Give me another lens, baby!

        

I'm still in Camera Gear Acquisition Mode....dear God, when will it end?

Anyway, I have been stalking the Lensbaby site for a while now, and decided to buy a Lensbaby Composer lens plus the Fisheye Optic in time for my trip to Japan. I love the crazy, creative effects these little lenses seem capable of producing, and thought they'd be relatively cheap substitutes into the worlds of tilt shift and fisheye photography - which for the most part, are pretty specialist lenses anyway.

So, that weird looking white thing above is the Lensbaby Composer - a double glass optic which produces a sweet spot of focus surrounded by graduated blur. Basically, you manually focus the lens, and then tilt it round to where you want the sharp part of the photo to be. A bendy lens - how cool is that! There's an awesome gallery of images created with this lens in Lensbaby's Gallery.

I also bought the Fisheye accessory because I really like the surreal look of fish eye photos - and I reckon this light little baby would be great for travelling. You can check out a bunch of pics taken with this combination of Lensbaby accessories, on Flickr here.

Now - a word about postage costs. A couple of Australian retailers sell Lensbaby products, but they are substantially more expensive to buy in Australia than the US. So with the exchange rate as strong as it is, it's currently cheaper for me to buy this stuff from the US even after adding shipping costs.

The Lensbaby site itself quoted postage costs for what I imagine would be a fairly small little package, of USD$100. B&H Photo quoted USD$60 to ship this stuff to Australia. Amazon, where I ultimately bought this gear, charged me USD$21 for postage (with the prices for the lenses being identical to those quoted on the Lensbaby site). I've been buying stuff from Amazon.com for years and they have a pretty amazing range of products. They're also really fair on shipping costs.

Australian retailers are whinging loudly at the moment about online stores (in Australia and overseas) taking business from them. They could rectify this problem and keep business in Australia by being a tad more competitive on price. Just sayin'...

Anyway, I can't wait to get the new toys and give them a whirl in Japan - which incidentally, is just 17 sleeps away. Whoohooo!