On the encouragement of another photographer, I purchased a sweet 35 lens for my old olympus—just about a decade ago, actually. I really enjoyed this tiltable point-focus lens, so I decided I wanted something similar for the sony. After a lot of hemming and hawing, because in the intervening years Lensbaby has greatly increased their product line, I got the sweet 35 again, except now it comes in this ‘optic swap’ system that allows you to insert different lenses into the rotating ball mechanism (the part that moves the focal point.)

Neighbor's hydrangeas, Sony ILCE-7C with lensbaby optic swap sweet 35, 1/50s, ISO 100, ev +0.7.

Currently my other two lenses are 90 and 70–180mm, so I thought having something wider angle would come in handy. Eventually I'll get some wider angle stuff, but in the meantime this was relatively inexpensive, since I bought it refurbished; and the action is really too loose for my tastes, but for playing around (not to mention learning how to focus it) it's fine.

So far I've learned that it and the camera's focus peaking don't play nicely with each other; I'm better off using the viewfinder set to my eye's diopter correction. Next trick will be to get view-screen magnification of the focus area working, which turns on automagically with the sony macro when I switch the lens to manual focus...

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.