Hazy Baby

June 28, 2006

It’s time to end the dreadful tyranny of the sharpness aesthetic. Everything that’s beautiful is hazy and delicate as the shadow of a dream. Welcome to the realm of the Lensbabies!

Ready for the boring, technical details?

Yesterday my Lensbaby arrived in the mail from a faraway place. A Lensbaby is a primitive lens — it consists of a single pane of glass. Modern lenses, on the other hand, have as many as 18 individual elements — this makes them sharp, fearfully precise, and static. Unlike modern lenses, however, a lensbaby is soft. It also inserts into your photographs all sorts of flares, aberrations, astigmatisms, and deformations.

All these deformations are pretty exciting. We live in a culture that’s dominated by the sharpness and resolution of the commercial aesthetic. An image is good as long as it’s sharp, regardless of the effect it’s trying to convey. Lensbabies are a way to reclaim photos — to capture images that move and breathe like living things and are not depended on their resolution for meaning.

Let’s be beautiful and hazy together.

Posted by Tudor at 12:01 PM in Ideas & Images | TrackBack

Comments

Strange. I was looking at those the other day (prompted by the Photojojo newsletter), and thought to myself, “That would be perfect for Tudor!”

So, uh, thanks for saving me some cash.

Posted by: paul on June 28, 2006 at 12:31 PM

Does this mean we have to sell more (lens)babies, then?

Posted by: Laura on June 28, 2006 at 01:23 PM

Hey! Cool blog! I want a lens baby but they don’t seem to work particularly well with Nikon cameras, like most things.

Agree with you on the sharp obsessed thing though. It’s like no image can be good unless it’s perfectly sharp. What a load of crap. It’s art!

Posted by: Jon on June 28, 2006 at 01:29 PM

Wow none of my pictures are sharp or even in focus, yay.

Posted by: Dean on June 28, 2006 at 08:20 PM

You were always one step ahead of the rest of us, Dean, you monster of the avant-garde you.

Thanks for the comment, Jon — I’m glad you’re enjoying the blog. And yes, Nikons are tricky.

Paul, thanks for thinking about me :)

Posted by: Tudor on June 28, 2006 at 10:16 PM