it image makers are more interested in the process, whether that’s the hands-on of using a Lensbaby to control things like selective focus in ways we never could before, getting a Holga and shooting on film or actually going into a darkroom and printing. It’s a different progression. It is similar to the process we went through to learn photography but today photographers can learn the art of making great images much more quickly. They can become excellent photographers by discovering much of their photographic vision long before they need to learn the process.

    Britt: I find this an interesting idea, that as a visual artist you don’t necessarily have to breathe fixer fumes to achieve a good print these days. It is an interesting concept to me thinking about the process of photography and thinking about how I do things now versus how I did things twenty years ago. In your previous statement you mentioned the Lensbaby; what made you become an inventor and create something cool like the Lensbaby?

    Craig: That’s a great question. I never really saw myself doing what I’m doing now. There wasn’t a big plan for me to go off into a business other than photography. I was doing well and very happy with what I was doing as a professional photographer. Eventually, though, frustration was what made me an inventor. My most useful homemade gadget when I was shooting film was the flash diffuser I couldn’t buy that I made out of a Tupperware lid. Once that worked so well I went to Goodwill and bought every Tupperware lid I could find so I could make a better one and have a bunch of them laying around (because I would lose them all the time). The first Lensbaby came about because I liked the look of selective focus lenses but I wanted something to experiment with that didn’t cost me $1,200 for a Canon tilt/shift lens. I just wanted to make some crazy images and I have a lot more fun with things that don’t cost me so much I have to worry about them. The very first Lensbaby prototype started as an 50-year-old Speed Graphic camera that my sister bought and gave me for my birthday in the early nineties. I removed the lens from the Speed Graphic, mounted it to a short piece of shop vac (vacuum) hose, cut a hole in a body cap that the tubing snapped into and started shooting all sorts of stuff with it. I took it to weddings and photographed the wildest images I had ever created, my clients loved the photographs. It was just something to play with at the time, not anything that I considered a business, especially not to the extent that Lensbaby has become.

    Britt: So now that you’re several years into making Lensbaby’s and on the second major revision (of the commercial version) and expanded the line quite a bit… what do you think about what Lensbaby’s are doing to the look of photography that you’re seeing?

    Craig: The fact that people want to buy this lens seems feasible, but the enthusiasm that users have for their Lensbaby’s is far beyond my expectations. And the application that they are making of this lens to just about any subject matter really blows my mind. Honestly I’m much more impressed with the photographers who’ve found such impressive and unique ways to use this funky tool than I am with the Lensbaby itself. I’m really excited about people trying new things. The willingness to try new things, coupled with frustration, has changed my career, changed the way I look at life. I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve seen. I think it is inherent in the fact that so many photographers, like you said, a lot of them, even many of the professionals, have never shot film. Everything they’ve done in photography has been brand new for them in the last several years. Lensbaby lenses are just one more aspect of that. Photographs that people have created with Lensbaby lenses just blow me away time and again. Much of my amazement with these images has been because they are far beyond anything I would have imagined using the Lensbaby for.

We came out with the Pinhole/Zone Plate optic for the Optic Swap System and it replaces your glass (the Composer comes with the double glass) and you just swap it out for the Pinhole/Zone Plate cup. The Zone Plate was a last minute addition to our system. Shawn Linehan whom we work with and does fantastic graphic design suggested the zone plate as one of the options for the optic swap system and I looked into it. I had no idea what it was. The zone plate is by far my favorite Lensbaby optic now. I’m seeing completely differently than I ever did because this is a new tool that interprets light and subject matter and detail and, well, everything in a way I never could have imagined. I’m putting this on my camera and I’m seeing things, I’m looking at the world saying, ‘here’s an image that I never would have seen before’ because of this tool that I’ve got on my camera.

