Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes the lensball. It turns your world over and shows you something you’ve never seen.

A lensball is a globe of clear glass or crystal that does amazing things to light. It gathers light, bends light and flips light upside down. It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary.

As a photographer’s tool, a lensball opens a whole new world of vision.

Photography does that anyway, of course. That’s what makes photography a form of art.

Adding a lensball view to that vision expands the art exponentially.

Norwich photographer Virginia Chase is on the cutting edge of this new world of reshaped light. In June, she will have a solo exhibit of lensball photography at Norwich Arts Center. The images are nothing less than astonishing.

Serious about her photography — she’s been doing this since she was 10 years old —Chase uses the highest quality of crystal ball, a K9. The resulting photos are nothing less than astonishing.

In the photographic process, the photographer places a lensball between the camera and a scene or subject. The scene, or some expanded central part of it, appears curled up inside the globe. The resulting photo can consist almost entirely of the image in the globe, or the image in the globe can be part of the wider scene, a glowing focal point that seems to encapsulate everything around it.

Light behind the photographer produces one kind of image. Light behind, above, or from the side of the lensball produces a different image. Move the lens closer to the ball or the ball closer to the subject and you get different forms and compositions.

The image is upside down in the globe, but the photograph itself can simply be turned upside down to make the image right-side up.

The globe can be set on a surface, held in the fingers, set in a stand, even stuck in a gap in a chain link fence. Use of the glass ball is a creative act in its own right.

Just don’t leave it out in the sun for too long. It can focus the light like a magnifying glass and start a fire.

It’s a little hard to explain what a lensball can do in the hands of a good photographer, so the best thing to do is visit Chase’s exhibit at Norwich Arts Center, right downtown at 60 Broadway. The NAC gallery is open Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 4, with an opening reception for Chase’s exhibit from 6 to 8 p.m. on June 4.

During the opening, the photographer will give a demonstration and basic lesson in use of the lensball.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@NLLibrarium.com.