The Viltrox 28mm F 4.5 In Use

1/200 second, F 4.5, ISO 200, 3-stop neutral density filter.

Sharp! I've been playing around with my new Viltrox 28mm F 4.5 quite a bit, and am very impressed with both its wide angle outlook on life, and the high degree of clinical sharpness. My assessment has been quite favorable so far, although adapting to the fixed F 4.5  aperture is still a work in progress.  But sharp it is, and this quality alone might justify a higher suggested retail price.

Now just for fun I included a cropped portion of the lead photograph. You can easily see the embossing on the bridge of my spectacles, which is a performance level well above its pay grade. Going back the lead image, I really liked how the out-of-focus background was so softly rendered

The Fixed Aperture: This particular lens has an aperture fixed at F 4.5. With low ISO settings, aperture priority exposure mode setting, and an outdoor subject this is definitely not a disadvantage unless you want/need greater depth of field. But as you may have guessed, I tend to think about what I would need to do if I wanted to employ a flash, and how this fixed aperture size might complicate a shooting solution. Since all of my current  interchangeable lens mirrorless bodies sync at about 1/200 of a second, the F 4.5 aperture makes it almost impossible to use it with flash outdoors. Que the ND Filter.

Bring The Darkness: Neutral Density (ND) filters can darken an image by reducing the amount of light passing through the lens. The one I purchased decreases the light throughput by 3 stops, turning my F 4.5 lens to an effective F-stop of between F11 and F 16. If you examine the lead shot's exposure data and adjust the aperture to accommodate the ND filter. the settings closely correspond to the values derived from the "Sunny Sixteen Rule". The combination of filter and fixed aperture allows my to properly expose a sunlit subject at a shutter setting low enough for effective lash application. The exposure settings gave me the cyan sky I so adore, but shadow detail has been sacrificed to achieve it. The facial illumination? I used a shoe mounted flash bounced off my neighbor's  white garage door.

Here's my Sony Alpha 7 with, from top to bottom :

• Hoya PRO ND filter,
• Vivitar 52mm filter with the glass and retaining ring removed,
• Filmatura 52mm filter adapter (triangle logo), and
• Viltrox 28 F 4.5 autofocus pancake lens.

Conclusion: This has been an exercise in extending the capabilities of an inexpensive, albeit useful, lens into the possible deployment into the "flash zone". Now all of this could be duplicated by using an 18mm APS lens on any of my Fuji bodies and mounting a neutral density filter for use with the F 4.5 shooting aperture. This flash, ND filter, and lens combination produced an interesting image with foreground detail and a softly rendered background. Again, just the sort of trick that might come in handy someday.

Custom White Balance With Flash

 

This should have been the money shot from a recent "Kitten Shower" held by the Peninsula SPCA. I sent two other photos for the Editor In Chief to select from and for some reason this one wasn't one of them, although the more I look at it, the more I wished I had sent it.

The venue featured narrow hallways with yellow walls and ceilings. I made this test shot by bouncing my flash off the ceiling, and you can see the yellow tint on my subject's faces. If the surroundings were painted in a warm color, the added tint might have gone unnoticed, or in the best case, actually improved their coloration. Yellow, unfortunately, gives my subjects a jaundiced look, and technically accurate, but not complimentary.

Now before proceeding, you should familiarize yourself with how to create a custom white balance (CWB) setting. While it may have been a novelty when digital cameras evolved, photographers soon realized that while one such preset would be very useful, the ability to create one for each venue where the lighting varied even the slightest bit. Currently, most cameras have provisions for multiple saved presets. Sure, you can correct this in post production, but by taking a few seconds to establish an "environmentally appropriate" CWB setting, you can save yourself  a lot of time during post production.

Read Ken Rockwell's review here.

White Balance Measurement. When the Expo Disc first appeared on the market in 2011, it gave photographers an easy way to obtain a CWB setting. It was designed primarily for achieving a compromise white balance formula when working with continuous artificial light sources. In use, one would:

• Select the CWB (or equivalent) setting from the camera's menu,
• Set the Exposure Control to A,
• Attach the Expo Disk to the front of the lens,
• Point the camera towards the light source, and
• Press the shutter release.

Internally, the camera would evaluate each photo sensor and adjust the red, green, and blue readings until they were all the same value, yielding a "neutral" baseline for the white balance setting.

Buy yours here.

I gave away my Expo Disk years ago, and experimented with a variety of gray card substitutes as a "target" for creating a CWP value. I finally replaced the Expo Disk with this inexpensive plastic Dot Line White Balance Lens Cap, which works just as well as the three-times more expensive Expo Disk. It could be adapted to serve as a lens cap, as it was made in a variety of diameters from 52 to 77mm. At one time they could be had in 49 and 82mm sizes, but apparently no longer. Since they were so inexpensive, I bought one in every diameter, but in the end, just carried the 82mm size and just held it in place over the lens whenever I needed to create a CWB for the current photographic venue. I keep one of these in all of my "recreational" camera bags, and there should have been one in the "working bag" I carry when on assignment.  I repeat: Should have.

I realized that the disk would have been the only way to properly achieve a  CWB for those pesky yellow walls. As it turned out, the disk was nowhere to be found. I wondered what I would do next, until I found the Dome from my Gary Fong Light Sphere. I now held a perfectly usable neutral diffuser that I could hold in front of my lens while I measured the light bouncing off of those yellow walls. I promptly did just that, and it gave me the proper white balance for all the photos when I bounced my flash off of similarly painted walls

In this historically accurate reenactment, you can see how I held the dome in front of the lens while I made the CWB reading. The forward-facing flash is directed towards the selected bounce surface when the reading is made. In the event of an over or under exposure warning, I will need to adjust the output until I get a proper reading. I rotate the flash head towards the bounce surface when I am actually shooting.

As described, this flash technique should only be used when bouncing off of a reflective surface. If the flash is to be used as a direct light source,  repeat this process while aiming your flash/camera into a convenient mirror. If you're adjusting the flash output manually, you'll need to dial the output way down, select a smaller shooting aperture, or both.

For the technically inclined, this photo was made (obviously) with two cameras: one mounted on a tripod, and the other held in my hand. The key light was provided by a radio controlled speedlight mounted on a light stand just to the left of the camera. A shoot-through umbrella was utilized for the shot. The second flash on the camera in my hand was programmed to respond to the radio trigger of the tripod camera, thus ensuring that it would fire when the tripod camera fired the key light. The fully articulating screen of the Fuji T-4 helped me position myself within the frame. Final cropping gave me the composition I wanted.