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Five Creative Lenses for the Mirrorless Camera User

Chris Gampat
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12/12/2013
5 Mins read

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer SLRMagic Bokehmorphic samples at night (12 of 12)

There are some optics that just weren’t designed to be evaluated by DxOMark or other places. Instead, they’re all about creativity. These alternatives let you look at the world in a whole new way and also open your creativity up to new possibilities. Many of them are also designed to be used with mirrorless cameras since the natural design of these cameras makes it much easier to create something for.

If you’re looking to expand your horizons a bit, check out this list of alternative lenses.

Wanderlust Pinhole Pinwide

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If you’re not familiar with what a pinhole camera is to begin with, then consider the fact that some of the coolest images in the world have been made with them. A pinhole camera is a camera with an extremely narrow aperture–we’re talking about in the hundreds. It forces you to make a very long exposure.

A couple of years back, Wanderlust made a little optic cap called the PinWide. This little cap turns your Micro Four Thirds camera into a pinhole device. For the best results, we strongly recommend that you shoot at a super slow shutter speed and a very low ISO number.

Further, we’d be idiots if we didn’t tell you to go snag a tripod of some sort. You’ll need absolute stability to shoot a pinhole image and if you’re an Olympus users, be sure to turn off the image stabilization in the bad (same with you newer Panasonic body users.)

Mostly though, consider the PinWide if you really want to get creative with your compositions and long exposures.

Read the Review.

Buy Now: Amazon

Pro Tip: The bokeh from a mirrorless can be quite trippy sometimes.
Pro Tip: The bokeh from a mirror lens can be quite trippy sometimes.

Lensbaby Sweet 35 and Composer Pro

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A Lensbaby is an optical unit that serves as a tilt-shift mechanism. Indeed, it can place the focusing nearly anywhere then. We strongly recommend it to be used with the Sweet 35 optic. This optic has a 35mm field of view (though what it may be with your camera’s crop factor may vary) and lots of aperture blades for smooth and creamy bokeh.

Lots of very creative work are done with Lensbabies–and we obviously recommend that you use them just like a tilt-shift lens. We’d like to note too that they can be tough to use, but the EVF and LCD screen of your mirrorless camera should make it easier if you also enable magnification or focus peaking.

If you decide to spring for one, also note that since you’re shifting the focus around, it can be tough to get anything in focus when shooting wide open. You’ll be best off stopping the aperture down and then working with the optic in that fashion.

Beyond this, we also recommend that you shoot in aperture priority or full manual.

Read the Review

Buy Now: Amazon

Tokina 300mm f6.3 Mirror Lens

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A mirror lens can be very cool but also quite quirky in its use. These lenses are designed for astrophotography, but for more conventional uses they can give a donut shaped bokeh and some very vivid colors.

We’ve played with a couple of mirror lenses, but Tokina’s 300mm f6.3 is the one that is the star in our eyes. Not only is the manual focusing buttery smooth, but the image quality we found to be quite great–though not as sharp as other modern lenses.

On a Micro Four Thirds camera, this lens will render a 600mm field of view–giving you all the power in the world to be a total creeper and potentially get busted by the NSA with your face all over Cable TV as a stalker/predator.

We’re kidding–no one actually watches that stuff.

Tokina’s 300mm is also quite compact and very lightweight, so you won’t sit there struggling with it.

Read the Review

Buy Now: Amazon 

Pro Tp: The general rule is that the closer you focus on a subject, the less will be in focus at a given aperture. When shooting macros, stop down a lot unless you want to do a method called focus stacking.
Pro Tp: The general rule is that the closer you focus on a subject, the less will be in focus at a given aperture. When shooting macros, stop down a lot unless you want to do a method called focus stacking.

Yasuhara Nanoha Macro

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Some folks love their Macro lenses–but others want to get even closer. While the typical macro lens can focus throughout an entire range, Yasuhara’s offering is more like a microscope. In fact, that’s actually what it is.

The lens is a bit quirky. It has an LED light array that needs to be powered via USB and is honestly quite weak. To get anything in focus, you’ll be struggling a bit. Then to get any real details at all, we’re going to recommend the more powerful option: a dedicated flash. When we tested the lens out, we connect a flash to the hot shoe of our camera via a cord and illuminated our subject.

While it surely is a quirky item and incredibly specialized, it will also be high up on the list of anyone wanting to play with macro (or microscopic) photography. Since you’re focusing this closely though, we recommend using a fast shutter speed, keeping the ISO down, and also using a tripod combined with the flash.

Read the Review

Buy Now: Amazon

Lomography Micro Four Thirds Experimental Lens Kit

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Lomography Micro Four Thirds lenses (1 of 6)

Last on the list are the recent offerings from Lomography. The company that’s all about analog has shown some interest in working with the digital world since the announcement of their Petzval lens for DSLRs. But now, they’ve released a three lens kit for Micro Four Thirds users.

The kit includes a fisheye, standard, and wide angle lens. Each optic is plastic based–but they include a cool feature. You have the option of using it as a normal lens with the shutter in the camera, or giving it a secondary shutter for multiple exposures. To do this, you’ll need to use a very slow shutter speed on the camera.

Granted, this technique is for the creative person while the in-camera multiple exposure mode is for the more technical user.

Read the Review

Buy Now: Lomography

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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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