Starry night photography lenses for m4/3

My favorite is the Olympus 8mm fisheye. I have had good results with the Oly 17/1.2, but often the wider angle of the fisheye leads to more impressive shots.

The Rokinon 12/2 is another one that works fairly well and is much more affordable.

I use the Olympus 7-14 f2.8.

My favorite is the Olympus 8mm f1.8 Fisheye. After that I guess it would be the Olympus 7-14mm f2.8 zoom. Then third would be the Olympus 17mm f1.2. I really wish there was a 10mm F1.4 lens.

The Oly 8mm is pretty great, and built like a tank. I've also used a Pany 15/1.7 to good effect.

- Oly 8/1.8 fisheye

- Laowa 7.5/2.0 manual focus

- PanaLeica 8-18/2.8-4.0

- Oly 7-14/2.8

- Voightlander 10.5/0.95 manual focus

- PanaLeica 10-25/1.7

- if 16mm is wide enough: Sigma 16/1.4

Adapted (x0,71 focal length, +1 f-stop in brightness!):

- Tokina 11-16/2.8 or

- newer Tokina 11-20/2.8

- Sigma 10-20/3.5

--
Bass
If things appear to good to be true - they're usually neither of both.

Love the Olympus 8mm f/1.8 fisheye. Defished, partly defished or untouched, got a dedicated flickr album .

Next is Panasonic Leica 12mm f/1.4. Not as wide, but still suitable for some nice astro, especially if you have some nice subject in the foreground. See my dedicated flickr album . Samyang 12mm f/2 is a much cheaper alternative. A stop slower, but still a good lens.

And of course last year we got a fast UWA in the form of 10-25mm f/1.7. I have not had the pleasure of using it, but I see no reason it would not do great. Very sharp, pretty well corrected coma and the only downside would be a pretty high vignetting (but still significantly less than full-frame UWAs).

For auroras it's a much easier choice. Basically anything wide works, even the good old Olympus 9-18mm f/4-5.6. I've got a bunch of aurora shots from this one in this flickr album .

Oly 8mm Pro f1.8, particularly if you can manage some defishing to taste. The PL 12 1.4 is great for lower ISO but not as wide as ideally possible. If higher ISO is OK for you, the Oly 7-14 Pro is perfect. M43 badly needs a rectilinear 8-10mm f1.2/ 1.4 lens that is sharp all over wide open with minimal vignetting.

For lightweight & budget option: Oly 17/1.8, Pana 15/1.7. Still budget, not lightweight: Sigma 16/1.4, Samyang 12/2.0.

Going for auroras with WA lens, try to be more fast (F/stop) than wide. Somebody here said that You can use any wide lens for aurora (like Oly 9-18/4.0-5.6 zoom), but it's both true and huge mistake. Using slow lens always means that You statistically loose most of fine details of aurora pattern due to longer shutter timesand aurora movement.

I personally photographed auroras with 14/2.5 and 17/1.8 with good results. When Sun would go towards the next activity maksimum (we are in minimum now) I'll probably buy Sigma 16/1.4 solely for aurora trips and for meteors. It's too big/heavy for regular travels.

Regards

-J.

The lens with the highest f-stop and the most aperture blades.

Simplest answer.

Lichtspiel said:

My favorite is the Olympus 8mm fisheye. I have had good results with the Oly 17/1.2, but often the wider angle of the fisheye leads to more impressive shots.

Click to expand...

I second the FE. The big advantages are the extreme wide FOV which makes many images look great but also allows a longer SS and hence for MW in particular a lower ISO.

I find the results much better than my MW images using the F2.8 12-40.

Lichtspiel said:

The Rokinon 12/2 is another one that works fairly well and is much more affordable.

Click to expand...

Yar1971 said:

For lightweight & budget option: Oly 17/1.8, Pana 15/1.7. Still budget, not lightweight: Sigma 16/1.4, Samyang 12/2.0.

Going for auroras with WA lens, try to be more fast (F/stop) than wide. Somebody here said that You can use any wide lens for aurora (like Oly 9-18/4.0-5.6 zoom), but it's both true and huge mistake. Using slow lens always means that You statistically loose most of fine details of aurora pattern due to longer shutter timesand aurora movement.

Click to expand...

Auroras can vary a great deal in brightness and also in how fast they change. If you shoot at too slow a shutter speed you are actually getting an image of an Aurora over time as it changes shape and position. It can be kind of mushy looking.

Yar1971 said:

I personally photographed auroras with 14/2.5 and 17/1.8 with good results. When Sun would go towards the next activity maksimum (we are in minimum now) I'll probably buy Sigma 16/1.4 solely for aurora trips and for meteors. It's too big/heavy for regular travels.

