Difference between Lensbaby and Tilt/Shift

Hi All,


Iv been looking into buying a cheap (russian) T/S lens, a lensbaby or....building a cheap T/S lens.

What Im intrested in doing is miniture effect shots (i know I can fake it, but I dont want to), but looking at Flickr I cant find any shots by the lensbaby that have that miniture effect (its mostly portrates/close ups), and Im wondering if lensbabys are capable of this effect

Yet...I keep reading that Lensbabys are really simple T/S lenses...but can they do that miniture effect shot I want to do, or is that effect only posible with a "real" T/S?

Yes ive seen some lensbaby shots & the very narrow DOF seems to give an illusion that the subject is miniature, when its actually not..

In a T/S lens, abberations are corrected. In a lensbaby they aren't.
You'll need a T/S lens IMO.

Lensbaby is nice, but serves a different purpose: Click

Yes if you think you can use a lensbaby as a tilt/shift lens for achitecture etc, you would be dissapointed, they just dont have the quality needed.

Agreed. A lensbaby can mimick a lot of the movements of a TS, and in fact can probably be tilted further, but all the aberrations will probably make it look less effective.

Personally I prefer a real tilt-shift because it has a lot more applications for me.

I just cannot agree that a lensbaby is a really simple T/S lens. It may look like it may be but it isn't in any practical way. Lensbaby certainly never makes such claims that I have seen.

If you want to do the miniature effect on the cheap then do it in post processing and save yourself the waste on a lensbaby. I am not saying the lensbaby is a waste (I have a couple) but they are for what you want.

I don't know about the russian options or what you could build yourself so maybe that might work.

Quote " Difference between Lensbaby and Tilt/Shift " Unquote

A country mile........!!

Lensbabies are toys. TS-E lenses are tools.

The huge difference is that the lensbabies have tiny sweet spots (on purpose) and hence the "selective focus" nature of its usage. You align the sweetspot to your subject and you get strong abberations elswhere (again, all intentionally). A TS-E lens is a proper T/S lens and has large elements that are better corrected across the entirety of the glass. When tilted, the TS-E should still yield a "line" of focus rather than a "spot" of focus as you get with the lensbabies. The lensbabies 3G I use really isn't doing any shifting, so much as it does a type of tilting.