Dear light chasers,
Before I ever touched a Lensbaby lens, I saw pictures made with one.
Someone had used a Lensbaby Velvet, and the images stopped me cold. They looked more like paintings than photographs — soft, luminous, dreamy in a way that felt intentional rather than accidental. Something about them pulled at me. Not because I wanted to recreate those exact images, but because they pointed toward a world I hadn't been able to reach yet. A way of seeing that felt closer to how I actually experienced beauty — felt, rather than captured.
I didn't know how to get there. I just knew those lenses might be the gate.
San Antonio, 2015
I flew into San Antonio for my first photography conference — ClickAway — not knowing a single person there. My confidence was shaky. I loved photography deeply but still held the word "artist" at arm's length, unsure I had earned it.
That weekend cracked something open. I found myself surrounded by people who spoke the same creative language — women who loved light and story and feeling, just like I did. Nobody was competing. Everyone was connecting. For the first time, I felt like my photography belonged somewhere.
And then I found the Lensbaby stand.
They were offering loaner lenses for the day. I was lucky — I got a Composer Pro with a Sweet 50 optic. I headed out on a photowalk, excited in a way I hadn't felt in a long time.
ClickAway 2015. Neither of us knew what we were doing. That was exactly the point.
The Photowalk That Changed Everything
The Composer Pro has a movable housing. You tilt it with your hand to shift the focal point — a small spot of sharpness surrounded by soft, swirling bokeh. The first time I moved it, I thought: this feels like a toy. Not a serious photographer's tool. A toy.
And that was exactly the point.
Something unlocked in me that day. The playfulness of it, the way it rewarded exploration over precision — it freed me from a kind of seriousness I hadn't even realized I was carrying. Suddenly everything looked like a photograph worth taking. I was seeing differently. Feeling differently.
At one point I started approaching strangers on the street to ask for their portraits. For anyone who knew me then, that detail says everything. I was quiet. Reserved. That kind of directness was completely out of character.
But the lens had turned me into a creative firework. I was exploding with ideas, with energy, with a joy I hadn't felt behind the camera before. By the end of the day I knew I had to buy it. I didn't even hesitate.
What Came After
That photowalk was the beginning of a much longer journey with Lensbaby lenses. Over the years that followed, the work I made with them started attracting attention. Other photographers noticed. Connections formed. Eventually I became a Lensbaby ambassador and spent several years as a beta tester for the brand—trying products before they launched, offering feedback, and exploring what these lenses could do. Some of the equipment I tested was given to me by the company.
That professional relationship has since ended. The lenses, however, never lost their place in my creative practice.
More than any gear I've ever used, Lensbaby helped me find my voice as a creative person. Not by teaching me a technique, but by giving me permission to stop correcting myself. Blur, imperfection, abstraction — they weren't problems to solve. They were ways of speaking a visual truth I had been holding back for years.
That is still what I come back to, and it is at the heart of what I teach in the self-paced Develop with Light workshop: using creative tools, play, and imperfection to discover a more personal way of seeing.
If you want to understand the technical side of the Lensbaby Optic Swap System — how each optic works, when to use it, what to expect — I've written a full guide. You can read the full story here. But this post is about something else. It's about what happens when a piece of gear changes not just your images, but the way you see yourself.
Sometimes that's the whole story.
Always towards the light,
Ute