I picked up the Sony 40 millimeters F 2.5 G lens.
It's a really nice little prime lens and I've been using it for street photography, lots of
videos, client shoots and youtube videos like this one here.
So today I would like to go over this lens.
My overall use history with it including some video samples and some photography
samples and my overall thoughts on the lens and whether or not you should pick one up.
Part one will be the physical build and ergonomics.
Part two will be real world examples and usability and part three will be
whether or not I'm going to keep this lens and what I recommend that you buy one yourself.
So part One.
I'd like to talk about the actual build of the lens.
It's overall, very short and squat little prime lens, which to be honest, I quite like
that.
I've always really enjoyed say on the fuji X 100 s.
Having such a short stubby little lens.
It just keeps your overall profile and footprint of your camera much smaller.
It means that paired with the A.
Seven C.
It fits into most of the smaller pockets of my camera bag alongside my A seven S.
And bigger lenses.
A couple of the more unique features around this lens compared to Sony's other prime lenses that are a bit
cheaper is the addition of the autofocus to manual focus switch.
Also the click list physical aperture ring, which is great.
Having the physical aperture ring with the click makes it feel like my old vintage Minolta lenses.
Whereas when you have it d clicked, it's actually very useful for controlling light manually while
you're recording a video.
Not having to sacrifice, you know, a jump in exposure with I.
S.
O.
Or stepping down aperture with that click but we want to smoothly drop down.
The aperture is, you know, nicely, you don't happen to have an nd on at the time.
The manual focus ring compared to pretty much any of the Sony lens I've used.
It feels much more linear than non linear.
Most Sony manual focus rings to me have always felt really tricky to
use and I end up just relying on the very good autofocus.
But with this manual focus ring I find it very reliable when shooting video and shooting
photos.
I still use focus speaking a little bit here and there.
It's much nicer if you were to do a poor focus a feature on this lens that I've not had on any of
my other Sony lenses is the function button.
You have a custom function button on the side of the lens and I currently have this map to
toggle in between silent and non silent.
Shooting in photography mode, especially when it comes to street photography.
It's really nice to have the option to go on to silent mode in case you're in like a nice quiet
environment, you don't want to attract much attention.
It's nice to put it on on to the real world examples and usability of this lens.
I'm gonna be showing you a few video clips and images from our trip to Italy a month or so ago.
I felt like having the physical amateur ring sort of did take me back a lot more to shooting on
analog film.
Having that addition made me actually consider my F stop in terms of depth of
field much more than do really on most digital cameras.
Often when the F stop is on a wheel on the back of the camera, I sort of just treat it as an
extra exposure adjustment, which is having the actual consideration of
what do I want to be at right now.
But whether it's all the way down 2.5 or 47.1 up to
22.
Having that consideration when you're out and about shooting different environments.
For me, it makes it more of a thoughtful process when I'm actually trying to put together an image.
The focal length of 40 millimeters for me sits very nicely between 35 50
mil.
And for me, 35 mil is pretty much where my 28 to 75
Tamron lens sits.
So from shooting a video like this a lot of the time before having this lens, I would set that zoom
lens to 35 at 2.8.
Whereas this video right now that you're seeing is shot at 2.8 on the 40
mil.
It's a very similar focal length, but I think unable to have a nice and squat
little lens, it's not quite 35 mil, but 40 mil for me felt like a good
shout because I was weighing up whether or not to keep this lens versus my Sony
1.8 50 mil And I actually ended up selling off that 1.850
mil after getting this lens because for me, the overall usability of it and pleasure of
shooting with this lens surpasses that 50 mil by a long way from which
had that as a if I needed basis.
Whereas this now stays on my A seven C for the most part, if I'm out shooting
b roll somewhere, I'm not really shooting much wide angle stuff, I'll just take this lens and
nothing else and I'll have a great time shooting with it now when backing up a lot of these images from.
Italy I tend to use a cloud storage software like Dropbox be there for my
own personal projects for Youtube or for client projects.
And when it comes to client projects I really have to be careful with my image is because it's not just me that's relying on
them.
It's actually my clients and when it's a client project there's a lot of value on all these images and it's very
important to keep all that information and data safe and secure both for yourself and for your clients.
Now imagine if you forgot your password for your account was hacked and some of this data was deleted,
stolen or damaged.
We could lose all of that work all that time.
And a lot of our clients in direct money.
This is not the sort of thing that you want happening to you, especially when it comes down to client work being created.
Professional and that's why the safe and simple way to stop this from happening to you is by using a password
manager like North pass.
North past is the password manager created by the same company Nord who developed nord VPN
which is famous in the VPN space within North past were able to generate unique secure
passwords that are all stored behind our one master password as well as doing
regular security breach checks and minimizing any duplicated passwords across lots
of our old and potentially forgotten accounts where you sort of used one easy to remember
password and therefore securing all of that data for yourself, your clients and anyone close to
you sign up to north past the day by going to north past dot com forward slash George holden where you can get
70% off a two year premium plan plus an additional month free using the code
George holden check out.
This comes with a 30 day money back guarantee so you can try before you buy.
But I promise you once you get started with your past, it makes your online life so much easier.
You'll never look back now on to my overall thoughts on the setup with the 40 mil G lens and the 78
70 for me, this actually has been a very nice suitable replacement
for having a fujifilm X 100 series camera, the X 100
series and fuji was always sort of a romantic idea of mine of like it's just a nice
pretty little camera that you can use all around.
It's a cheap liquor from what I've had with the 40 mil on the A seven C.
So far.
It feels like a match made in heaven because a lot of the times on the X 100 s
I would think, oh, a nice little video shot here.
It'd be rolling issue.
That would be nice.
But sadly, those cameras aren't equipped for video.
They don't really have many features that help them.
So you're always a bit limited.
But having this lens on this camera means that I have a perfectly capable
photography camera and a very capable video camera with slow March 10 84
K or focus my can put the works.
But again, if I was just going to go down the street photography roots, it's a really nice
setup.
Something I often like to do is to fold back the LCD screen and then just
use the E.
V.
F, which is a bit ropey on this camera but it's usable having that and then silent shooting.
It's a very nice street photography experience just going around
capturing images and then trying to be very mindful about my aperture and be able to use the ring
and it sort of makes what can be quite cold, numerical digital
Sony cameras into a bit more of a old school tactile
photography experience.
So from this in case you haven't gathered, I am definitely a massive fan of this lens, especially when
it's combined with the A.
Seven C.
And so far it has been a great addition to my kit.
It's inspired me to invest more into Sony's G lens series.
But right now this is the one that I'm going to keep Along with my Tamron
17 - 28 and 28 75.
I feel like I've got three great lenses to pair up with both my SMC and my
A seven S three That's gonna be it for me today guys, I would like to thank North Past once again for sponsoring
today's video.
Go check them out at the link below north past dot com for slash George Holden and use
the code George Holden at checkout to get 70% off your two year premium plan plus an
additional month free.
I will see you In the next one.