Regards

-J.

Click to expand...

Gary from Seattle said:

Yar1971 said:

Going for auroras with WA lens, try to be more fast (F/stop) than wide. Somebody here said that You can use any wide lens for aurora (like Oly 9-18/4.0-5.6 zoom), but it's both true and huge mistake. Using slow lens always means that You statistically loose most of fine details of aurora pattern due to longer shutter timesand aurora movement.

Click to expand...

Auroras can vary a great deal in brightness and also in how fast they change. If you shoot at too slow a shutter speed you are actually getting an image of an Aurora over time as it changes shape and position. It can be kind of mushy looking.

Click to expand...

That was exactly my point. But Your way to explain it may be more clear for OP.

For him I'll only add that it's position change that kills true image of aurora. Changes in brightness may be sometimes a problem too (local overesposure/saturation), but this is easily correctable in a next shot.

Movement is more tricky: whatever lens You use, most of the time shutter speed would be longer than average stillness of some fine aurora patterns. You may litterally observe visually some lines/bands making a rochade along the big part of the sky while Your camera is just colecting light right now. That's why most of the shots are just uniform bands of green. Any sharp features that are really breathtaking can be catched just as a pure luck. If we can shorten shutter time without loosing expositon (= faster F/stop lens) it happens more frequently and we finally get better pictures.

Regards

-J.

Olympus has a patent for a 10mm f1.4 lens. I hope it will get released in the future.

MrALLCAPS said:

The lens with the highest f-stop and the most aperture blades.

Simplest answer.

Click to expand...

ohhhh. Now your talking. So why the most aperture blades? Is that for the star points? Does sharpness rank at all. The Voitlander 10mm f0.95, or panny Leica 12mm f1.4 or 10-25mm f1.7???
Without concern for price or angle of view, which would you recommend??

Thank you

Len-Metcalf said:

MrALLCAPS said:

The lens with the highest f-stop and the most aperture blades.

Simplest answer.

Click to expand...

ohhhh. Now your talking. So why the most aperture blades? Is that for the star points? Does sharpness rank at all. The Voitlander 10mm f0.95, or panny Leica 12mm f1.4 or 10-25mm f1.7???

Click to expand...

Realize that shooting the sky is a lot about getting a lot of sky in an image. The wider the lens, the more sky. The horizontal angle of view of the 8mm FE is about 145 degrees, much greater than a 7mm lens.

The other advantage of a wide lens is that the stars are much smaller. The exposure of the Milky Way requires letting a lot of light in, either a longer exposure or higher ISO (with a fast aperture). But if you lengthen the exposure, you will already be overexposing the individual stars. The larger the stars are, the more blown out they will look. Hence, the smaller they are, the less you will see this defect. To me many MW images with good composition look pretty poor when you look at them closely.

But there is yet another advantage. There is something called the rule of 500, which is actually the rule of 250 in m4/3. It has to do with the length of time you can expose before each star individually begins to look visibly distorted as it moves over the period of an exposure. The shorter the exposure the less apparent distortion, but also the wider the lens the less you see this distortion. This is what the Rule of 500 is all about. With a super wide lens, you can expose for a longer period of time with a given aperture, and you can minimize a boost in ISO for less noisy images.





The disadvantage of a FE is that it is less versatile because of distortion. But Olympus software in newer bodies or in Olympus Workspace can be used to de-fish an image; at the expense of some resolution and scene width.

But, in many situations, if you either compose with a centered skyline, or in a location where there are not obvious straight vertical lines - like in the mountains or deserts - some distortion would not be recognized by a viewer.

Len-Metcalf said:

MrALLCAPS said:

The lens with the highest f-stop and the most aperture blades.

Simplest answer.

Click to expand...

ohhhh. Now your talking. So why the most aperture blades? Is that for the star points?

Click to expand...

Exactly.

Len-Metcalf said:

Does sharpness rank at all. The Voitlander 10mm f0.95, or panny Leica 12mm f1.4 or 10-25mm f1.7???
Without concern for price or angle of view, which would you recommend??

Click to expand...

I would personally go for the Voitlander. Even though it's a manual lens, it's much faster, let in more light and I think it would render images better.

DLBlack said:

Olympus has a patent for a 10mm f1.4 lens. I hope it will get released in the future.

Click to expand...

Me hope so too!

Cheers

So am I right in gathering that Auras and start nights are pretty much two different kettles of fish?

A good lens for one might not be a good one for the other?