Traveling with one lens - the Laowa 9 mm

Maxmolly7 wrote:

Larry Rexley wrote:

ezriel wrote:

Nice.

just pointing out the the 11-22 goes to 10mm

....

Not only that, but the Laowa is a manual-focus lens with infinity focus marking and even a depth of field scale, making it preferable for some precision work and night and astrophotography uses.

....

, and the difference is 1mm, vs Zoom that does help when shooting landscape. Also as far as I heard the Photo quality on the 11-22 is better. Isn’t it?

Hi Larry,

I am new to the Laowa (and manual lens use on AF body), how do set to infinity?

Focus ring all the way to the right until mechnical stop or, to the center of the infinity mark?

It could be either, or neither. The only way to know for your copy is to use the focus magnifier at max power (10x for recent Canon M bodies) with the lens lens at f2.8. Focus on a subject very far away and find the point it is sharpest.

It may change slightly with the ambient temperature, as the lens might expand or contract if the temp changes drastically.

I don't have my Laowa yet. It is possible, due to the large depth of field, that distant objects may appear sharp both at the hard stop and the center of the infinity marking. That will be true when the lens is stopped down to f5.6 or 8 for sure.

Good advice Larry, I will check next time I get out! 

Larry Rexley wrote:

It could be either, or neither. The only way to know for your copy is to use the focus magnifier at max power (10x for recent Canon M bodies) with the lens lens at f2.8. Focus on a subject very far away and find the point it is sharpest.

It may change slightly with the ambient temperature, as the lens might expand or contract if the temp changes drastically.

I don't have my Laowa yet. It is possible, due to the large depth of field, that distant objects may appear sharp both at the hard stop and the center of the infinity marking. That will be true when the lens is stopped down to f5.6 or 8 for sure.

I took some Milky Way shots when I was up in Washington. The sky was only fair, with smoke in the distance, so no image was great. I just set the focus at infinity. I think this was shot wide open...

The stars mostly look pretty good.

David

My copy of the Laowa 9mm f2.8 lens arrived today. Weather was good and skies had some nice clouds, so I did some test shots with it, and took it on my usual bike ride to shoot some trains around Tampa.

The first two images are taken with my full-spectrum Canon M200. I managed to get images with a 67mm BG3 (dual-band blue and IR) and a 77mm Red R25A filter with almost no filter vignetting in the corners (with step-up rings). The lens has a mild infrared hot spot in the center, but I was able to correct it with a DxO control point, reducing the exposure and bumping up contrast, saturation, and microcontrast for a uniform image. Looks like the lens is usable for IR, and in the IR it's sharp enough to get decent images! Much sharper in IR than the EF-M 15-45 or EF-M 11-22, which both have fuzzy IR corners.

The lens needed about +40 to +50 vignetting correction in DxO which is a lot, but DxO's deep prime de-noise eliminated additional noise caused by pushing the corners 2 EV, even at the higher 1600 and 3200 ISO shots.

My lens focuses at infinity 'past' the infinity mark --- at infinity focus, the center of the infinity marking is exactly on the 'f2.8' marking on the lens to the left of the center 'focus' marking.

Full-spectrum M200, Laowa 9mm f2.8, 67mm BG3 dual-band filter (blue-violet & IR>700nm) f5.6, 1/640s, ISO 100, uncropped. Violet-tinged sky was hue-shifted more to the blue

Full-spectrum M200, Laowa 9mm f2.8, Vivitar 77mm R25A filter, f8, 1/100s, ISO 100, uncropped, 180-degree hue shift in DxO HSL settings (like a Red-Blue channel swap)

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f5.6, 1/400s, ISO 160, uncropped

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f5.6, 1/400s, ISO 125, cropped

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f5.6, 1/160s, ISO 640, cropped

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f5.6, 1/250s, ISO 500, uncropped

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f5.6, 1/800s, ISO 1600, cropped

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f5.6, 1/800s, ISO 3200, cropped

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f5.6, 1/100s, ISO 250, uncropped

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO 3200, cropped vertically: full pixel resolution

ezriel wrote:

It is around 10mm if going beyond the stop before lense get closed.
1mm in the sunset photos would not make a difference

quetion is photo quality wise which 1 is better

To show the field of view differences, here are shots from each of three lenses taken from the same spot of the same view: Rokinon 8mm f2.8, Laowa 9mm f2.8, and Canon EF-M 11-22mm at 11mm.

