It's my opinion that you either get soft focus photography or you don't. I fall into the latter camp, which can make shooting with (and reviewing) a soft focus lens, even one for a unique tool like the Lensbaby, a challenge. The Lensbaby Soft Focus Optic ($90) works with any of the company's Optic Swap lenses, including the inexpensive Spark, the classic Muse, and the top-end Composer Pro. It captures images with a soft, dreamy look, which you can control by swapping out the three included aperture plates.

If you're not familiar with the concept of the Lensbaby system, it does require a little bit of explaining. Lensbaby lenses have removable optic modules, so you can capture photos with different looks by swapping them out. They are designed to be moved around fluidly, tilting at any direction, which changes the plane of focus. With a standard lens, the front element is perfectly parallel to an image sensor, and that results in a plane of focus that's parallel to the front element. With the tilt capabilities of a Lensbaby, you can move that plane of focus so that it can be diagonal in any direction. This gives you a sharp point of focus with blurred areas surrounding it that would normally be in focus with a traditional focus plane. Just how extreme that effect is depends on how much the lens is tilted, the focal length, working aperture, and distance to subject.