The Lensbaby and the Diving Bell

Our Photography and the Movies issue, just out, proves that there’s a happily thin line between still and moving pictures—at least for the artists who ply both media. The respective technologies of film and photography have certainly crossed over in many ways. Canon’s D-SLR lenses borrow optical tricks from their video and film counterparts, for example. And going the other way, the Lensbaby (below)—which started life as an innovative still-photography tool—has now played a starring role in an Oscar-nominated French-produced film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
 

In case you’ve been living in a diving bell, the Lensbaby is an ingenious selective-focus lens that comes in most common 35mm and digital SLR camera mounts. (We featured it in last year’s Editor’s Choice issue.) It’s essentially a two-element lens on the end of a flexible tube, and by bending and compressing the tube you can move the plane of focus every which way. In particular the Lensbaby lets you create a sharp “sweet spot” in the middle of an image that becomes progressively more blurred toward the edges—same idea as using a view camera’s tilts and swings to throw large areas of the image out of focus, except that you can do it with a small camera that’s much easier to operate. The Lensbaby was recently introduced in a version specifically for PL-mount 16- and 35mm movie-film cameras (model 3GPL), and adapters are available for its use on some video camcorders as well.

Since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is about its main character’s recovery from a stroke-induced coma, it’s easy to imagine how cinematographer Janusz Kaminski used the Lensbaby's dreamy effect to simulate what that experience might be like (above). Go here for the trailer and click “Bauby Wakes Up” to see footage in which Kaminski’s Lensbaby is bending it like Beckham. Go here for more examples of the PL-mount Lensbaby in use, and here for specs and available accessories for the now-various models of this ever-hot imaging tool.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is Oscar-nominated for both its cinematography and its directing. The director? Painter Julian Schnabel, a crossover artist if there ever was one. -- Russell Hart

Comments

[Eric Hamilton]

That's a very creative use! I never thought of using selective focus in film before. Nice!