Samyang 14mm Prime - Lens Review

Samyang 14mm Prime - Lens Review

My second lens I have bought to date. First things first, this is a manual focus lens only and cannot auto focus. That's right, you have to actually do something besides point and shoot. The horror!

A big plus of this lens is that it is an EF mount so works on both APS-C crop sensor cameras and full frame as well. 

To make this more interesting I will add in some pictures I have taken with the 14mm so you can judge for yourself.  

Price:- Around £330

Compared to that tiny 50mm EF-S lens I reviewed first, this is 4 times the price. So what do you get? For that price you get really good build quality. It's so sturdy and weighty that is makes my camera tip when it's not on a tripod and could probably smash it's way through a few bricks without taking a dent. You also get a really smooth, and  I mean SMOOTH focus ring. It glides under your fingers. You also get a manual aperture ring on the canon mount which is so useful, so so useful. And look at that sexy glass bulging out of the end! Fwoarr!  

Handling:- 

Like I said above, it's manual focus. It's all about the handling.
The Aperture ring is manual and clicks to confirm it has been changed. It is very nice to keeping the same aperture without accidentally changing it, it's a very robust ring and the chances of knocking it and it changing are almost non-existent. This makes it impossible to change aperture during video however, because you'll jog the camera. But who does that anyway?
It's pretty weighty but you don't notice really. It fits perfectly in your hand for handheld and feels nice to hold with the bonus of having a rubber focus ring that's easy to grip.

The focus ring is smooth as hell and takes a lot of work to go from infinity to its 28cm limit. 2 Meters to infinity is a very small distance with the majority of the ring for under 1 meter. To be honest, it's so wide you can leave it close to infinity unless you're getting within 3 meters of the subject. It's really handy for walking and shooting. 

Performance:-

Image quality! The big reason you will buy this lens. As you can see from the pictures, when you buy this lens you are buying it for the beautiful 14mm perspective. Not only that but with minimal distortion around the edges. It is an absolutely gorgeous lens. I haven't noticed any colour fringing which is a nice plus. There is however, no place to put any filters because of how protruding the front element is. This means lens flares unless you get a really wide lens hood you made yourself or something.  It's a soft lens as well. It's not sharp, but it's a wide angle, sharpness isn't what you buy it for. It works very well for video. There is a VDSLR version with a follow focus ring but to be honest this works just as well. My biggest problem is it has a tendency to over expose. The LCD on the camera is not to be trusted. The exposure simulation on the camera is off so go buy the meter.

 

Uses:-

The field of view is pretty much your entire field of view as a human. Everything you can see with your eyes, the camera picks up. This is on a crop sensor camera as well. Put this on full frame cameras and you have a seriously trippy looking picture. On full frame you get huge distortion but on a crop sensor camera not so much. It is extremely good for landscapes, nature shots, rocks, skies and anything which is large and benefits from the stretched perspective. It is not good for portrait photography at all. People get very distorted when you get close enough to get a decent picture. It's great for video, both hand held and tripod because of how nice everything looks through it. If it's close ups you want, this is not the lens for you.

Conclusion:-

£330 is a lot of money if you're on a budget. Is it worth it? For me it was. From day 1 those thoughts evaporated. It's a beautiful lens with a decent build quality. The perspective is awesome and it comes in handy, too as a functional lens.  The focusing is easy to do and the aperture ring saves time. It feels good knowing you're doing everything. For what it is, is a well made third party lens that is cheaper than the canon equivalent. While it does have it's issues, mainly the over exposure. It is soft but only when compared to a 50mm prime which is sharp as hell to begin with. Bokeh? Forget it, you don't get any but that's not why you buy this lens. You buy it for the perspective and character of the image, not the bokeh. If you're wanting an architecture lens then move on, you won't get straight lines. Portraits? Move on. Animal shots? Move on. If you want to expand the environment with a really deep depth of field even at f2.8, get this lens. It is amazing. 

Nifty Fifty - 50mm f/1.8 - Lens Review

The Nifty Fifty - 50mm F1.8

This was my first lens and it took me a while to get used to it. Once I did, I fell in love with this lens. It has it's down points but the positives make up for it, no question.

To make this more interesting I will add in some pictures I have taken with the 50mm so you can judge for yourself. 
 

Price:- Around £80

The price of the 50mm f/1.8 prime is by far the cheapest lens I have ever come across for a DSLR. No doubt, with attachments you can fit on older cheaper lenses but as for modern lenses go, this is a steal for how immense it is. To put it in perspective, a good friend and colleague of mine Oliver Halsey says to me once, that his 50mm prime was the sharpest lens he had at the time. Edging out thousand pound zoom lenses, for a mere 80 pounds.Considering this is an official Canon (or Nikkon) lens instead of a cheap manual focus third party lens, this is an absolute steal for the quality of picture you can take.

 Handling:-

The handling is a good and and point for me. Let's get the negative out of the way. The focus ring is very small, extremely sensitive and not incredibly smooth to turn. This is my only major problem with this lens. If you want it for video then you have to be so incredibly smooth on your focus pulling. It seems that sometimes it's perfectly fine and other times it's very rough and difficult to focus smoothly. That combined with the small focus ring, makes it somewhat difficult sometimes. Positive sides trump all that though. First and most obvious thing: It is extremely small and light for a lens. This means you can take it all over the place and it wont weigh you down, won't take up much of any space in your bag and won't add much of any weight at all to the camera. Lighter camera = more steady hand-held shooting. It might be a bit small and light but that is also its strength in that it is a small and portable lens that does a whole lot for what you pay for it. The sensitive focus ring can be a plus if you're like me and like using manual focus and do street photography.

 

Performance:-

As you know, the lens can be opened to F1.8 which is very wide. The next best lens is the f1.4 and then the expensive luxury f1.2 lens. While build quality will differ, the F number is very similar. You will only really get a subtle difference in any vignetting and the bokeh will be a bit different because there are more aperture blades. F1.8 is very wide and lets a lot of light in. Being a medium telephoto lens it also allows for some shallow depth of field.... very shallow in fact. If you open the lens to f1.8, you're depth of field will be virtual as thick as a pencil. The bokeh is fantastic with this lens, absolutely beautiful. My only problem with it's performance is that it suffers from a huge amount of colour fringing.

 

Uses:-

Being a 50mm lens, it's very similar to how we actually see as humans. The images look very similar to me at least so they are great for things we expect to see normally in pictures. Faces, animals, bodies, people in general, plants and so on. Anything organic really that we expect to see in a certain way. Unless you want the effect of distorting the picture of flattening it to achieve a desired effect and play with the viewer, you are going to want something with this focal length. It;s flattering on faces and makes for some very great head-shots and body-shots.  

 

Conclusion:-

Would I recommend you get this lens? Would it make a great first lens? Is it worth the money? Is it limited and have flaws? Do the positives outweigh the negatives?  Yes. Yes. Hell yes. Of course. Hands down. I've been using this lens for a good while and have found out first hand it's flaws, limitations and strengths. It's fantastic for animals, people and nature. It's good but not amazing for landscapes and skies. It's awful for long range photography, you'll need a long lens for birds flying and shy squirrels. When I have the money, I am going to get the F1.4 lens just for the build quality and more professional look but that is a way off in the future. First I want equipment and more lenses so it will have to wait. There is no doubt in my mind that my little 50mm will stay in my collection for a long time to come.