Lensbaby Sweet 22

This wideangle pancake lens produces a central spot of sharp focus surrounded by dramatic blur. Angela Nicholson has had some fun with it

- Angela Nicholson

At a glance

£179 £222 with case and ND filter

• Standalone lens

• 22mm focal length

• Covers full-frame but compatible with smaller sensors

• Fixed f/3.5 aperture

• 46mm filter thread

• Manual focus

The Lensbaby Sweet 22 has a focal length of 22mm and it produces an image that covers a full-frame sensor. But it can also be used on APS-C format cameras with the appropriate mount, providing an equivalent focal length of around 33mm. Lensbaby makes the lens for mirrorless cameras and it’s available in Canon RF, Nikon Z, Fujifilm X, and Sony FE mounts, plus the L-mount used by Leica, Sigma and Panasonic.

Setting up for using a Lensbaby lens

Because Lensbaby lenses have no electrical contacts, the camera doesn’t know that a lens is mounted. As a result, you may need to search your camera’s menu for a setting that allows it to shoot without a lens. Once that’s done, you just need to focus the lens manually and shoot as normal.

As usual for Lensbaby, the Sweet 22 is a manual-focus lens with no electrical contacts. It’s constructed from 4 elements arranged in 2 groups and the round aperture is fixed at f/3.5. Consequently, the only control on the lens is the ridged focus ring, which moves smoothly through around 90° of rotation. Although focus peaking can help, I find it best to customise a button on the camera to enlarge the image in the viewfinder to ease focusing.