Hello Photographers, I have here the Lensbaby Sol 22, which is a Lensbaby lens designed specifically for micro four thirds cameras. Now I’ve been testing this lens for about a month and I gotta tell you, I am pretty happy with this thing.

Like other Lensbabies, the goal of this lens is to give you creative expression through interesting optical characteristics. With this lens you get a kind of smeared, blurry, zooming kind of look, which I really really like.

Now if you followed my photography at all, you know that I don’t generally shoot photos that look like this, I tend to shoot cleaner, using regular lenses. I don’t often shoot shallow depth of field and I don’t often shoot stuff that has a lot of bokeh. So for me, using this lens was a pretty interesting challenge because I had to think outside of the box and my comfort zone

So let’s go over some of the basic info on this lens. This is designed specifically for micro four thirds cameras. I don’t have any pricing info on this yet. But what I do know is that this is designed to be an entry point into the Lensbaby system.

So this is a fixed 22 millimeter lens. On a Micro Four Thirds camera that will give you a field of view equivalent to a 44 millimeter lens on a full frame camera. This is like Lensbaby’s version of the nifty fifty for Micro Four Thirds cameras.

As far as aperture is concerned, this is fixed at F 3.5. So there is no aperture ring. You cannot change the aperture at all, and this is a manual focus lens like all of the other Lensbaby lenses.

What’s great about this lens is in addition to giving you that swirly bokeh blur on the edges of the frame, you can also alter the focal plane of your image by twisting the barrel of the lens, giving yourself a free lensing effect.

I had a lot of fun working with this lens. I will say that it is also difficult to work with it because you need to make sure that the focal plane lines up with the thing that you want to be in focus. So if you decide to try this Sol 22 or similar Lensbaby lens, be prepared to slow down, and be prepared to spend more time focusing and checking your images to make sure that your focus is where you want it.

Now, as I mentioned, I don’t have any pricing information about this but I wanted to share my experiences with this lens and get your opinion on Lensbaby in general. Are you interested in these types of lenses?

I think they’re really cool. What I really love is that it’s pushing me outside of my comfort zone, pushing me to think differently about my photography and pushing me to expand my own creativity.

Let me know what you think of my images shot with the Lensbaby and the Sol 22 in general down in the comments and then get out there and take some damn photos!