I’ve always loved very shallow depth of field, and done well, with the right subject you can get some beautiful dreamy images especially if you like flower photography. Earlier this year I purchased 2 lenses from the 7Artisans a company who produce a number of lenses for crop sensor cameras. (This is not a lens review, I’ll link to one at the end of the post). The first lens I purchased was the 35mm f1.2 to try it out and I loved it so I decided to purchase the wider 35mm f0.95 MK11.
I’ve always been a fan of 3rd party lenses and have a number of vintage and Lensbaby lenses in my line-up, however the f0.95 lens has now become my goto for most of my flower photography.
If you like dreamy, soft focus images, very much like the Lensbaby Velvet this lens is ideal for this sort of work. There is a beautiful quality to the background bokeh if you get it just right.
It has a good minimum focusing distance but for me it really comes into it’s own when used with an extender between the body and the lens to create a macro version.
All these lenses are manual focus so focus peaking is a must and the DOF is exceptionally shallow so you need to catch the right bit in focus (not easy)
It’s equally good for regular photography and I’ve found there to be a particular character to the way it renders the images. I have the Fuji 80mm f.2 Macro which is an excellent lens but I’ve often found it overly sharp for this type of photography. The images on the left and below are all hand held taken outdoors against a white/black backboard.
