LENSBABY SOL 45
Get creative with this lens’s tilting action and textured bokeh www.lensbaby.com £149 / $200
Lensbaby’s first lenses were built from bendy plastic pipes, and although its products are now a lot more upmarket in terms of build quality these days, the Sol 45 harks back to that starting point. The lens barrel is made from metal, for example, but there’s a tilting mechanism that allows you to move the sharp ‘sweet spot’ away from the centre just like the first lenses. It’s also a manual-focus full-frame lens and is available in Canon
EF, Nikon F, Sony E, Sony A, Pentax K, and Fujifilm X mounts. We tested the Sony E version on a Sony a7R III.
Lensbaby lenses are especially well suited for use on mirrorless cameras as their magnified view and focus peaking enables you to see exactly where the sweet spot is. That’s helpful because with a fixed aperture of f3.5, the depth of field is quite shallow.
A large ring around the lens enables you to lock the sweet spot of sharpest focus in the centre of the frame. Unlocking this allows you to shift the focus towards the edges of the frame. In front of this ring, there’s a smaller ring for focusing. There’s also a pair of ‘bokeh blades’ that can be pulled across the lens to introduce some texture to the out-of-focus areas. We found it best to focus, adjust the tilt angle and the blades, then fine-tune the focus using the magnified view. If you point the lens towards a flat surface and adjust the focus, you’ll see the sharp area move from the centre to a sharp ring around the centre.
We’ve seen sharper results from a Lensbaby lens, but the Sol 45 produces some very attractive images and chromatic aberration is controlled very well. If you mount the lens on an APS-C format camera the sweet spot goes closer to the edges of the frame, which can be handy with some compositions. Otherwise, you can crop the full-frame image. The blur is very effective and the bokeh blades can add some extra interest. It’s a lens for fun and creativity.