The Other Day I Had an Idea….

It was when I was trying to squeeze one more lens onto my shelf of lenses, knowing that just a few hours I had secured purchases on another pair of must have primes, it became quite apparent that I am in a position of owning too many lenses. This is not a surprise. Be it bikes, computers, music, books or pretty much anything I have an interest in, I am loathed to sell, pass on, or give away pretty much anything I have acquired.

The issue I have, like many I am sure, is that in a position of such overwhelming choice, I end up not using an awful lot of them, or falling back on the small number of lenses that I am most fond of using or happy with their results. The reality is that the majority of the lenses I own rarely see any usage other than the old sample shot to reassure myself that the purchase decision was a sound one, no matter how infrequently actually use them.

It was a few hours later, when I was trying to wind down from another evening of F1 editing that an idea sprung into my head. One so instantly appealing that I just had to action it almost immediately, which I did, after a night’s sleep and a few more hours to convince myself it is a good idea.

The idea is quite simple. I use a Spin The Wheel app on my phone to list all the lenses I have currently in my position. I then have another wheel to choose which camera I will use. Then, based on the spinning of these aforementioned wheels, I pair the two together and use them for my next photo assignment. The idea would be that I can get to use lenses that may not see a lot of love and I can see what results will yield when I am forced into using a lens and camera combination I may not naturally choose.

The cameras wheel was easy enough. I have five interchangeable lens cameras – all Sony, none of which I am willing to part with, despite some having a distinct lack of use: the A100, the Minolta based DSLR that heralded Sony’s journey from minnow to camera giant; its successor the A700; the successor to that the A77; the A7R IV; and last, but by no means least the A6700.

I may in the future bring all five bodies into the game, but for now I am playing with the last two – these being capable of using the EF mount lenses the modern mirrorless Sony cameras use, in addition to the older Sony A Mount lenses which I can fit with the Sony LA-EA5 adapter, and the collection of M42 and Minolta MD lenses I have amassed over the years and can fix to the camera using adapters, in particular the Techart LM-EA9 which, amazingly, allows me to use autofocus on manual focus lenses!

Adding the lenses to the wheel took a little longer. At the time of writing I think I have 35 lenses – there may be one or two more hiding in camera bags I have accounted for. I have added them all to the wheel save for one, the mighty Tair-3 300mm F4.5, which is just too big and cumbersome to carry around and use unless I have made special arrangements like have a friend carry it for me!

With all lenses added to the wheel the first spins in this new project commenced. The camera would be the A7R IV – the full frame 61MP beast of a camera and the lens would be the Sony 50mm F1.4 A-Mount lens. Immediately the irony of this lens being the first was not lost on me – in many ways this was the perfect choice to to begin this adventure.

I had to double check this as memory has a funny habit of blurring the truth, but my Sony A100 was a Christmas Present to myself, first used on Christmas day evening. This was the first picture taken – white balance corrected eighteen years on thanks to increased Photoshop knowledge!

You’ll notice that it was the kit lens that came with the camera that was used, soon replaced the next day when we were down in Minehead visiting the family and I was getting to grips with the main reason why I chose Sony over what was, at the time, the the more obvious choices for a digital camera, Nikon and in particular, Canon, the Minolta 50mm f1.7. One of the main attractions of getting the underdog Sony camera was it’s choice of using the Minolta A-Mount, which meant that there was a good supply of old, but good, AF lenses on the second hand market, the nifty fifty being my first acquisition.

From that first afternoon shooting on the cold hills that surround Minehead, I fell in love with that Minolta lens. It became a mainstay on that camera, partly because I loved its sharpness, colours, and ability to melt the background with its fast aperture; partly because the Sony A100 was really only an ISO100 camera and when shooting indoors in particular before I got hold of a flash, the 50mm was the only lens I had that was fast enough to produce pleasing quality images in low light before the days of decent (AI) noise reduction and not very good high ISO performance. I championed it to anyone I knew who was interested in upgrading to a fancy big camera from their compacts – an example of what an inexpensive vintage lens could do on modern equipment

That lens was used for a good majority of the images I took with my DSLR over the next few years, a period which saw the birth of our eldest child and the sudden and dramatic uptick in quantity of photos taken. That changed in November 2011 when perusing through Currys / PC World in Coventry I chanced upon a brand new Sony 50mm f1.4 discounted to what was at the time a silly price of, I think, just over £100. It was an instant purchase, the lure of the f1.4 and a more modern lens – first manufactured in 2006, twenty or so years after my Minolta was first manufactured. Excitedly I got home and below was the first picture I took, my latest duty free purchase in my final year of traveling with the F1 circus.

