Lensbaby Composer Pro II With Edge 35: My First Time Doing Street Photography

Street photography is one type of photography that I'm honestly not brilliant at. It's different from most kinds of photography, because it's somewhat difficult to plan. For architecture, I can control most things, and this is comforting, because I know the kind of results I'm going to be able to produce. Street photography, however, is not quite the same. 

In a recent video of ours, I was joined by my fellow Fstoppers writer Anete Lusina to review the new Lensbaby Composer Pro II with Edge 35. Fortunately, Lusina is far more experienced when it comes to street photography, and I was able to tap into that experience. The Composer Pro II lens is quite interesting for a number of reasons. For one, Lensbaby as a company is more interested in character over sharpness, and for that reason, the kind of images you can produce with this lens have quite an interesting look. I wouldn't necessarily equate it to a filmic look, but the lens does have certain similarities to older film lenses. The other point is that this lens allows you to tilt the lens, which gives you greater control of your depth of field. If you've ever shot with a tilt-shift lens, you'll know how tilting the lens gives you the ability to have a different plane of focus. This can create some really interesting looks which aren't really possible with any other kind of lens. Tilting the lens in a specific way can allow you to have items in the foreground and background in sharp focus at the same time. 

This is probably my favorite feature of the lens and something I really enjoyed experimenting with. It's important to remember you're not getting a greater depth of field but instead, you're changing in where the depth of field is. The best thing about this lens is that it is a lot of fun shooting with it, and although I'd probably recommend the Sol 45mm from Lensbaby, I do think the 35mm focal length has quite a nice look to it, especially for street photography. 

Check out the full video linked above, and you can find a link to all the images here

Usman Dawood's picture

Usman Dawood is a professional architectural photographer based in the UK.

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1 Comment

Thanks! You just reminded me to use my own Lensbaby more often.