Best Sony Prime Lens for Travel Photography and Videography

When travelling to a destination filled with epic landscapes, vibrant street scenes and tropical beaches, it can make sense to bring a Sony zoom lens to cover all of your travel photography needs. But, while zoom lenses can be convenient and versatile, they do come with one major drawback for travel photography: they can be heavy.

Now, if you’re going on a short trek, your camera’s overall size and weight may not be a huge factor. However, if you’re planning on trekking through the jungle for multiple hours or clocking over 10,000 steps through city streets, a zoom lens will start to weigh you down pretty quick. And, even on shorter outings, such as walking to dinner or grabbing a morning coffee, a massive camera lens will feel a bit cumbersome, too.

I will admit that, despite their large form factor, I always bring my Sony 24-105mm lens on every trip. Its combination of image quality, build quality and versatility make it the perfect lens for pretty much every travel photography scenario. But, after lugging that lens around on a few trips, I realized that I needed a much smaller lens to make my camera more enjoyable to carry - especially on chill walks around town, coffee runs and sunset dinners. Basically, I wanted a camera set up small and light enough for the travel moments where I wanted to have my camera, but really didn’t want to carry it.

After researching a number of Sony’s smaller lens options and determining the best focal length for travel photography, I landed on the perfect sidekick for my hefty zoom lens: the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 prime lens.

Features

One of the best things about using the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 as a travel lens is that it’s super simple to use, providing only a few essential features on the lens itself.

The lens features a fairly large manual focus ring with generous rivets, allowing you to easily find it and dial in your focus when snapping photos. The lens also includes a manual focus / autofocus switch, so that you can quickly and easily change between the two. There’s also a focus hold button, which prevents the camera from refocusing when using autofocus. In addition, the lens comes with a relatively compact lens hood, too.

Build Quality

Since the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens isn’t a G Master or G lens, you’d think the build quality would feel, well, cheap, but this lens is built solidly.

The lens is constructed out of aluminum and plastic. The aluminum body makes this lens feel like one of Sony’s higher end lenses. The solid construction also provides a bit more comfort and reassurance when you’re lugging it around jungles, city streets or beaches, as it feels like the lens would be able to withstand the elements a bit better than some of Sony’s fully plastic-constructed lenses.

Speaking of surviving the elements, the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens also provides dust and weather resistance, which, again, gives you a bit more peace of mind when you’re snapping photos in environments with changing or demanding conditions.

Image Quality

This lens has character. Whenever I use this lens, the photos always end up looking a little vintage, which is something I personally love in a travel lens. And, with a generous F1.8 aperture, you can get creative with the depth of field in your images. And, if bokeh is your thing, this lens creates, in my opinion, a smooth and dreamy bokeh, adding an extra cinematic element to your travel images.

Is the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens as sharp as a G Master lens? No. But that’s ok. The lens is still super sharp, and will be sufficient for most people.

The lens can produce some colour fringing around the edges of things like tree branches. However, these nuances can be corrected in a program like Adobe Lightroom. In my opinion, this lens’s imperfections add to the character of the images it produces. If you’re looking for a technically flawless lens, you’ll likely need to spend more money on one of Sony’s G Master lenses.

Travel Practicality

In general, 35mm lenses are super practical and versatile for travel photography, allowing you to capture landscapes, street photos and portraits without changing your lens.

The Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens’s small size makes it super easy to pack in any compact travel camera set up. The lens only weighs 280 g, making it much lighter than most zoom lenses (and even other prime lenses). Because of this, you’ll barely notice it when it’s in your camera bag or attached to your camera as you walk around town.

The lens’s solid build quality not only provides you with a premium feel while snapping travel photos, but also helps protect it from the elements when you’re out on the road. The dust and weather resistance features are also a bonus on this lens, as dust, rain, snow and other elements can definitely be a factor for travel photographers.

Lastly, the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 is exceptionally good at shooting videos, offering essentially no focus breathing. If you’re looking to shoot some travel videos in between snapping epic travel shots, you’ll be hard pressed to find a Sony lens better-suited for videography.

Given the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens’s small size factor, excellent build quality and relatively reasonable price ($799.99 CAD), I believe this lens is a great everyday walk around lens for most travel photographers.

Potential Cons

In terms of high performing Sony prime lenses, the Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens is fairly reasonably priced. However, at $799.99 CAD, it’s still not a super cheap lens. Because of this, some travel photographers may be less inclined to expose this lens to the elements - even with it’s fairly solid build quality.

While I also think 35mm is a versatile focal length for travel photography, some travel photographers may simply not like that focal length. Even I find using just a 35mm lens for travel photography a bit limiting, so I always bring a standard zoom lens on my trips, too. If you do purchase this lens for travel photography, just know that you may still need to bring another lens to compliment it, depending on the type of photography you’re looking to do on your trip.

Lastly, this lens lacks some of the premium lens features found on Sony’s G and G Master lenses, such as an aperture ring. I’ve never found this to be an issue, as I simply adjust the aperture on my Sony a7iii, but some other photographers may really want this feature. If so, you may need to spring for the much more expensive 35mm G Master.

Sony FE 35mm F1.8 - Verdict

The Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens is a well-built, reasonably priced prime lens, offering high quality imagery with a bit of vintage flair. The lens is small and lightweight, making it super easy to pack and carry around while you’re travelling. The 35mm focal length is also, in my opinion, one of the best focal lengths for travel photography. However, depending on the location you’re visiting, you may find the focal length a bit limiting, requiring you to bring an additional prime or zoom lens to complement this lens. If you’re looking for a small, everyday prime lens to toss into your compact travel camera bag though, it’s hard to go wrong with the Sony FE 35mm F1.8.

Grab your Sony FE 35mm F1.8 lens here! Please note: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.