[shuttertalk]

Apparently there's this new fad called "freelensing" - where you basically take the lens off your camera and shoot through it to get an effect similar to using a lensbaby.

I think it's a bit gimmicky and you'll probably need to be very nimble to be able to hold your camera in one hand and control your lens with the other.

http://lifehacker.com/5676792/take-inter...reelensing

[Don Schaeffer]

This is very gimmiky. It seems to me there must be many ways of getting that effect besides this.

[Toad]

I don't even like lensbabies at the best of times - so unlikely to try this...

[NT73]

You are getting stereotyped or is it stereotypical, in your old age Toad.
Mind you if it means getting dust on your sensor at the same time, then ......

[Toad]

You are getting stereotyped or is it stereotypical, in your old age Toad.

Oh, I get it - I just feel that we should be doing photo enhancements the *old fashioned* way - in PhotoShop...

[matthew]

This sounds sort of like the photographic equivalent of tractor racing - driving cars gets to be boring, so we'll use lawn equipment instead.

It's interesting also to follow the blog chain. Life Hacker got it on Oct 29, from Swiss Miss who posted it on October 26, linking back to a Swiss (.ch) website that wrote it up on February 18, who themselves link back to a post from lukeroberts.us from December 26, 2009. The flickr group for the technique - the arbiter of everything photogenic - has 1177 members, who've contributed just over two photos each.

Oh, I get it - I just feel that we should be doing photo enhancements the *old fashioned* way - in PhotoShop...

[Zig]

Now, this might be a whacky and arcane bit of Ziggery here, but I've a feeling that that these experiments with removing the lens are part of something deeper: ...
Consider the phenomenon of present photography: it's now an omnipresent part of daily experience for people; one that used to have its own skill sets and apprencticeship in order to do at all...yet now as common as Twittering, using mobile(cell) phones, as throwaway and thoughtless as textspeak. It is an experience at which even talentless people can have their basest efforts controlled and "optimised" by a piece of technology...and is so, so much now a phenomenon that is purely external.
What I mean by this, is that pretty much the hugest percentage of daily shots taken by all the cameras and phones in the world is firstly totally external and documentary in nature, secondly "optimised" and controlled not by the creator but by the technology. The servant has become the master, and without complaint.
Now, when someone removes part of this process, one is essence is working towards a return of the primary photographic experience in which the photographer creates not so much a documentarised representation of an external object, as something from within themselves: soomething creative and over which they have control.
Thus, removing the lens becomes part of this..indeed, are you aware of the immense interest(at the V and A, I think..?) in many people actually removing the whole camera from the process, returning to creative forays with photographic paper? There is some stunningly beautiful work around, "taken" by such artists as Floris Neusüss, Pierre Cordier, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller and Adam Fuss: type in any of these names to see what I mean....
...I perhaps have strung together 2 x 2s and made 5...yet I do think that freelensing is part of a creative yearning to step away from the limitations of cameras as documentary-led external image-recorders(all optimised for our benefit) experienced by the masses and a return to having creative control of our inner visions.
Here in our forums, of course, we largely have people who will use a lens' field of view or software in order to wrest control back for themselves..and yet most of our efforts are working with something that is already a capture of that which we already see empirically. We may have an inner vision..something that we are REALLY saying beneath the image...but how many of us are practised in this language of the deeper meaning....?...and from where do we get back the time to practise this, in a world of increasingly transient and throwaway images...?
Just my musing for today...!

[Kombisaurus]

When I think "Freelensing", for some reason I think of people taking photos while wearing no underwear.... :/

Zig, that's far too much thinking for my brain to process at the moment but I can see where you're going. I'm not sure trends like these are necessarily conscious efforts to rebel against the technology in order to regain a lost sense of control, although in effect that is exactly what's happening,
I think it's less thought-out than that though. To me it's just the human desire to experiment, and now that technology does all the hard work for us in photography and has dumbed-down the process we go looking for ways to upset the apple cart and express our individualism. To some peolpe this means running their photos through a Hipstermatic or Poladroid app, for others it means freelensing.
On the one hand techniques like this can all be seen as valid tools, but on the other hand they can also simply be novel attempts to compensate for shortcomings in the photographs themselves. At the end of the day it always comes back to the basics. It won't make the subject, composition, or the idea behind the photo any better.

And Toad.. lol about the photoshop comment!

[Zig]

Oh absolutely..quite unconscious, I'm sure you're right...and I'm exploring really something at quite a subliminal level(er, just putting into words as best I can).
I confess, ...now I can't quite get past your, er, "photocommando" image....mind you, we do all go in skimpies when we take photos, right..?... :|