Lens Baby Spark Review / Test / First Look

Ok, so I admit it, the title of the post is written just to get some traffic ( I'm cheeky like that, but then again I am a marketing guru....errrr ).
Anyway, a rather nice Aussie chap called Paul, who has been in the photography industry for a fair few years, hooked me up last week with one of these new 'Spark' gizmos from those purveyors of photography fun Lens Baby.

Looks pretty weird doesn't it? Well it's pretty lo-tech, with a couple of lenses and a plastic bendy tunnel of joy between them. It mounts straight onto my old Nikon D90 pretty easily and to quote Lens Baby, it is pretty straight forward to use

1. Replace your normal lens with a Spark
2. Set your camera to "M" mode
3. Squeeze to focus
4. Shoot away

I suppose it gives a Lomo/tiltshifty/instagram/messy/retro/thingy look? Yes, you could do it in Photoshop ( or run one of those funky lightroom pre-sets ), but where is the fun in that?
Anyway, with a bit of Autumnal sunshine I wacked it on the camera this morning and snapped away at Marple Festival.
Going to need to play with it a lot more, but pretty happy with first set out of the camera ( only some minor curve tweakage...no cropping rule in effect ).
Here is my favorite one from today ( ok, I did drop this one to grayscale, but you can see the effects ).

Oh and this one is pretty cool too...

Check out the rest of the snaps here...more to come, as this is proving to be really fun!