I already reviewed a few of Miyazaki Sadayasu’s lenses but I had yet to get my hands on his MS-Optics 35mm 1.4 Apoqualia. Thanks to a reader from France I now got the chance and I am very curious what the pictures taken with it will look like and what its quirks are. Let’s discover together in this review.
Lens is being tested on 42mp Sony A7rII and 24mp Leica M10
Kodak Gold 200 is something special these days. I don’t have the feeling it has ever been a highly praised 35mm film, but it is one of the few color films that is affordable and still widely available in 2022.
Processing and scanning was done at urbanfilmlab in Germany.
Continue reading Analogue Adventures – Part 9: Kodak Gold 200
Modern lenses are too good, free of most optical aberrations even at their maximum aperture. This led to a whole new market emerging offering all kind of accessories to make your pictures look worse: kaleidoscope filters, prisms, streak filters and black mist/diffusion filters, the latter being what we will have a look at today.
A couple of years ago, with samples taken on the last major overseas trip I took before Covid closed the world for quite a while, I reviewed the Laowa 100mm macro. I concluded it was good and sharp, a little challenged for flare at longer distances, but absolutely superb in the macro range. Eventually – in fact very recently, a couple of years after that review – I purchased my own copy. I was doing a lot of macro and at actual macro distances that lens is in most ways better than all the pricier lenses I’ve tried (though perhaps not as an all purpose short tele with macro).
Of course, inevitably, after I paid my money, Laowa announced a new lens – a 90mm, built specifically for mirrorless, and a lot more compact, with otherwise similar specs.
Did I blow it? Should I get rid of my recently acquired 100 and get the new 90? Read on and see.
Samples
Continue reading Laowa FFii 90mm F2.8 CA-Dreamer Macro 2x: getting close!
The Samyang 10mm 3.5 XP is a bit of an odd lens. It is still the widest lens for DSLRs, but it was announced at a time when no one really cared about DSLRs anymore. And it came out after the Voigtländer 10mm 5.6, which surely didn’t help the marketing department. And in the meantime we also got the Laowa 9mm 5.6, which is even wider, has great optics and is small at the same time. So is there still a reason to get the Samyang 10mm 3.5 XP in 2022? Let’s find out in this review.
