I’m not really a fan of lenses like the Lensbaby. If you’re not familiar with the Lensbaby, it’s a special optics add-on lens that gives either a tilt-shift, blurred or fisheye look to your image. It allows you to alter the plane of your subject which can dramatically blur the background of your image. This is an image from the Lensbaby gallery on their site:

These are the type of lenses you either love or you hate. I’m in the latter camp. I totally see them for their creative capabilities (and who knows, I might love them for that someday), but for things like portraits, it’s just not my thing. To me it’s like taking a nice blurred background in a portrait and making it a drunken, dizzy, creepy blurred background.

I love blurred backgrounds, especially when the subject of my focus is tack-sharp. But the exception for me is when I shoot macro. For whatever reason, shooting at a 1:1 ratio, especially of things that are close up, just seems to lend it self to more fuzziness for me. I shoot a lot at f2.8 with my Canon 100mm 2.8L macro lens (which by the way has become my favorite little friend).

And did you know that you can use your macro lens to shoot things other than close-up shots? Even portraits? More on that to come later…

Here are some shots that I took this past weekend at my daughter’s 8th birthday party. It was an ice cream social theme, and needless to say I had a blast setting it up. All of the shots are with my macro lens.

(For those interested in the party details… the yogurt cups, straws, and adorable “happy birthday” spoons are from Sweet Lulu, the white bowls are mini-plastic mixing bowls from Target, the signs I made myself).