Sony 135mm f/2.8 STF

The STF (Smooth Transition Focus) 135mm lens is a manual focus lens renowned by Alpha shooters both for its sharpness and for the smoothness of its out-of-focus highlights. While the subject stays sharply focused, the lens can emphasize blurring of the foreground and background by use of an apodization element inside the lens.

The lens is most commonly used as a long portrait lens. Because of the apodization filter the lens actually transmits less light than f2.8 would imply, it actually is around t4.5, meaning it transmits about as much light as an f4.5 lens normally would, although it has the shallow depth of field of an f2.8 lens. But don’t worry about it – the camera takes care of figuring exposure out.

Roger’s Take: Ok, I really am irritated about this. You see the 135mm f1.8 Zeiss owns the 135mm trophy. It was my favorite lens, better than the superb Canon 135 f2. And it was so good I wasn’t even going to stock the 135 STF (until people started demanding it). So I couldn’t wait to write this up and say it was a nice lens if you couldn’t get the 135 f1.8.

But it didn’t turn out that way. This lens is spectacular. Spectacularly sharp, but with an amazingly smooth background blur that lets the subject stand out in a unique 3-D look. Much easier to use than I expected, the learning curve was about 20 shots and I was comfortable. And it is a lot smaller than the lens-formerly-known-as-the-best 135. Actually, the f1.8 is still my favorite, but not by much after trying this out. And not at all after I’ve carried it around for a few hours.

The one downside with the STF is it does need good light, either outdoors or in a studio. It’s not going to be very useful inside.