Is the Lensball The New HDR? A look at the Lensball Craze

The crystal ball allows you to take refraction photos, which reveal the background scene within the ball. 

What’s a Lensball?

If you haven’t seen a Lensball photo in your Facebook or Instagram feed yet, chances are you’ll see one in the next few seconds.

A lens ball is a crystal or acrylic shere or ball used to take interesting photographs. Think of it as one of those garden gazing balls that Jeff Koons likes to stick on his reproduction artwork.

The colorful and reflective garden gazing balls reflected the garden in a sort of 360, tiny planet kind of way.

The smaller, more portable, less expensive, clear, Lensball or eqivilent does sort of the same thing. The coolest thing is when you use a small aperture and focus in on the ball. The background becomes blurred but the image gathered inside the ball is sharp. Kind of like capturing the scene in miniature inside one of those tourist snow-globes except without the floating pieces of white plastic and the water.

Gimmack or tool?

There is no doubt that a Lensball can create cool images. Reflections in general are always unique and different in photography, which is a good thing. Photographers have long used puddles, car reflections and mirrors to create compelling images. The Lensball continues along these lines.

The problem comes with over use. Like a photographer discovering HDR for the first time especially over the top tonal mapping with the garish sliders turned up to 11, the Lensball can be overused and ultimately boring the audience if every time the photographer goes out to photograph it has to be another Lensball shot.

Like overuse of HDR, it can stifle creativity if one gets sucked into its charms. But then again, you can certainly have a lot of fun with an accessory that costs less than $20. A lot less than a Lensbaby which is another gimmacky photography item that people can get sucked into using to the point their audience cries UNCLE!

So buy a Lensball, play with it and put it in your kit. Instagram and Facebook fans will love you for it, until the next gimmick comes along.