Cause I'm Free, Free-Lensing

Free-Lensing, also known as lens whacking in video terminology, has become one of those trending things in the gray area of photography: The "creative" aspect...in one sense I could argue that creativity has been piled up into this dense space of "creative" filters: By making colors look off, using blurs to select focus, light leaks, faux distress. Being bitter about it is kind of redundant and needless. I remember when I really started getting into photography, I picked up some book with all sorts of tricks you could do in camera: using an old filter and putting vasoline to selectively blur or an old pair of pantyhose stretched over the rear lens for a weird glowy look. It was all fun, so who am I to say anything is a gimmick. Everything is subjective. ::end rant:: Lens whacking...Why would you ever want to whack your lens? Did you make an offer it couldn't refuse? No, You're not physically hitting it, sorry to all the crazies out there. It is a little wild though, you're basically using the lens in a way that would make your manufacturers guarantee cry. Just detach the lens and angle it in front of the sensor to bend the focal plane , giving you the desired forced perspective. The tilt-shift look is pretty popular these days, but if you ever used a perspective control lens you'll find that they're not all that easy to use and really expensive. LensBaby came in as a suggestion, a cheaper alternative that would open up the "creative" process to photographers  is like riding a bike without your helmet. You take your DSLR and a prime lens, somewhere from 35-50mm. You'll need a lens with a fast aperture that you can set manually. Seeing a bunch of examples on the internet, I figured I'd give it a try. I mean how hard could it be? >Famous final words. For this I used a D600 and an old 50mm f/1.8 AF since it's been banged around a bit and has an aperture ring unlike AF-Gs and what not. I set my camera to manual, the AF turns off when a lens isn't attached which is a good thing. You'll see the aperture saying 00...that's your camera basically saying "OoO what the hell are you doing?" I left it wide open at 1.8, changing the shutter speed accordingly. The trouble I was having right off the bat is that the lens is naturally very soft wide open. This leaves a lot of room for error, so I stopped down to 2.8 since I didn't want to sacrifice the desired shallow depth of field. Originally I thought leaving the focus at infinity would allow me to go crazy, but this was foolish thinking. I should know better. If you have your lens past the flange this won't focus further than infinity...der. What worked for me was prefocusing at something in front of me, adjusting my plane of focus and then zooming with my feet. Another thing I noticed was that the sensor catches the edge of the lens pretty easily even though you don't see it through the view finder. If you get too crazy with your bending, the light leaks become something like a finger in front of the lens. not so attractive. In most cases I found that subtle shifts resulted in a usable picture, maybe I wasn't being gutsy enough, but there is something kind of terrifying about potentially screwing up your lens mount. Oh well, YOLO as the kids are no longer saying these days. Like I said before, it looks easy. Making it work is another thing. The initial tries didn't work as well as I hoped so I figured I'd do a little research in stead of just going Rambo.   you could experiment with extension tubes, wider lenses