Freelensing Tips and Inspiration with a Broken Nifty 50mm Lens

Freelensing is a creative technique in photography that involves detaching the lens from the camera body and manually holding it in front of the sensor while capturing an image. By disconnecting the lens, photographers can achieve unique and artistic effects, including selective focus, light leaks, and dreamy, ethereal qualities in their photographs. In this article, we’ll give you some freelensing tips and show you some examples with a 50mm lens to help with your creative photography.

Note: If you find the idea of breaking a lens apart or having a camera sensor exposed to the elements abhorrent and sacrilegious, this may not be the right article for you. Reader, you have been warned.

How Does Freelensing Work?

By manually moving the lens elements not just forwards and backwards from the image sensor (like a normal lens does), but up, down, or even diagonally, you’re able do things with the focus plane that are normally impossible, unless you spend $2000 on a fancy tilt-shift lens.

How to Get Started with Freelensing

To try basic freelensing photography, follow these steps to get started (then be sure to read my advanced tips below):

1. Set your camera to manual mode and choose a wide aperture to create a shallow depth of field.
2. Remove the lens from the camera body by unlocking it and gently twisting it off.
3. Hold the lens near the camera mount, angling it slightly away from the sensor.
4. While looking through the viewfinder or using the camera’s Live View mode, move the lens around to experiment with different angles and positions.
5. Take the photo by manually triggering the shutter or using the camera’s remote shutter release.

Freelensing allows for creative control over the plane of focus, as tilting or shifting the lens can create selective focus on specific areas of the image while leaving other parts blurred or distorted. It also introduces light leaks, as the…