Wide Angle Close Ups - The Opteka 15mm Macro Lens

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

Stranger In A Strange Land: I had planned on postponing my take on the Opteka 15mm F 4.0 wide angle, manual focus, Nikon mount, macro lens until later in the month, but an opportunity just popped up today, and with my enthusiasm thus whipped to a fever pitch, I was compelled to write about it immediately. Unlike my past musings, this post will be a collection of loosely related,  "get to the point" paragraphs.

The Subject: I found this Walking Stick clinging to my green Recyclable bin. I don't see them that often, which is a testament to their ability to hide in plain sight. I felt this would make a interesting subject, so I grabbed my X-E2 on which I installed a Photodiox Nikon G to Fuji adapter.  I carefully moved the insect to a remaining branch on the camellia bush I cut down earlier this year, and went to work.

The Lens: The Opteka 15mm lens ($109 on Amazon) is the fraternal twin of the more expensive Venus Optics Laowa macro lens  (about $499 at B&H) with similar specifications. The former lacks the tilt/shift feature of the latter, and as such, sells for less than one-third the cost. Both offer the user a wide angle macro capability for when you want you close-up photos to include wide swaths of recognizable backgrounds.

The lens feels like its build quality was not foremost in the designer's mind. The focusing is not particularly smooth when compared to the 7artisans lenses. The big draw for the lens is the unique nature of the lens itself: It will focus to 1:1* when used with a full-frame DSLR body. Unfortunately, to achieve this reproduction ratio, the subject must almost touch the front element of the lens. The seriously restricts your lighting options. 

Lighting: I used an manually adjusted shoe-mounted speedlight with a Gary Fong Light Sphere. The head was tilted to 45 degrees to maximize the relative size of the light source. Test shots showed that the background was too dark, which is understandable, since the shoe-mounted speedlight was less than a foot away, while the background was nearly three times the distance. Think Inverse-Square Law. To remedy this, I added a second remote speedlight with an early iteration of the Gary Fong Power Grid. This concentrated the light into a "spot" that I could re-position as needed.

This shot shows the walking stick with its front legs extended forward. The photo was made from above the insect, so the background is the ivy that covers the ground in front of my home. I'm sure that if the background was less abstract and more recognizable, the visual impact of a close-focusing macro lens would have been more apparent.

Since this Walking Stick was about 4" long, I decided to switch to my favorite lens, the 25mm F 1.8 from 7artisans. Using the same aperture settings, this image shows the relationship between the focal length of the lens and the appearance of the background. The working distance between the film sensor and the subject is much shorter when using the 15mm lens, but the distance to the background is, for all intents and purposes, the same for both the 15mm and the 25mm. The shot made with the longer lens renders ivy leaves larger and less district. 

I will submit another post when I find a situation where the visual impact of this close-focusing wide angle lens is visually more interesting. For the moment, I was just pleased to have a chance to solve the lighting problems associated with using flash at very short working distances. 

*If you're wondering, a 1:1 Reproduction Ratio means that it is capable of filling a standard 35mm negative with a subject an inch long and one and a half inches wide. When used on a crop sensor body like the Fuji X cameras, the reproduction ratio is 2;1 or twice life size.