#lensbaby — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

2026-09-29

Ich wünsche euch allen, dass ihr stets "Licht am Ende des Tunnels" seht. Habt einen herrlichen sonnigen Dienstag.
#Lensbaby #blackandwhite #schwarzweiß #monochrome #LiebeIstAlles #FloodTheZoneMitSchoenem #SchoenesGegenDoofes #DerSchlockbackNimmtEuchMit

#lensbaby #blackandwhite #schwarzweiß #monochrome #liebeistalles #floodthezonemitschoenem

/ˈsnæp.ʃɒt/ @[email protected]

2026-09-20

Lens Artists Challenge #413: Bridges

This week it’s Beth’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Bridges‘. It’s a simple Challenge, ‘to show us your favorite bridge images. You can feature any kind of bridge: natural bridges, foot bridges, swinging bridges, highway bridges, stone bridges, railroad bridges, or any other kind of bridge you can think of’. What a great subject for the Challenge. I love bridges, and there are some great bridges in Portugal. Like the Ponte (bridge) 25 de Abril in Lisbon. Spanning the river Tejo, this always reminds me of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. There’s also the new bridge over the Tejo, the Ponte Vasco Da Gama. Although I’ve been over it many times, I’ve never actually managed to get a photograph of it.

A view of the Ponte 25 de Abril from the banks of the Rio Tejo. In the foreground is a piece of work by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos

Anyways, today the Challenge is to look at the footbridges in the city of Aveiro. Famous in Portugal for its canals (Aveiro is known as the ‘Venice of Portugal’, which always made me wonder, is Venice known locally as the ‘Aveiro of Italy’?), these are criss-crossed by small bridges beneath which the tourist boats of the moliceiro pass. Some are new, but there are still a couple of the older bridges remaining, and even one that I was that I was unaware of until I went out the other day.

Anyone who has pottered around this blog might have noticed that my favourite camera of the moment is the Ilford Pixie 35-II, with its amazing radial blur. I’ve been trying to recreate this effect digitally using an old Canon EOS 10D DSLR and the Lensbaby Muse, and I reckoned that this combination would be the perfect selection for a wander around the city. The thing with the Lensbaby Muse is that it’s a real challenge to focus. Instead of twisting the lens to achieve focus, with the Muse you have to push and pull a flexible plastic lens barrel. I think I achieved focus most of the time, but it was pretty hit and miss.

I managed to make images from some of my favourite bridges, and also discovered a couple of new ones. The Lensbaby has a 50mm focal length on full-frame cameras, so with the APS-C sensor of the Canon EOS 10D this is equivalent to about 75mm. As a result, this meant that in some cases, instead of getting a view of the whole bridge many images were presented in close-up. But in the event, I quite liked this abstract approach.

Also, for me the blur effect of the Lensbaby is sometimes more interesting in black and white. However, the old Canon EOS 10D DSLR that I was using doesn’t have the ability to dial in monochrome mode, so I ended up converting some of the images to black and white in post. Also, the EOS 10D weighs an absolute tonne, especially with the battery pack that it came with, so between the weight and holding the camera so I could ‘focus’ the Muse properly it was certainly a fun challenge.

If you’re interested, I’ve posted the whole series in an album on my Photo Web Cloud (formerly Joomeo) if you want to see the rest of the images. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the following week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Bridge #Bridges #EffectLens #IntentionalBlur #LensArtists #Lensbaby #LensbabyComposer #LensBlur #TiltShift #VintageDigital #Aveiro #LensArtists

#bridge #bridges #effectlens #intentionalblur #lensartists #lensbaby

Keith Devereux @[email protected]

2026-09-05

It was unplanned, but instead of heading to Nazaré for an analogue day out I took the Shitty compiant Canon EOS 10D and Lensbaby Muse to Vagueira.
#Canon10D, #LensBlur, #Lensbaby, #TiltShift, #LensbabyMuse, #EffectLens, #ShittyCameraChallenge,

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2026/09/05/the-shitty-camera-challenge-the-lensbaby-muse-and-a-now-shitty-dslr/

