How to Create Dreamy, Emotive Photos with Creative Lenses | by Holly Awwad
If you’ve ever picked up a Lensbaby or other creative lens and thought, “Why does this feel so different than every other lens I own?”, you’re not alone. When I got my first Lensbaby, I tried to use it like a regular lens and got so frustrated I ended up setting it aside to collect dust for two years!
When I decided to give my Lensbaby another try, I discovered that these lenses are not meant to behave like traditional lenses. They are designed to help you create emotion, movement, flare, blur, and imperfection on purpose. And once you understand how to use them, they can completely change the way you see photography.
In this post, I want to talk about what makes Lensbaby lenses so special, why so many photographers struggle with them at first, and how learning to use them can unlock a whole new level of creativity.
What Is a Lensbaby Lens? (And Why It Feels So Different)
Lensbaby lenses are creative lenses designed to produce unique in-camera effects like swirl, glow, blur, tilt, flare, and selective focus.
Unlike traditional lenses, Lensbaby lenses:
Use manual focus
Do not communicate electronically with your camera
Allow you to control the focus plane in unusual ways
Create artistic blur, flare, and bokeh intentionally
Instead of trying to make every part of the image perfectly sharp, Lensbaby lenses let you lean into imperfection and choose what matters most in the frame. You use the effects that Lensbabies produce to create something truly unique, and let the rest fall away.
That’s part of what makes them so addictive. Many photographers try one and immediately want more because each effect creates a completely different look.
Common Lensbaby effects include:
Sweet effect – central focus with dreamy blur
Edge effect – slice of focus with tilt-shift style blur
Velvet effect – soft glow and dreamy contrast
Twist effect – rotating, painterly bokeh
Each one produces a different emotional feel in your images.
Why So Many Photographers Struggle with Lensbaby
Lensbaby lenses don’t work the way we’ve been trained to shoot. Most photographers are taught to aim for perfect focus, perfect sharpness, perfect exposure and technical accuracy. Lensbaby asks you to do the opposite. You have to learn to embrace imperfection, manual control, slower shooting, experimentation and emotion over perfection. That shift can be frustrating at first, but it’s also what makes Lensbaby such a powerful creative tool. Once you stop trying to make it behave like a normal lens, everything changes.
The Secret to Getting the Dreamy Lensbaby Look
The biggest mistake I see photographers make with Lensbaby is that they try to control everything. Lensbaby works best when you learn to work with light, movement, and environment instead of fighting them.
Things that make Lensbaby images stronger:
Backlight
Golden hour
Texture in the background
Shooting through elements
Using tilt intentionally
Choosing your focal point carefully
Letting blur guide the viewer’s eye
The blur isn’t a flaw. It’s part of the storytelling. Lensbaby lets you show emotion in a way that perfectly sharp lenses often can’t.
Why I Love Shooting with Lensbaby
For me, Lensbaby allows me to be creative and unique with images that can’t be recreated in any other way. It forces me to slow down. It makes me pay attention to light. It makes me think about feeling instead of perfection. Some of my favorite images I’ve ever taken were shot with Lensbaby lenses because they don’t just show what something looked like… They show what it felt like. And that’s what I want my photography to do.
Last Chance: My Unlocking Your Lensbaby Course Is Retiring April 30
For the last few years, my popular Unlocking Your Lensbaby: Skills & Creative Practice course has helped photographers learn how to truly use these lenses instead of feeling frustrated by them. Whether you are looking to master using these lenses or simply want to get reinspired to use them again, this course covers everything from the technical side to letting your guard down and getting creative!
Inside the course I teach:
What each Lensbaby effect does
How to focus manually without frustration
How to use tilt correctly
How to get beautiful flare and bokeh
Where to place your focal point
How to shoot different genres with Lensbaby
How I shoot step-by-step
Behind-the-scenes demos
Editing walkthroughs
This is a truly valuable Lensbaby resource that every Lensbaby photographer should have… and it’s about to retire. After April 30, this course will no longer be available. And just because I want this to help as many artists as possible, I’m offering 25% off until it closes.
