7artisans 12mm F 2.8 - As Wide As It Comes*

For a compilation of the morning walk images, click here.

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I took the 7artisans 12mm F 2.8 lens with me on my morning walk, hoping to make a photo that would shout "wide angle" to the viewer. I had been using the 25mm lens for about two weeks, and found the weight and heft of the 12mm lens something I really couldn't ignore. It isn't the sort of lens that becomes an organic extension of the photographer. It requires a lot of thought to find a suitable subject. At least for me.

When designing a lens this wide, size and weight come with the territory. The bulbous front element and the petal lens hood make attaching a protective UV filter impossible in its current state. For the moment, I kept the lens cap on the lens until I was ready to make a shot, a precaution that puts a real damper on spontaneity.

Need one? Find one on eBay.

It turns out that 7artisans does have a filter holder for the lens. From what I've seen, it appears to slip over the lens hood petals and is held in place with a strip of felt, an insecure arrangement at best. It takes 77mm filters, an easy go for me since this is the standard thread size for my 2.8 Nikkors. My real fear is that the adapter will catch on something and drag an unsuspecting B&W filter crashing to the ground. Ouch!

One word of caution if you decide to add a protective filter. The 102 degree angle of acceptance means that at the edges, light will enter the lens at a 51 degree angle. Image carrying light entering the edge of the lens at so steep an angle is bound to introduce some color fringing.

If adding filters is really that important to you, there are alternatives, but not from 7artisans. Samyang, Opteka, and Meike offer 12mm lenses that will accept filters. You can see their specifications by clicking here.

Backlit Leaves, Mars Street in San Francisco. April 22, 2020

I found these these backlit leaves that were naturally framed by the surrounding shrubbery. The leaves in the center are reasonably sharp, not so much because of the lens design but because of the difficulty in establishing critical focus with a wide angle lens. Perhaps I should have changed from Focus Peaking to Digital Split Image, or perhaps even the standard, unassisted focusing mode. In any case, better planning on my part might have sharpened the image a bit, but it's a reasonable image, but not one that could stand up to extreme enlargement and close examination.

Crosswalk, Portola Avenue San Francisco. April 22, 2020

This crosswalk image could also have benefited from some additional planning. For now, I am not confident the lens is capable of delivering stellar sharpness from edge to edge, as the sign above the crossing request button isn't super sharp. If memory serves, I opted to set my focus to favor the background, which could have thrown the foreground "out of focus". Since I'm still in the experimental stage, I'll give this one a pass, with a commitment to give more attention to details in the future.

Ghosts In My Lens: One re-occurring artifact is the "ghost", or small bright shapes the arranged themselves in a line with the center of the lens as their source. I don't recall seeing a multi-colored series like this one, but they do occur when a sun, just outside of the field of view, sends light into the lens and ricochets off the inner surface of the lens barrel which passes obliquely through the glass elements of the lens. A proper anti-reflective coating of each lens glass-to-air surface should minimize, or eliminate, these dots of light. We should note that they are shaped like the lens aperture, and one can infer that the more rounded the aperture, the more rounded the ghost. This lens has only seven aperture blades, which explains the heptagonal** shape.

The fix is simple. Just use your hand to shield the lens. I normally position my hand so that it can be seen in the viewfinder, and move it until it no longer appears in the frame. Luckily for us, mirrorless cameras allow you to preview the image immediately after the shot is made without moving your eye from the viewfinder. 

I'll continue to shoot with the lens, and see what else I can discover.

* 7artisans offers a fisheye lens, but after experimenting with my Tokina APS frame lens adapted to Fuji, decided that owning it would be much more fun than actually using it.

**Seven-sided regular polygon.