That few speck of dust did not made me panaroid in changing of lens, instead, I went out to change them on purpose to do this comparison shots to see the difference in using various lens. There is no hypothesis to test so no variables were controlled in this little experiment. Just whack and see the differences.


First up, the kit lens at 70mm f5.6. The colours look appealing and is pretty sharp wide open. A good performer considering that Canon and Nikon both produce junk-like kit lens.


Next, the 50mm prime lens at f1.7. Seems like exposure is a bit darker than the rest but the shallower depth of field makes the background less confusing than the kit and the flower looks a bit sharper than the kit. And the colours seem different too.


The el-cheapo zoom lens of mine. Colours look similar to the Sony kit lens. I always thought that it is a bit too soft wide open at 300mm from my bird shots taken with it but it seems to be comparable side by side to me.


Last but not least, the 'Beercan' at f4 and 210mm with the least distracting (best) bokeh imho. Just look at the out of focus flower a bit to the right of the subject in all 4 shots. I could see 3 or 4 blurry stalk lines running down the out of focus flower for all 3 shots except for this where it is all mashed up nicely. I don't know if the beercan has the shallowest depth of field for this little test since I did not measure my subject distance in these shots.

But one thing evident from these comparison is that the beercan and the 50mm prime lens, both more than 20 years old in the Minolta lens line have similar colours while the Sony kit and the Minolta el-cheapo lens do so too. The latter colours seem to be in harmony but the earlier ones has an unique appeal.

Enough of lens banter, here's some bird shots I took lately by chance.


Sunbird from my window...

Taken with the el-cheapo minolta zoom lens and the f56am flash, this bird regularly visits my dad's potted plants and this is like the 37th time I shot it (Seriously, do you think I keep count?). Had to use flash to counter the bright sunlight on the background and give more details on my subject. Spots underneath the leaves are water droplets as my dad use a sprinkler to water the plants not too long ago.


A pair of doves?

These birds are so common in Singapore but I spotted some of them while venturing the hidden corners of NUS. A family of these birds were hiding in the rooftop at the hidden walkways that I visited. These pair of doves then fumbled out of the hidding place and landed on the aircon unit while I changed to my telephoto lens, slowly sneak up to them and took over 20 photos.


Any closer and I'll have to stitch my photographs.

All photos taken using the _______________ [1]. I guess you can fill in the blanks by now.

singapore flowers birds minolta beercan lens photoblog sony a100 alpha