One Of Those “What am I doing here?” moments: 7Artisans 50mm f/1.1… Again.

Preamble:

Occasionally I realize that I am looking for logic inside an illogical artificial relevancy construct. What am I on about? I am glad I imagined you asked.

Avengers: Infinity War Outrage

I am a long time comic book nerd. Surprise, surprise. The Engineer IT guy that is into cameras likes comics. DC and Marvel movie overload is challenging my attention span though. Anyhoo. Infinity War. During the opening the Mad Titan Thanos cleaned The Hulk’s clock.

My initial reaction was outrage. Had been tracking both characters for many years. But Hulk gets stronger with rage. How dare they! But… Hold on.

Then I remembered something. I am attempting to attribute logic to that which by default is an illogical artificial relevancy construct. To wit:

What you have here is a mutated human scientist fighting the deviant offspring of an Eternal born on Saturn’s moon… <insert other further nerd ramblings here>.

And I am arguing strength levels.

So yeah. None of this makes any sense. But after years of ingesting these narratives, I have been conditioned to normalize base conceits that are also nonsense. Further, there is this… Who cares?

The bottom line is that Thanos needed to win in this instance to further the narrative. If The Hulk had won this would have been a 5 or 10 minute movie. Had to catch myself a few other times also.

• Starlord is an idiot for getting angry, they almost had… Hold on.
• Pfft. Turning to dust. He is not going to stay dead. I already read that another Spiderman movie was… Man. I keep doing this.

The house of mouse has solved my problem since. They have pumped out so much Marvel content of varying quality that I have become fatigued and have stopped caring about any of it. Same goes for Star Wars. Whoo! Lost track of proceedings there. Where was I? Right.

Looking for logic within an illogical artificial construct.

There is a lens that I keep buying, selling, buying, selling, etc. I have recently decided to get one and just keep it.

A very fast 50mm (My favorite focal length.) for a reasonable sum.

Why would I ever sell it?

I will get to a point where I convince myself that the lens does not make “sense”.

An admittedly affordable manual focus lens with “unique” image quality and a mount I may not have when I have native 50mm lenses at my disposal?

Put another way applying logic to what is an illogical construct. Photography is about many things. But logic is not one of them.

Why do I keep purchasing it?

A multitude of reasons.

Image Quality

Perfection is not necessarily perfect. A clinically perfect lens can be… boring. Wide open the 7Artisans can be hilarious, yielding wonderfully unpredictable results.

But then it will turn around and produce a technically proficient result.

If you want consistent results all you need to do is stop it down a bit.

Size

Despite its impressive aperture spec it is very compact.

Much smaller than the nearly as fast and the nearly perfect Sony G Master 50mm f/1.2. But that is not a fair comparison. That Sony lens is stellar in every measure so the size can be forgiven. But it is also far smaller and lighter than the also manual focus FE mount Mitakon 50mm f/0.95. And at this size it makes for a perfect daily carry lens whereas the other two are more for occasional use due to their heft.

Value

Can be had for $360 or so new and even less used. That is a good deal in general but an absolute bargain for an M mount lens new or used.

Use Cases

This is this lens’s party piece. Of course, it can be used with M mount cameras. And this one plays well with many of them.

Film M.

Digital M.

More to come… maybe.

Adapted.

Adapting to mirrorless is a trait technically shared with other M mount lenses. The only issue is that fast aperture M mount lenses are so expensive that it would make more sense to get a native mount lens instead. But this M mount lens is so affordable that you could be justified in buying it even if you do not have an M mount camera. There is also the added benefit over native M cameras of close focusing if you purchase a helicoid adapter (KEH post I wrote about this.).

Manual focus can be had very affordably. But courtesy TECHART you can have access to AF as well (Post I wrote for KEH.).

Though it is what Leica adherents would prefer that is something no M mount camera can offer. And at a few hundred dollars lens and adapter combined still make for a relatively affordable combination.

And no matter how you choose to use it this lens is capable of wonderful results.

Who knows what the future holds but currently I have no plans to let go of this lens again.

-ELW