Someone picking up a Lensbaby for the first time often experiences a ‘Wow!’ moment when they realize that they can create images of completely different subject matters than they’ve photographed before. It’s important to find a way to apply new tools to the subject matter you’ve always photographed. In addition, photographers can broaden their horizons with the kind of pictures and the kind of subject matter they choose with these new tools, be it fisheye lenses, Lensbaby lenses, tilt/shift lenses or Holgas. Each one of these non-traditional tools has a resonance, a spot where they really fit into someone’s style and the way they see the world. I’m excited to see people trying something new and finding that place where it resonates with their personal vision.

    Britt: When digital started coming into the photography scene, I thought it would be a long time before digital eclipsed film and analog style photography. Every few months it seems we see a new digital SLR with more features and more megapixels. Where do you see digital photography and photography in general going over the next ten years?

    Craig: It’s funny you say that, because about two weeks before I ordered my first digital SLR someone came up to me at a wedding and asked ‘So, do you have a digital camera? I said ‘Nah, that doesn’t really apply to what I do, (I knew there were professional cameras out there but they cost $15,000 or $20,000 dollars for the SLR’s), maybe I’ll get one in 10 or 15 years.’ at that point film was really required for the kind of photography I made my money with. Two weeks later I had just found DPReview out of the blue, I think I actually did a search because I heard someone saying ‘Canon’s coming out with this digital SLR’ for $3,000 or $2,000 I don’t even remember what it was, but it was the D30 that can print film-quality 11×14’s. And I went ‘What? That’s not possible.’ And so I went looking and I think I was the second person on the list at Pro Photo Supply (www.prophotosupply.com) here in Portland. I picked up that Canon D30 the day the first shipment arrived; it changed my career, it changed my photography.

And obviously the Lensbaby came out of that because I wouldn’t have done all of the necessary experimentation to come up with the Lensbaby had I been shooting exclusively with a film SLR. I had not experimented much with photographic techniques since I was in college. I had a developed very comfortable vision, something that I was comfortable with, of what photography was, how I used it, what my role as a documentary photographer was, and I didn’t really see a need to try a whole lot of new things. I had my three prime lenses and a couple of zooms and that’s what I needed, just as long as my camera bodies worked. Once I got the D30 I immediately started trying new things, and my vision started to change, and as far as my personal artistic vision (and I’m getting older so my vision changes anyhow), but the excitement for photography came back and I felt like I was in college again where I was trying something new and trying to get my mind around paradigms that I’d never understood before.

I’m rambling here, but I’d have to say based on having told someone that digital photography wasn’t for me and then two weeks later ordering my first dSLR I am looking forward to being surprised by the future of photography in this digital era. Things are changing so much… you look at that D30 and in two weeks my paradigm shifted from being ten to fifteen years before I get a digital camera to two weeks later putting one on order. There are a lot more of those kind of innovations and changes to come in this industry, thats the world we live in right now. Things are changing. Paradigms are shifting, there’s a lot of technology that hasn’t been fully utilized that’s maybe just in the mind of the inventory right now that I think is really going to dramatically affect photography. It’s going to affect how we see the world, and it’s going to affect the images we create. I can’t really guess; I’ve got some things in my engineering notebook but I wouldn’t say those are going to categorically change anything.

I am excited about the stuff that is out there that will be changing how I see the world, the tools that I have in my hands. On the other hand, I know that I have a digital SLR in the (Nikon) D300 that’s able to keep me happy as a clam with more than enough features for me to play with and to figure out, for the rest of my life. With what I’ve done thus far I’ve decided that I have a camera which is all I need. I’m sure that when the D800 or whatever comes out with the full-frame (sensor) and the HD video, and hopefully it’ll have some other features, because I don’t think the HD video is something I have the time to work with right now, but there will still be something that entices me to do an upgrade. But at the same time, I am still photographer, I have the tool I need that potentially I could create and continue to grow with for the rest of my life. There’s a real dichotomy there too, ‘cause while I have everything I need, I know there’s going to be something else that’s going to bring me along, and get me excited down the road, and I have no idea what that is.

Read Pt 2: Analog to Digital: Interview with Craig Strong, Inventor of the Lensbaby here…

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