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RLight wrote:

Photato wrote:

Great pictures.

Did not know about this 21mm lens.
If only had AF I'd buy it in a heart beat.

Viltrox makes a 25mm AF, but, the contrast and resolution go south wide open. The Rokinon has strong contrast and resolution even wide open. It's MF though. This really gets into the glass... Adding an AF motor means there is more girth to a lens (as something has to drive it). By going full MF, the lens can contain more glass by volume, and be more optimized potentially. There's just no two ways about this.

I can actually say the Rokinon's, the 21 f/1.4 and 50mm f/1.2 produce some of the most unique stuff. But, they require practice, and yes, you'll miss shots. However the bokeh drawing, resolution and contrast, in addition to color rendering, are phenomenal. Really top notch. They rival "Goliath", my RF 28-70 f/2L. The benefit of the Rokinons is they can accompany my bag of small M glass. The drawback is manual focus. However again, manual focus itself is an art, and therapy if you will.

Yes - yes - I agree that sometimes using manual focus lenses is a good activity that forces more 'mindfulness' into your photography. It can be therapeutic and improve your photography skills and your images.

In most situations, I shoot nearly all my stills and video with the cameras set on 'manual' exposure mode, so I am always choosing the aperture and shutter speed and let the ISO float in a narrow range. Using manual focus is the 'completion' of that -- attaining total manual control over the image parameters.

Some of the lenses I use relatively frequently are manual focus lenses: the Laowa 9mm f2.8, Rokinon 12mm f2.8, Rokinon 135mm f2.0, and Rokinon 8mm f2.8 fisheye, I'm quite used to using those lenses differently than the AF lenses.

AFter doing some testing, you learn what the settings are that give you the desired depth of field (usually for landscapes or cityscapes, but can be for other subjects, like in my case approaching trains) and you can set the proper focus priecisely and quickly using the manual scale. AF in those circumstances isn't going to figure out the desired depth of field for your distance range and subject - and so it won't do what you can do in a split-second with a manual focus setting on a well-engineered MF lens.

For the wide-angle lenses, in many situations (night photography, astrophotography) manual focus is actually preferred --- faster and dead accurate when you know the lens. Manual focus becomes a natural habit when using those wide lenses.

For longer lenses like the Rokinon 135mm f2.0 and other 'vintage' lenses I use from time to time, it certainly is a much more conscious effort I've been shooting night video with the Roki 135 a lot lately mostly because nothing else I have can do the job and I don't want to spend a small fortune for a fast AF tele lens. Although I'm getting good results with the Roki, I'm also getting some focus 'misses' - so definitely some compromises there.