hey guys welcome or welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we're going to go through
what i personally think of the sony 135 1.8 gm lens
so i've had this lens for like about a month and you guys have already seen
kind of my little review of the best lens for dog photography ever which is the sigma
105 1.4 i want to just revisit that conversation with this lens because i think
if you'd have watched that video you'll know that i was undecided about which one of these to buy
anyway so i've gone ahead and i've bought this on a good show deal from the photography show
and i've had it for about a month and i've used it on a paid shoots and personal projects and
just put it through its paces so i wanted to run through that with you guys today in terms of
what i personally believe is important what you guys actually would want to know when it comes
to portrait photography natural light stuff with this lens in this video you're going to see some
raw files so the raw files are obviously raw files they've not been edited so where do we start well
i think that it's probably a good idea to kind of look at the specs i don't want to go into things
in too much technical detail because to be honest i don't actually care all i care about is it does
it take a good photograph is it fast enough and is it easy for me to use so those are kind of like my
list of things i actually care about and when it comes to this lens that's what i want to discuss
so in terms of the lens itself it's got an aperture ring which if you're not used to having
an aperture ring it can take a little bit to get used to i personally found myself accidentally
flicking it from the camera setting the aperture to f 22 which obviously had massive ramifications
in terms of my exposure but if you're aware of it you know exactly what's happened when
you've done that and you can just flick it back over and off you go so the aperture ring is
something that's a little bit special there are focus lock buttons i personally don't use those
and then there's also the kind of focus range and afmf switch so just kind of normal things
that you would have on a lens the range is quite nice to have it kind of feels a little bit like
a telephoto zoom lens almost and it's buttons but most of the time you're probably not going to be
switching those on and off in terms of its size and weight and how it compares to the other two
lenses that i think most people would probably compare this to so you've got the sony 135 1.8
gm lens then on the table here we've also got the sigma 105 1.4 art lens and then also we have the
sony 70 to 200 2.8 gm lens and in terms of its weight size price and image quality focus speed
how it handles backlight all of those things we're going to cover off in this review so when
it comes to the weight the 135 1.8 is actually the lightest of all three lenses on the table
in terms of its size the smallest so if you can see the top point there of that lens it sits there
and so we've got the smallest in terms of its size if we're taking into consideration the price here
we've got them going from this is like the most affordable lens and then this one and then this
one so it's kind of like stacked up you've got those kind of specs i i don't care how heavy a
lens is i care about the photographs that it can take personally so the weight has never really
been a decision factor for me what definitely has been a decision factor though is speed speed and
capability in backlight when using it with a sony a7r iii now i know that these lenses work really
well and kind of similar with every other sony body so there's very little difference there when
it comes to backlight you guys know that i've had issues with sigma art lenses in the past in
terms of it's just not allowing me to focus on the subject and i'm working with in these situations
dogs so the animal iaf is just not working well we thought it was a sony body issue we thought
it was a lens issue we tried different things and actually we can't really find out what it actually
is but when i use the sony gm lenses there is no issue shooting into backlight so that i think
kind of gives us a summary so it's not really the camera body that's at fault because i can
get tac sharp images in a very harsh backlight with a very dark dog exposing for the highlights
with this lens and there's no issue at all so in terms of its focus speed it doesn't hunt a lot
in those conditions it's actually really rapid it is a great lens but what about if you're shooting
say for example action in backlight that gives you uh and your camera a whole host of other
issues to work through and using this lens just as a test run whilst we were out shooting pippi for
the online course videos we did run through a few little bits of action drills and what we found was
actually testing using the camera on expanded flexible spot and also on wide that the lens
performed actually really quite well definitely not perfect but really really well we then shot
action outdoors in really good light so super bright sunshine super harsh light and this is fast
action again and the lens performed really really well again really really well it's not perfect
but it's not a sport lens so it shouldn't like it doesn't need to be perfect but for action work it
is great and a hundred times better than the sigma 105 1.4 are for action so they're kind of like on
par-ish i would say that this is probably a little bit faster and a little bit sharper than the
70-200 2.8 gm but great so then what did we try then we tried just shooting some nice beautiful
portraits in different locations and obviously knowing your distances and the compression
factors of things we shot some beautiful beautiful portraits with this lens and those were in very
low light conditions backlit conditions and also just kind of like normal normal outdoor conditions
really so we did all of those different things and then i thought well what would anybody else
want to do so i was like you know what screw it i'm going to use this lens for a full shoot
with two toddlers in the woods i think working with children is a really good test of equipment
because i mean i'm not gonna lie a dog you can put a dog on a lead and tell it to sit you can't
do that with a child so we photographed some absolutely beautiful twins oh my goodness they
are absolutely gorgeous so we went out and we shot the twins with this lens and i only had this lens
on the camera i did not it was hard though at times i will admit i did want to just be able to
zoom out and zoom in like i would have been able to do on a 70 to 200 but we ended that shoot with
over 250 images that were super tack sharp in all the right places in varying light conditions from
quite open areas to much more closed off areas of the woodland in terms of the bokeh rendition
absolutely brilliant you would expect really nothing less i love the bokeh still a bit more
out of the 105 1.4 sigma r i would personally say but that's probably because it's a slightly wider
focal length so if you're sitting at the exact same shot you will be able to get closer to the
subject with the same composition with this lens than you would with this lens right so in terms
of that i think it's great so we shot it what did we do so we did backlit like super harsh backlit
well-lit portraits dimly lit portraits action shots in low light and backlight action shots in
really good harsh light we did a full shoot with it and so what then is the verdict what is the
verdict of this lens i don't want to make a lens review really long so i don't think it has to be
i think if you're looking for something to sit in your lens lineup and you don't have a 135 already
this lens is absolutely incredible if you are not doing paid portrait sessions and you don't
currently have a lens then this is an amazing lens to have i still personally would suggest
for professional photographers to have a 70 to 200 on hand because you can increase your sales
volume and value by the variety that you can get with this lens that being said it's absolutely
doable to do a full portrait shoot with a 135 on the camera so you just need to know that you're
going to have to be moving your feet getting up getting down moving around and kind of having
maybe a little bit more control over your subject so in terms of what age group into human portraits
that i would use this lens on exclusively and comfortably i would probably say maybe five to
five years plus because those children can take a little bit of direction and you will have a
little bit more control in terms of dogs would i recommend this lens absolutely oh yeah 100%
will i be sending this lens back no will i use it every single time i go out no probably not
but will i reach for it if i need it absolutely i know that it will deliver i can rely on it and
the image quality is beautiful i really don't know what else i can say about a lens so that's it if
you like this review please do let me know if you'd like more kit reviews then please
do let me know and yeah if you want to see any of those images edited apart from the pippi ones
because they're in the online course let me know as well and we can always do a full edit of those