Lens baby vs TS lens?

Question

Just wonder the differences betweem lens baby and TS lens.

Answer 1

The differences? About a thousand dollars.

Answer 2

What the others said is correct and I will add that a tilt shift can give you perspective control like you would get from the bellows on a view camera. With a tilt shift lens you can shoot a landscape where everything is in extremely sharp focus from closeup to far away. This is very difficult to impossible to do with a regular lens. Another example is if you were shooting a tall building or some trees. With a regular lens if you were to tilt the camera up to get the top of the building your photo would look like the building was leaning toward you. With a tilt shift lens the camera stays level and you tilt the lens up. The resulting photo will look like the building is straight not leaning like with a regular lens.

A lensbaby will give you a bit of this effect but it is primarily used to adjust the sweet spot of focus. Lensbabies have a very nice blurring effect but do not give you tack sharp images from near to far like a tilt shift lens would.

Check out the attached article about tilt shift lenses.

http://www.shutterbug.net/equipmentrevie...

Answer 3

A TS lens (Tilt & Shift) is capable of such more than a simple lens baby and all that I know of are highly corrected and very sharp lenses.

The ability to both tilt and shift the lens gives you the possibility to correct your pictures for converging lines and other sometimes irritating aberations and this to a very high degree of precision.

You can also enlarge the subjective depth of focus in the picture.

A lens baby can do some of this to a limited extent, you simply twist it and hopefully you have corrected some of the converging lines but you can't repeat it in the next shot and it is up to what you can gauge in the view finder. You dont have the same level of control or the precision or quality of the lens but perhaps only one tenth or less of the price tag.

Although many people find them very good for spontaneous photography and special effects in your pictures for a small amount of investment.

Answer 4

What's a TS lens?

Ah, tilt and shift, thanks Henrik.

With the 3G version of a Lensbaby you can lock the settings and adjust them very accurately, but at the end of the day its just a doublet lens compared to a much more sophisticated beast. The Lensbaby doesn't do the shift part (correcting verticals etc.) either, its more of an 'Art' lens (controlling the focus point and has a great bokeh) than an accurate tool.

Chris