About tilt-shift and Lensbaby

The first time I saw a collection of tilt-shift photos in AirVenture 2009 program book, I was convinced it was a collection of Lensbaby images. After reading this blog post, and then visiting Tiltshiftmaker web page and their Flickr gallery, I am not so sure anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to convince anybody one way or the other. I am just curious to see side by side, how similar it really is.
So, let’s make an experiment. The first photo is taken with Lensbaby composer, f/5.6, no tilting, just straight lens.

The next image was made with different camera, different focal length, but cropped similarly and run through tilt-shift software on the web page. There are few sliders, you can control strength and gradient of effect, but… the area is rather limited to horizontal line. Fun, but a bit disappointing… and limited compared with a real thing.

For the record- I had polarizer on both lenses, and images were done just few minutes apart…. The exif data was stripped when I run the photo through the tilt-shit maker, but the image was taken with Nikon D40x, ISO 200, 31 mm focal length, f/4.2 at 1/640 sec.
Bottom line? No bottom line, really. Draw your own conclusions.
But, I do have my Lensbaby and take it with me every time I go out shooting. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes- a frustration.