Over the next couple of months and years I took a lot of pictures with the 50mm f1.4, according to the stats I have more edited images using that lens than any other. I liked the lens and it has taken some of my favourite, most memorable pictures, but over the years I found myself noticing its obvious faults and lamenting my decision to give away my Minolta 50mm f1.7 to a family member.

The most obvious failing of the lens is that at f1.4 it is soft, very soft, and in my opinion with my example of the lens, essentially unusably soft. It was always stopped down to a minimum of f1.7, which basically made it the same lens as the Minolta, whose colour rendition I slightly preferred.

Many years later when I bought my Sony A7R IV, the 50mm f1.4 was one of the first lenses I went to armed with the LA-EA5 adapter I bought at the same time as the camera, for I had no E mount lenses and was so relying on my collection of A mount lenses. My experiences were not wholly positive, it turned out the crop sensors of my DSLR cameras flattered the lens slightly, and of all the lenses I have thrown at the camera and the adapter, it has struggled with this one the most to be consistently in focus. I have often found myself having to manually focus instead, as if the lens requires a micro AF adjustment, which isn’t possible when using the adapter. That said I have returned to the lens on occasion, using it very recently for the baby above’s first birthday as a fully fledged teenager.

Dyxum, still the best resource for Minolta and Sony lenses, A Mount lenses in particular, has near identical user review scores of 4.59 and 4.58 respectively, the most frequent criticisms of both seems to be copy variation. I suspect my experience was that I had a great copy of the Minolta; a slightly Friday afternoon at the optics factory for the Sony variant. I was within a click of reacquainting myself with the Minolta 50mm very recently. At the last minute I changed my mind and found myself clicking for something else. More about that later.

With the Sony 50mm f1.4 attached to the A7R IV, the plan was to take the camera on a trip into town where I was going to get my hair cut and my eyes tested. Nothing special; the highlight perhaps being to catch some of the autumnal colours that make October such a visual treat. First though I had a quick social media shot to take for my wife’s new business venture Needle In Hand, something the lens could handle quite comfortably.

With those taken I was off into Grantham town. As someone who loves looking back at photos of towns and city high streets over the past 100 years or so, my preference is more or less to capture fairly mundane pictures in terms of composition. I find that in the short term they hold very little value or interest. But look back at the pictures in 5, 10, 20 or maybe 30 or more years, then the normal everyday sights take on a nostalgic significance that can be lost if you are capturing the extraordinary in an ordinary environment. With that said it is inevitable that you will always find yourself looking for something that is a little out of the norm or particularly attractive or otherwise.

So without further ado, here is a selection of the photos I took on my little trip into town:

North Parade does Halloween – I think…..

And that for the Sony 50mm f1.4 was that. Nearly. One more shot to take as I walked through the door to be greeted by the site of a lens sized box. In the opticians I was prescribed some fancy new lenses to aid my deteriorating eyesight. As they used premium glass I was told it would either be Nikon or Zeiss. Thankfully for my wallet they opted for Nikon. The Zeiss would be waiting for me at home.

So instead of going with a return to Minolta, my latest nifty 50 is the legendary Sony Carl Zeiss FE 55mm F1.8 ZA Sonnar T – a comparative vintage by EF mount lens standards, but renowned and by many revered for its 3D Pop, but not without its own issues and arguable shortcomings. I’ve barely any chance to use it and exclusively in less than ideal light, but the initial signs very good indeed.

So the question for me is, will the Sony 50mm F1.4 be like it’s Minolta brother just the second lens I part company with? Or will it remain in my collection, more for the memories it has captured than the likelihood that I will use it much in the future? I imagine, knowing me, it will be the latter. I think that my town walkabout showed, that despite the majority of the shots mostly mundane nature and taken at 1/500 at f5.6, hardly a typical use case for a fast fifty, it remains a versatile and, for the most part, capable lens, occasional focusing issues aside and the fact that it is essentially useless at f1.4. It’s compact, lightweight, and I can see it being a good backup, just in case something bad happens to my Zeiss. And the Zeiss is technically not the same focal length, so I could argue that I am not actually doubling up and that the 50mm will have its unique uses that the 55mm cannot provide! That I think will be my justification, and I will go to bed happy with that!