In the Blackstone Valley Art Association’s 2025 “Local Beauty” art show, we celebrated scenes of local interest. Joanne Zeis entered a photo of the Miss Worcester lunch car diner. This classic diner is located in Worcester, Massachusetts. The way Joanne took this photo, the diner looks like a toy model.
How do you get a camera to turn a regular building into a toy model version?
2013, Miss Worcester Diner / Joanne Zeis
Joanne’s husband, Mike Zeis, explains the process!
Joanne shot the Miss Worcester Diner photo with her Canon Rebel T3 in 2013, through a Lensbaby Composer mounted instead of the regular zoom lens.
Think about it this way: The regular lenses we use are tubes with one lens mounted on the outside of the tube and another lens on the back of the tube—that’s the part that attaches to the camera body. The Lensbaby Composer is built so that the lens on the outside pivots or tilts. With the front lens aligned straight, the photo will be normal (except with a very shallow depth of field). With the Lensbaby, the sharpness fall-off is steep—there’s only a small center in focus. When you pivot or tilt the front lens, the optics that usually allow images to be sharp in the center shift, and the areas that are in focus (plane of focus) move to another part of the image, and no longer are parallel to the plane of the film.
In other words, because the whole plane of focus changes, the depth of field sometimes appears to be “stretched,” so that some parts of the picture that are the same distance from the lens appear in focus and others that may be nearby are not. The ability to modify both the location of the center of focus and the shape of the depth of field makes this kind of lens special: It has the ability to make subjects look like toys, like in the Miss Worcester shot.
There’s no autofocus: Lensbabies have a focus ring on the barrel. One controls the aperture and depth of field by swapping out washer-like plastic inserts into the front part of the lens.
In practice, the Lensbaby is sort of the opposite of point-and-shoot. It’s a little easier to set up if your photo has the sharp part in the center. But if your composition calls for the in-focus part to be on the side or toward one of the corners, there’s a bit of back and forth between adjusting the tilt/pivot and bringing the subject into focus. Screen preview helps a lot, and zooming in on the screen preview and scrolling over to the right place lets you nail in the focus, and gives you assurance that you’re OK.
Our Lensbaby (Lensbaby Composer) was $199 when we got it in 2013. The line has expanded considerably. Today’s Lensbaby Composer Pro II costs $299. The low-end model, the Lensbaby Spark 2.0, costs $199. They’ve added an aperture ring, but now use a “accordion-like design” with “squeeze-to-focus” adjustment.
Joanne’s photo is not from street level. And we didn’t put a ladder up in the middle of the intersection, we used the handy concrete ramp across Southbridge Street. The lens is 50mm, and the photo was cropped tight (there’s no uncropped version that we could find).
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Thank you so much to Joanne Zeis and Mike Zeis for bringing us this photo and explaining how to create it!
A framed 8×12 version of this photo is available for $50 from Joanne Zeis. Contact us for details or if you’d like a different size.