Just a little reminder that you find my list of all fullframe E-mount lenses (with electronic contacts) under list.phillipreeve.net. As of today it has data for 113 lenses.
If you spot any mistakes (I am sure there are still some) or if I should have missed a lens please leave a comment.
I love travel photography, going to exotic places and exploring landscapes and cities different from those I can find back home. But when you travel somewhere far away what you mostly do is checking before what are “the best” spots, hoping for decent weather only to actually end up at a totally overcrowded landmark with lots of other photographers, fighting for a good spot and hoping to not have too many tourists in the picture.
In this article I will try to show some alternatives that might not be as exotic, but can nevertheless be just as enjoyable and in the process might also improve your photography skills more than just “collecting” the shots from other photographers.
Landscape astro photography or milky way photography is getting more and more popular nowadays. In my opinion a good milky way picture is about more than the stars alone, a good foreground is what makes your picture stand out. Landscape astro photography has been one of my favorite subjects for several years now, so in this article I will share my experiences for those that are just starting out.
For a few years now I’ve owned an FLM CB-58FTR ballhead. It sits on my largest series 4 tripod, and I’ve liked it up to now, and admired it’s extraordinary engineering. But I discovered something recently. I didn’t know how to use it properly. Not the fancy tilt mechanism that allows you to lock all axes but one, that was fine. Not the fancy switchable indexing on the pan mechanism, I had that down. But the simple act of setting the friction, and locking and unlocking the head. I had that all wrong. And so did almost everyone on the web. So in the timeless style of first paragraph stings: does this mean that the head is even better than I thought? Spoiler: yes.
Back in 2018 Samyang – mostly known for cheap manual focus lenses like the 14mm 2.8 and the 85mm 1.4 at that time – wanted to show what they are capable of and released the first lens of their “Premium MF XP Series”, the Samyang 50mm f/1.2 XP. These faster XP lenses are only available for Canon EF mount and it seems they were devoid of any size constraints during development and even come with electronic contacts and electronic diaphragm controlled by the camera.
Despite all this it seems no one bought them though – was it due to bad marketing, lack in optical qualities or simply because of the massive size of these lenses? Let us find out in this review!