#canon10d #lensblur #lensbaby #tiltshift #lensbabymuse #effectlens

/ˈsnæp.ʃɒt/ @[email protected]

2026-09-05

The Shitty Camera Challenge: The Lensbaby Muse And A Now-Shitty DSLR

I had this dumb idea a while back. One of my favourite beasties at the moment is the Ilford Pixie 35-II, a basic plastic 35mm camera that produces images with the most amazing radial blur effect. For a while, I’ve wanted to create a similar effect with a digital camera, and I did have some success with the homemade ‘Deakinizer’, holding a wide-angle converter reversed over the lens, but this is cumbersome and oftentimes it’s quite fiddly to achieve the desired effect.

https://flic.kr/p/2sjE4ev

My first idea was to get another Pixie, remove the lens housing, and fit this onto a spare Olympus Pen mirrorless digital camera. The Pixie has a helicoid for focusing, and if I took the shutter out, too I could set the camera to aperture priority or manual mode for exposure. I’d have to make a few measurements, but it might work. But it seemed unnecessarily complicated, and I figured there must be a simpler way. In a rare light bulb moment (for me), I thought, what about a Lensbaby?

For the uninitiated, Lensbaby is a company that produce lenses and lens accessories that create a whole range of in-camera effects, from dreamy Lomography like images to extreme blur. The snag is that Lensbabys are quite expensive, and even getting something second hand on eBay commands a premium. So I did what I always do at times like this, and turned to the Kamerastore website. There were a few Lensbabys available, all for under 100€, for different lens mounts, including a Lensbaby Muse for a Canon EF mount for 30€. Of course it was in the ‘Not Passed’ category, with ‘flaws that will affect typical use’. In this case, it ‘only comes with the f5.6 aperture disc and does not include the tool for changing aperture discs’.

The Lensbaby Muse, like other lenses in the range, works by changing apertures with a series of discs with different sized apertures, from f2.8 to f16 or f22. These are attached to the lens with little magnets and can be removed/changed with a special tool. If the aperture disc is not present, the Muse has a fixed aperture of f2. The Muse weighs less than 100g, and in its ‘relaxed’ form, the Muse focuses to a distance of about 20cm, bit if you squeeze it so the lens is closer to the camera body, it should focus to infinity.

The Muse is intended for large sensor cameras, and I before I started this quest didn’t have a full-frame DSLR. To attach the lens to a micro four-thirds (MFT) camera I have a Canon EOS/EF lens to MFT body adapter. However, the cameras that I have are definitely not Shitty Camera compliant, being greater than the (as I thought) 5MP sensor resolution permitted by the Challenge.

So, should I get a cheap’n’cheerful old Canon EF mount DSLR tgat I can use with the Lensbaby Muse for the Shitty Camera Challenge? Definitely. I headed back to my favourite sources of weird and wonderful cameras to see what was available. After a while, I came across a Canon EOS 10D DSLR at Cano Ameralo in Porto. The Canon EOS 10D, released in 2003, is a 6.3MP camera that was described as being for ‘semi-professional’ use. According to the description on the Cano Ameralo website, the 10D is ‘built like a tank’, and it certainly is a heavy beast, clocking in at 790g excluding the BG-ED3 battery grip that came with it.

The Canon EOS 10D DSLR features a electronic focal plane shutter with speeds between 30s and 1/4000s (+B). The shutter can take bursts of up to 9 frames at 3fps before the image buffer is filled. Released in 2003, the EOS 10D was the last Canon digital SLR to take EF mount lenses, before EF-S mount became available. The EOS 10D records to Compact Flash (CF) cards. Back when the EOS 10D was released in 2003, it was aimed at the semi-professional market, and retailed for about 1800€. Today, you can pick one up for between 30-50€.

My EOS 10D was fitted with the Canon BG-ED3 battery grip which included a single battery (a second was ordered straight away). What it didn’t have was the original battery door, so the grip always has to be fitted. It has also lost the side rubber covering over the USB and video sockets, but that is quite common nowadays. It was sold as an ‘outlet’ product at Cano Ameralo, which meant it was, ‘sold for parts or decoration’, but it was described as, ‘fully functional … in good condition with signs of use’.

