Sony Week ...Three...The Lens

on August 06, 2018
With a shelf full of E-mount lenses to pick for the Alpha 6300, what do you think I would gravitate to? Me, the guy with the toy air field... Well, anything that said MACRO would attract my attention and anything that had a short focal length would rivet it. I treasure my old Tokina 35mm f:2.8 and adapter that lets me shoot on the Fujifilm system but wait a minute...Sony have a 30mm f:3.5 lens in E-mount! And it'll stop down to f:22! Don't mind if I do...! The example I drew down is silver-coloured, but I daresay there are black ones as well. The amusing part was seeing the tiny lens hood attached to the front. Some of the shorter macro lenses of the film era - notably Pentax and Nikon examples - had front elements buried deep within the barrel of the lens - providing a natural sun shade. Then sometimes they also supplied additional lens hoods. You were struggling to see if there was any glass down in there... The Sony, on the other hand has a bayonet hood exactly trimmed to the field of view of the lens. I am not sure how much shade it would provide in an open paddock with the Western Australian sun slanting across it, but when you are using a flash, it seems fine. Plus it lets you get close in to your subject - which you will be doing with a short macro anyway. As the Sony Alpha 6300 has an on-board flash on a stalk, I'll see if the lenshood causes any shadowing in close shots. The landscape photographers who shoot with wide lenses may be wondering why I gurgle on about getting down from 35mm focal length to 30mm. So too, the high-speed portrait shooters who have never seen the f:22 mark on their lenses because they've never twisted the aperture ring off of f:1.2 or 1.4... Well down in the macro world, at the closest focusing distance - 9.5 cm - and the smallest aperture - f:22 - the difference it makes to depth of field is the difference between 4 mm and 5.9 mm. That's a lot when you're shooting a flower or a bee. It's even better if you are going to be doing focus stacking, More DOF, less stack. This Sony lens will indeed do 1:1 macro. and it is small enough to poke into tight places - under forest mushrooms, into bee-filled flowers, or through the doors of an air museum. Combine it with a front-mounted ring flash or LED setup and you might also have a very good technical rig for dermatology shots. Ingredients: Sony lens from CE storeroom. Everything else from my Little Studio.
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