Shooting with a new, short zoom. The Sony 28-70mm f3.5 - 4.0. Nice.

You know that feeling that you get when a new (to you) lens gets dropped in your hands? You know it's probably just another reasonably good, modern lens but you just have to put it on a camera and try it out for yourself. Secretly you are always hoping that this one will have that little bit of extra magic that just makes your photographs sing. On key. That's the way I felt when my friend sold me his relatively new (and hardly used) Sony FE 28-70mm lens. I knew it wasn't going to blow away the stuff I already own but I was hoping it had some endearing quality which would become known to me as I shot with it. 

It was gloomy and overcast yesterday afternoon. The threat of rain hung over us like a boring dinner guest reaching for that last slug of great red wine at the bottom of the bottle. I had just finished reading Ian Rankin's gloriously good new novel, Rather Be The Devil, and I was ready to get out of reading chair and get outside. I put on a jacket, grabbed the A7ii and headed away from my sleepy, cloistered neighborhood toward the promise of a hipster downtown. 

Since it was cloudy and flat I set the white balance control to the "cloudy" icon, selected auto ISO and set the lens for f5.6 in aperture mode. All done and ready to shoot randomly and happily. 

I walked from Treaty Oak over to the Graffiti Wall to see what new art had appeared since my last visit many weeks ago. The place was hopping. I brought the camera up to my eye and one of the first things I noticed was how nice and stable the image stabilization seemed. As I understand it the camera system uses both the lens stabilization and the body stabilization in tandem. That gives you full five axis performance. 

There are no external switches on the lens. It's extremely spare. I thought the images had a nice bite to them. 

There is something nice about having a small, lightweight package that wasn't priced to break the bank on the front of my beater camera. I was still careful to keep it from getting drenched in a sudden downpour. That's why I keep a one galloon ZipLoc bag in my jacket pocket on days like today. I got wet but my camera stayed dry. 

All in all I am a fan of the lens. It's pretty nice.