To begin with, I was disappointed that the EOS 10D was a 6.3MP camera, since it was outside the Shitty compliant resolution for DSLRs. I appealed to the Shitty Camera community for leniency, and was delighted to discover that somewhere along the way, the resolution for Shitty DSLRs had increased to 10MP. Looks like I was in business. I also bought a Canon 35-80mm f4-5.6 EF mount zoom lens to go with the camera, which is functioning well, though it has ‘haze behind the front element which will effect image quality ‘. However, a Google search has shown that it’s quite easy to take these apart and if I can remove the front element then I can clear away the haze.

We headed out to Vagueira, for a nice lunch, and stopped in Costa Nova for an aperitivo at one of our favourite beachfront cafés, the Kon-Tiki. What I particularly like about this café is the wooden walkway that stretches the length of the beach and is great for capturing people walking from one bar to another. It was a good test for the Lensbaby, and I set about getting some pictures. And thee I encountered my first snag: getting focus with the Muse is really difficult. To focus the Muse you squeeze the lens barrel and then can move the lens orientation to get a selectively blurred image. But it’s a really slow process to get the focus just right, and trying ‘street’ photography was probably not the best idea for a first try with this lens.

I’ve also discovered that perhaps the program mode of this Canon EOS 10D is not working properly, or it just doesn’t like not having a fixed aperture size. The images on program mode were horribly blown out, and I ended up leaving the camera on manual and adjusting the shutter speed as needed. After a brief session at Costa Nova, we headed over to Vagueira for lunch. After lunch, I had a brief window to play with the Lensbaby on more static objects, and that was certainly easier.

I’ve discovered that the sweet spot for focusing the Lensbaby is about 10m distance from the camera and I think I’m going to need a lot more practise with this combination. In the meantime, and perhaps this is a mistake, I’ve ordered a ‘well used’ Lensbaby Composer from the MPB website. The Composer looks quite beat up, but it does include the Aperture kit and I’m hoping that this might help with using the Muse, too.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Canon #Canon10D #CanonDSLR #EffectLens #EOS10D #IntentionalBlur #Lensbaby #LensbabyMuse #TiltShift #TiltShiftVibesLensBlur #VintageDigital #ShittyCameraChallenge

#canon #canon10d #canondslr #effectlens #eos10d #intentionalblur

Kimberly J Tilley Photography @[email protected]

2026-08-27

A Stop in Washington State

We took a quick day trip to revisit Mount Rainier and Mount Saint Helens.

Helens had a cloud cover so the sleeping volcano was not fully visible. It was a nice day with lots of sun, some clouds lingered in areas, adding drama to the sky. We climbed the staircase to view Spirit Lake and the surrounding mountain ranges.

At Mount Rainier, it was crowded as usual. And of course the Instagram culture made the visitors hold up lines to some viewing spots. This was not the only place we have seen smartphone users hold up locations. It’s a shame that some people feel like they need to dress up and make others wait to take in the scenic view whilst they take many pictures of themselves to post on social media for likes. This behavior should be done when one is alone, and then you should have the courtesy of moving out of the way when others arrive to the viewpoint, if you are not yet done.

Do leave the “glam portraits” in a studio setting. Do candid memory pictures on trails. There is no need to take more than 3 selfies at the viewpoint. Maybe buy Kodak disposable cameras for your next outing and put your phone away so there is only 24 usages, instead of endless ones. And be surprised when viewing the prints as you are reliving the memories of the trip later. Like we did before smartphones. Your trips and pictures should be about happy memories and not for social media likes.

Before leaving for our road trip, I learned about a Lensbaby photo contest and took one of these lenses with me. Since we lived near Mount Rainier National Park for a few years and visited the park several times, I decided to use the artistic lens here. The lens adds a soft focus and blur to the image. Depending on the settings the blur and light effect can be extreme or minimal. I prefer a minimal amount of the blur so that there is still structure to the image.

Here are a few pictures that I took with the Lensbaby Velvet at Christine Falls, Narada Falls and at the Myrtle Falls bridge.