The Random lens generator through up a good choice for my planned photoshoot of the week – exterior Christmas lights in my locale, the 1988 second generation Minolta AF 35-105 f/3.5-4.5 coupled with the full frame Sony A7R IV and LA-EA5 adapter.

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I have used this combination for anything other than a test shot to make sure the lens still worked – using the more favoured lens on a few occasions in recent years. I own this 1988 lens and the original 1985 version, which has the familiar Beercan style build and generally gets better reviews on Dyxum than this model (4.28 out of 5 vs 4.64). I’m fairly sure I bought this version of the lens before the other, which I bought in 2009 – perhaps one of the first lenses I bought. The lens filter option on Adobe Bridge I think combines the two versions together so I can’t tell what lens I shot the 520 odd edited pictures I have taken with this zoom range over the years. For that reason I won’t put up any sample images as I suspect the better ones would have been taken using the Beercan style model. Whichever lens they were taken on they include some of my favourite family pictures and some good photos in general, so a lens zoom combination I enjoy, albeit the majority would have been taken on an APS-C camera with its crop factor.

I will keep this fairly brief as I am pushed for time, as I was when I headed out on a short walk to primarily take pictures of some of the many houses within a mile of my house who have adorned their plots of land with Christmas lights and associated paraphernalia. I’m still very much a novice when it comes to shooting in the dark, so was experimenting shooting at various ISO levels and metering. I settled on using highlight metering so that it gave me the most opportunity to set the brightness of the lights to a level of my choosing rather than having unrecoverable blown highlights, and preferred to have a lower ISO where possible so I could push the shadows a bit, although in many cases this just wasn’t possible. I AI denoised a lot of the pictures, perhaps overdoing it a bit on some of the pictures, but it was a rush edit…..

I plan to head out again in the next week or so with another lens to try and get comparison data as to how this performed, but, for the most part, I was pretty pleased with the performance of this very inexpensive lens (I doubt I would have paid any more than £40 for this back in the day). It was mostly shot wide open (to get in as much light as possible), which is not the lens’ strong point, but it looks reasonably sharp with nice colours for the night time. It didn’t wow me as I was taking pictures, but it may be the case that not many lenses would in the way that I was shooting.

It wouldn’t be a lens I would consider purchasing today but if I was new to photography and had an older Sony A mount camera and wanted to pick up an inexpensive lens (They are going on Ebay for about the same amount I would have paid for it) I would say it is a recommended lens, although I would recommend getting the older model which can be picked up for similar prices and – if I am correct in assuming I used this lens rather than this one through the 2010s – is capable of producing some lovely images.