When I first saw the announcement of the Lensbaby Soft Focus Optic I fell in love head over heels immediately. The images that accompanied the announcement earlier this year sold me straight away. They were dreamy and velvety soft and had a very beautiful quality to them.

While I have had the Soft Focus Optic for a while now, it wasn’t until today that I finally got around to make some images with this new optic.

And I can tell you that I wasn’t one bit disappointed. I’m still very much in love…

The focal length of the Soft Focus Optic is 50mm which is ideal for portraits (although you can of course use this optic for virtually any subject matter) and since I had my 21 month old daughter within arms reach, she became the subject for my ‘first impressions’ of this lens baby (pun most definitely intended!)

Contrary to the Double Glass, Single Glass, and Plastic Optics the Soft Focus Optic does not have the sweet spot of sharp focus and dramatic blur outside of that spot. The optic comes with three special soft focus multi-hole apertures that combine one large opening over the optic’s sharp center with small openings over the optic’s soft edges. This hole pattern creates a sharp underlying image with a soft overlay. This effect is shown in the image above where Laura’s hair appears fairly sharp, but there is still a lovely soft overall quality to the image. 

For me it was very much just a matter of installing the Soft Optic into the Composer (it also works with the Muse and Control Freak) and then just start shooting away. The design of the optic takes care of creating the soft focus for you, and the learning curve is therefore not as steep as with the ‘sweet spot optics’.

The image above was only my fifth out of a total of 35 images for this ‘first impressions’ article and it’s probably my favourite of them all.  Although I must say I have wondered about the somewhat uncomfortable lack of eye contact, but it leaves the image open for interpretation.

In this next image Laura started fooling around with her Teddy’s blanket, putting it over own head, so I snapped a few more and as you can see the soft focus is quite apparent.

I find the Soft Focus Optic is very easy to work with and if you shoot portraits from time to time I’m inclined to say this is a ‘must have’ in your gear bag.

I will be using the Soft Focus Optic a lot more and on a variety of subjects in the coming weeks and will be sure to share my further impressions in a couple of weeks/

Here is the Soft Focus Optic product specification:

• Focal Length: 50mm
• Multi-coated optical glass doublet
• f/2 optic with aperture disks that range from f/2.8 to f/22
• Creates images that are overall soft and diffuse
• Creates a flatter field of focus than the other Lensbaby optics. Suited for variety of soft focus applications such as portrait, landscape, urban, and botanical photography
• Magnetic disk aperture system
• Degree of softness can be controlled by changing the special apertures, or stacking them with regular Lensbaby aperture disks
• With the soft focus multi-hole apertures, bright, out-of-focus points of light take on the hole pattern’s shape.  Photographers can control this creative effect by using standard Lensbaby apertures or choosing a low contrast background

The Soft Focus Optic costs US$89.95 and can be purchased directly from the Lensbaby website.

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