Rokinon 8mm f2.8 at f5.6

Laowa 9mm f2.8 at f4

Canon EF-M 11-22mm at 11mm, f5.6

1. Looks like the difference bet. Laowa & Rokinon is more than 1mm. 
   
2. turn the 11-22 to the left passed the stop, and the difference bet. the Laowa and 11-2/ will be even more insignificant. 

ezriel wrote:

1. Looks like the difference bet. Laowa & Rokinon is more than 1mm.
2. turn the 11-22 to the left passed the stop, and the difference bet. the Laowa and 11-2/ will be even more insignificant.

Not sure how Rokinon/Samyang came up with 8mm, but the 8mm fisheye's field of view is way wider than the rectilinear Laowa's 9mm, I was surprised by how much more it was. Notably, even though the Roki has curved lines, its projection is very nice and balanced looking, compared to the stretched out edges of the Laowa. Each has its uses.

I tried correcting the curvature of the Roki to see if I could get convert it to look like the Laowa, but doing so smeared out the resolution near the edges too much. It would only look good if I downsampled to about 768 pixels high!

As I mentioned in a prior post, my copy of the 11-22 shuts the camera down immediately if you try to retract the lens past the 11mm zoom point at all. It is not possible to get any wider. You're lucky if your copy allows you to go wider.

Also if you are a wide shoote, the diff between 11mm and 9mm is definitely not insignificant. Since 11 is already so wide, 9mm gives you quite a bit of extra field of view, and can give make the difference between whether you can gdt certain shots, or not.

What happened when you try the Auto Geometry correct on the Roki in Lightroom / Acr?

BTW, I had more than 1 11-22, you have to keep trying very carefully to move pass the stop VERY slightly. 
somtimes it’s immediately goes off, sometimes it let you extra half a MM.

ezriel wrote:

What happened when you try the Auto Geometry correct on the Roki in Lightroom / Acr?

I use DxO Photolab 5 and Viewpoint 3 to correct the fisheye curvature, which should be similar to what you can do in lightroom and other software.

Since you asked, here are results of perspective correcting the Rokinon 8mm shot and cropping to the 9mm field of view, converting to JPG at 'full' pixel resolution. I cropped from the center of the frame to get the least amount of distortion, so the image will look shifted, but the field of view is the same. Then a shot taken with the 9mm Laowa, downsampled to the same 'resolution' so it can be compared.

Canon M6ii, Rokinon 8mm f2.8 fisheye at f5.6, distortion correction using DxO PL5 & Viewpoint 3 to 'rectilinear', field of view cropped (centered) to match that of 9mm Laowa lens

Canon M6ii, Laowa 9mm f2.8 lens at f4, downsampled to same size as Rokinon '9mm cropped' image

Here's a similar comparison of the Rokinon 8mm fisheye curvature-corrected and cropped to the field of view of the Canon EF-M 11-22mm lens at f11, compared with the Canon downsampled to the same image resolution:

Canon M6ii, Rokinon 8mm f2.8 fisheye at f5.6, distortion correction using DxO PL5 & Viewpoint 3 to 'rectilinear', field of view cropped (centered) to match that of 11mm Canon 11-22 lens at 11mm

Canon M6ii,Canon EF_M 11-22 lens at 11mm, f5.6, downsampled to same size as Rokinon '11mm cropped' image

The Laowa and Canon lenses are sharper in the corners, but interestingly the curvature-corrected and cropped Rokinon fisheye results are better than you might expect, almost holding their own.