Laowa 15mm f/4 Wide-Angled 1:1 Macro Lens on the Sony A7RII by Dierk Topp

 

Laowa 15mm f/4 Wide-Angled 1:1 Macro Lens on the Sony A7RII

by Dierk Topp

Hi Brandon and Steve,

This is about a very special lens, the Laowa 15mm f/4 Wide-Angled 1:1 Macro from Venus Optics in Hefei/Anhui in CHINA.

To explain the specialty of this lens here is a quote of a short description from Venus Optics:

“The new Laowa 15mm f/4 1:1 Macro lens features an ultra wide angle of view of 110 degrees with 1:1 maximum magnification. Photographers can focus very close to the subject and let the foreground dominates in the photo but at the same time, have the background telling viewers about where and how the subject lives.”

and

” A shift mechanism is added at the rear end of the lens with a maximum adjustment of +/- 6mm, which is extremely useful for landscape/architecture photography for distortion correction.”

I love wide and super wide lenses and preordered it after it was announced. My lens has the serial # 761 🙂

The reasons for me:

I ordered the Sony E-mount version, Nikon and Canon mount is available too
the specs looked very interesting and the price for it even more
the main advantage of the lens is, that I can get a very close foreground and environment background
it could be a universal super wide angle lens
the design is for DSLR and color shift in the corners are not expected
of course it has a manual aperture
it does not have clicks for the apertures
the shift mechanism may be a bit soft, not like a tilt/shift lens

This is not supposed to be a review!

I don’t dig into CA and soft corners. I just want to share my experiences with this special lens with you and your readers.
If you are interested in full resolution test images, you may find them here on my flickr.

From the practical use I can say, it works great. If you really use it close to 1:1 you have to take off the sun shield but still may get problems with the light and/or shadows of the lens over the subject. The following picture of the lens attached to a Sony A7RII shows, how close you are in these situations.
And I would like to mention, that the aperture has no clicks, the following images are “about” f/11. The shift mechanism is a bit soft too, but it works.

Find the following images and some more here on my flickr album.

The lens mounted on the Sony A7RII

–

Comparison of the sizes: Sony Zeiss 16-35/4 – Laowa 15mm/4 – Sony Zeiss 24-70/4
(it is the E-mount lens, the DSLR lens will be much shorter)

–

On this picture the object distance is set to 1:1,  You see, that this is only useful for very specific situations! You will have problems to get enough light to your object!

Ok. here are some examples of the practical use of this lens

On the architecture images below vertical lines have been corrected in PP the used aperture on most images is “about” f/11, you never know exactly, when you stop down while watching the focus magnification. Even with f/11 the DOF is very small at 1:1

All images made with Sony A7RII full format camera
On the following images the distance to the front lens is about 5 to 10cm! (I know, it does not look like this, but it is a 15mm lens 🙂 )

–

on the sample images of the vendor for this lens you find images with mushrooms seen from the below the mushroom, I had to try that as well 🙂
(this may be difficult with a DSLR with a fixed screen)

–

–
town hall of my home city

–

–

it seems to be an interesting lens for certain product shots:

–

–

–

The following two images with the use of the shift function. Both are stitched two images, one full shift down and one shift up,  you see the problems in the corners, the images are not cropped.
With stitched images I usually use the full shift and crop later. Again the foreground is a few cm away!
(no info of shutter and ISO in the EXIF)

–

–

–

The following images may show the normal use as a super wide lens
vertical correction in PP

from a visit to Hamburg, Germany

–
the Hamburg Rathaus (town hall)

–

–

–

–

–

–

and last but not least:
the gate was closed and I heard the train coming, I focused on the gate.
The ICE passed me at a distance of about 5 meters and with more than 100 km/h – I got it 🙂

I hope, that you got an impression, what this lens can do.

Thanks very much for looking

regards
dierk

more of my images:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dierktopp/