Lonely in a Crowd? | Sony 85mm f1.8
85mm Travel Photography can be lonely on both sides of the lens.
Want your travel photos to stand out? You should try 85mm. A focal length flattering for people, architecture, landscapes, that can melt the background away if you want to. While everyone else is shooting wide? Your 85 will pick out faraway details and capture locations through a completely different perspective. Granted it’s not the easiest lens to start with.
Alone in the frame
Isolated from surroundings
Your subject and your work will have nowhere to hide.
Sony’s 85mm f1.8 is the newest lens in my collection, but it’s not new.
It’s 5 years old, ancient by Sony standards. No aperture ring, mostly plastic, some manual controls, supposedly weather sealed? I’ve tried 4 85mm lenses for this system, and its image quality isn’t even in the top 3? I bought it just before a trip to Japan, thinking I would sell it when I got back, but then it kinda stuck. Not only does Lightroom confirm that this was my most used lens on that trip, it’s now my most used lens full stop.
What is it about this 85?
1 in 3 people in the world report feeling lonely, but I’m sure that number is higher for photographers. In an era of smartphones and Photoshop Generative fill, caring this much about taking photos makes us the minority.
Online platforms are supposed to help connect us, but Flickr is dead, Instagram’s a wasteland, Vero is super weird, let’s not even talk about X or Facebook.
Where are photographers - especially hobbyists shooting for fun - supposed to share our work?
If you can get the working distance right a 85mm is very versatile - I like to shoot it in 3 ways:
One, stop it down a bit - say to f4, f5.6, in a crowded urban setting and shooting something 10 metres or more away. You close the distance optically, a bit of compression, and your is subject tack sharp, full of detail.
Two wide open, in nature or cityscapes. I know the bokeh will look good so I wait for subjects to walk past and paint a beautiful backlit scene.
Three - and this is my favourite - layering. The subject sandwiched between something in the foreground, hopefully a leading line, and something in the background. Two layers of visual interest on either side of your subject, stopped down or wide open depending on your taste.
It took me a long time to get comfortable shooting 85. At the start I could only fit one subject in frame at any one time, and all my pictures looked a little too close. Too familiar. Invasive even. Looking at all these photos, frame by frame, I could start to see a pattern.
While it’s free to access support via healthcare, there is still enormous stigma around mental health in Japan. The fact that there is a term in the Japanese Zeitgeist: “karoshi” - “death by overwork” suggests that this is a people accustomed to being hard on themselves.
Everyone plays their part. Working late into the night. Polite to a fault, organised to the extreme.
Does all of this take a toll over time? Following the UK’s lead, Japan established their own minister for loneliness in 2023 to raise mental health awareness overall, but at the end of the day loneliness is an entirely subjective individual experience.
Do you feel lonely all the time, even when surrounded by huge crowds?
Being alone is not the same as feeling lonely, and only you can figure out A) if you’re lonely and B) what might make you feel better. Being active, spending time in nature, joining volunteer groups - can all help a little, but it’s pretty obvious the one that works for me is photography. It’s not enough just to take photos - I need to share my work *somewhere* to talk to and learn from other photographers. No gallery is exhibiting the work of hobbyists like us, - so instagram seemed to be the best option?
But my favourite IG accounts - one by one - stopped posting. I stopped posting. No-one wants to be the last schmuck at the party?
Photographers - especially those just getting started - are running out of places to go.
Sony’s 85mm f1.8 is only let down by one problem. Purple fringing. It’s everywhere (see the image above), and pretty bad.
In Lightroom you need to select the exact shade of purple in the HSL panel and fix it manually, or just live with the purple outlines in most high-contrast areas. But if you can overlook this, the rest is good news.
Build quality? Good enough given the price. Part metal, part plastic, no aperture ring, some manual controls, supposed weather sealing.
Autofocus? Quickest out of any 85 for Sony E mount. Yes it gets thrown off is if you’re at the limit of its minimal focus distance, but it’s better than all the other 85s out right now.
Don’t go for the 85mm f1.4 G-master - too big and bulky, loud autofocus, and rumors are a mark 2 will be out shortly anyway.
Zeiss 85mm f1.8? All-metal premium build, but similar purple fringing, bokeh is arguably not as nice, and oh it’s twice the price.
Sigma’s 85mm f1.4 DG DN? Buttery smooth at f1.4, all-metal no-nonsense design language, minimal CA or purple fringing. I owned this Sigma for a while - shot heaps with it, loved the images, but it’s still third-party. Autofocus, IBIS, focus-breathing compensation for video - not quite as seamless as Sony’s, but that’s not the reason I decided to sell it.
I had thousands of street photos sitting on my hard drive, and with no other purpose for them I started posting on YouTube?
It turns out that this is where photographers have been hanging out all along. In the past 10 days I’ve interacted with more photographers than the past 10 years combined, and I’ve gotten some really useful feedback on the channel on how to improve my work.
This is an open invitation:
Leave a comment
Send me links to your work
Get into the weeds of your process for photography, because this matters.
I need this just as much as you do.
I went for Sony’s 85mm f1.8 in the end because of the weight. 625 grams for the Sigma, versus 371 grams for the Sony. The form factor transforms its utility, giving you a bright telephoto prime in a ultra portable autofocusing package. It blended into my everyday carry better than any other lens combo I own, and portability is the reason I sold the Sigma and now use this one so much.
Now there is one camera - a unicorn on the market - whose portability and image quality is unmatched for everyday carry - more on this in the next post.
Happy shooting everyone, talk soon.
Jack.
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