Wednesday 2 January 2013

Sony 35mm f1.8

This is my favourite lens. There are quite a few shortcomings, which I will go into detail about later on but ultimately it is very sharp and I find the 'standard' focal length to be very useful for a variety of uses.

   The lens auto focuses very snappily and accurately, which could be a product of the lens only turning a small fraction of its rotation between infinity and 3 metres. There is then a large rotation until the lens reaches its minimum focus distance, which is usefully short at 23 centimetres. That is one of the features of this lens that I like most: its versatility. You can use the lens for street photography or semi-macro photography even though the lens can't zoom. Or you can use the lens for 3/4 to head and shoulder portraits or for effective available light photography (if you don't want to use a flash).

   That brings me onto my next point, which is making the most use out of a prime lens. Prime lenses probably still offer the best optical quality over zoom lenses but their more profound advantages are the amount of light they can gather and the manner in which they make you think about how you approach each photograph.

   The amount of light gathered by this lens is crucial for handheld low light or night time photography and the lens backs up the fast aperture (which enables the user faster shutter speeds) well with useable amounts of sharpness and only a little bit of vignetting at f1.8. In my experience by f2.2 there is almost no vignetting and the sharpness is superb, while stopping down further increases the sharpness marginally.

   The narrow depth of field on this lens gives the photographer the ability to isolate their subject well at close to mid-range focal lengths at larger apertures. The lens also encourages the user to 'zoom with their feet' where the framing is performed by the photographer themselves, which potentially encourages more refined compositional skills.

   One of my few major quibbles with the lens is the manual focus ring. I know the idea of the lens is to be very cheaply built but with a low price-tag and excellent optics. However I feel it would have been nice to feature a manual focus ring that has at least some kind of resistance.

   On the other hand the front element doesn't rotate when focusing, which is handy if using a polariser. I find a polariser works well on this lens because of firstly the aforementioned, secondly the 'standard' focal length so there aren't any uneven areas of polarisation in the sky for example and lastly the fact you can use larger apertures if required to counteract the light loss from the polariser.

   It is supplied with a lens hood to prevent flair although I personally prefer to leave it off as I can then easily attach a polariser and also the breadth of the camera and lens is significantly smaller.

   The auto focus noise is quite apparent, which could be detrimental to your style of photography, for example street photography or even for users who shoot a lot of videos.

   Overall this lens is very much worth the relatively (compared to other lenses) small amount of money. This is mainly down to the optical quality and the benefits of having any fast prime lens in your bag. You can use such a lens creatively because of the shallow depth of field at f1.8 and partly because of its small size it is the lens that is 'stuck' to my camera most of the time.