As stated in my first post about this lens I have bought yet another FE mount 50mm lens. Had no plans to purchase one. Stumbled across it while trolling KEH’s website for lowest price FE lenses.
I also said that I may regret that post later on.
I do not.
Why? I am glad I imagined that you asked. I also said…
Next up I need to find myself a rooftop or some manner of elevated setting to get my forced perspective miniaturization on.
And wow. I did not know this until now but I really like tilt lenses.
When I first saw this lens I had thought I had owned a tilt lens before. But I had not. That was a shift lens.
I had heard them used together so often I had confused tilt and shift lenses. That Laowa was a good lens. But a wholly different beast from this TTArtisans lens. Very wide.
A 1:1 macro.
I even pretty much got the hang of shift on the fly.
But for a few reasons, it was not a good match for me.
- 15mm
- That is quite wide for regular use.
- I have a lens nearly as wide and brighter that also has AF.
- 1:1.
- Normally a good thing. But a bit difficult for me to exploit at 15mm without the lens casting a shadow on the subject.
- And while the 17-28mm Tamron does not approach 1:1 it gets close enough for my purposes.
- Virtual shift is a thing.
- Lightroom replicates the tilt function (straightening verticals) well enough for my purposes in most cases.
- Chock full of pointy parts.
- All those pointy parts in the product pic above wreak havoc on adjacent gear, elbows, soft or easily scratched surfaces etc.
One thing that did not bother me was a lack of AF. At 15mm and f/4 most everything not nearby is in focus. But with the list above I let it go. And I have had no regrets.
Alright, back to the task at hand.A quick cut and paste from the first post on why I bought this lens. It was:
- $170.
- Weird.
- All metal.
- Cool looking.
- 50mm.
- f/1.4.
Now that I have eliminated my tilt/shift confusion I can say that I am a huge fan of tilt. I could ramble on but one word mostly covers it.
Fun.
This lens is a hoot. In my first post about this lens I took some sample pics in a rather tight area. This did show some of this lens’ promise and I was impressed. So on to finding myself a rooftop or some manner of elevated setting to get my forced perspective miniaturization on.
Yep. There it is. And not only that. It was fun just using tilt to knock most of the frame out of focus.
And then it is also fun just as a regular old untilted 50mm f/1.4 lens.
So with that, I will stop talking and just show the sample images I took on a quick late afternoon run around my usual gear testing haunts. I will say that it was a lot of fun using this lens’ bag of tricks to take photos I have never taken before at locations I have photographed plenty of times before.
Ok. I count that as a success. Great fun while taking the pics and I am happy with the resulting images. That is a win-win. A few more thoughts before I close.
- Tilt ease of use.
- This lens is very easy to use. Tilt and rotation have locks that work well and both are easily manipulated.
- There is another similarly priced tilt lens I mentioned in the last post that lacks a metal build and requires the user to adjust the tilt by hand. I prefer this lens.
- Standard lens.
- Unlike that other tilt lens this lens has a worthy spec for using as a regular lens at 50mm and f/1.4.
- And not only that it is also somehow the least expensive available for new f/1.4 50mm manual focus lens. Oddly it costs even less than TTArtisans’ own 50mm f/1.4 non-tilt lens. Maybe because that lens may be sharper wide open? Ok. But even so I would personally rather have the more versatile tilt variant.
- Build, handling, and appearance.
- I mentioned this in the last post, but this is a good looking lens, that feels good in hand, and feels solidly built
That was a lot of fun for not a lot of spend. Well done TTArtisans… again.
Happy capturing.
-ELW
Eric L. Woods 
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