The Opteka Lens, Again

I had some time to kill before I was to meet a friend in Richmond, so I thought I'd take a 30-minute detour into Sausalito and spend the time looking for something to photograph with my 15mm F 4.0 Opteka wide angle macro lens, a lens I have barely touched in over three years. As I mentioned in the Morning Photo posting, it's a lens looking for a reason to exist. Yes, it can photograph at a 1:1 reproduction ratio and render images with world-width backgrounds. But the novelty wore off quickly when the images were a little soft with color-fringed edges. It turned out that I could not find a subject that would showcase the close-focusing capabilities and the wide angle of acceptance of the lens. Everything that caught my eye was pretty much two dimensional or too large to take advantage of  the macro focusing capabilities. The canisters in this photo were about 12" in diameter, and were oddly rendered due to the short shooting distance. I attempted to correct the barrel distortion that curved the foreground, and was partially successful. The Opteka never received high marks in this regard. This was Sausalito, so of course I had to stop to admire the many yachts resting in their slips. The crisp whites and the cyan skies always catch my attention. I made tis shot intending to examine it for color fringing and other difficult to correct optical defects so common in inexpensive lenses. There was definitely some color flinging and a lack of sharpness along the edges, totally expected for a lens at this price point.

One of the most memorable articles from Modern Photography was one where a Scandinavian photographer who, armed with a Hasselblad 500, a 40mm Zeiss Distagon lens, and some film, created several black and white images using a single egg as a prop. He created one image where he photographed the soles of his model’s feet, one wearing a black sock and the other bare, with the egg carefully nestled between them. If the egg was a metaphor for the origins of life, the human presence in the image made one ponder the evolution of our species from an unusual perspective. The photographs gave me something to think about, since those images have stayed in my intellectual photo album for nearly fifty years.

The objective of creating a decent image using this lens proved to be a "bridge too far". A huge expanse of unencumbered background is difficult to find so close to civilization, so I think I will swap the lens to something that is not quite so wide. And this exercise saved me the expense of buying this Pergear 14mm lens. it is tempting.

There is one thing that may me succumb to temptation and buy the lens: My Opteka is designed to work on a Nikon DSLR, and my employ an adapter to work on my mirrorless cameras. If if turns out that the Pergear is more compact than the Opteka PLUS the necessary adapter, it may be back in the running.