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.