Thursday, August 31, 2017

Laowa 7.5mm f/2 MFT for Astrophotography? YASSS!


So yes, the Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 together with my GX7 can make some really awesome wide-field Astrophotography shots in a relatively small package.

ISO 200, 25 seconds shutter speed, and f/2.0 wide open for the Milky Way exposure. These are actually blended exposures, the other exposure for the house was taken using the same setting except that the shutter speed is about 8 seconds or so.

The exposures were processed in Lightroom, and then blended in Photoshop.

I must say I'm very satisfied with the result of this combination. Maybe I'll have a chance to photograph Northern Light again in the future, then I'll bring this lens along and get some awesome shots!!

Enjoy!

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

DIY Focus Calibration Repair on Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 MFT

Dear all,

I know what you're thinking. You just received that shiny new Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 for your MFT camera, you're all excited and jumping in joy, you grabbed the camera outside, find some nice place to do some test shots, focused the lens, took the shot, got back home, and when the files are on your computer everything looks mushy and lack details especially on faraway objects at its largest aperture, no matter how you set the focus on the lens.

My friends, I am sorry to say that your Laowa 7.5mm isn't properly calibrated. The lens couldn't focus to infinity eventhough the focus marker goes to infinity and beyond. I had the same problem too and I know some might have the same problem. Not all of the copy of this lens have the same issue though, so if your lens produce an adequately sharp picture, your lens is fine.

But fear not, today I'm going to show you how to repair it yourself. I know, you can send it back to them for a replacement unit, or wait for it to get repaired by Laowa. I took a slightly more savage route and repair it myself. This post was inspired by an article about fixing Samyang 7.5mm FE lens that someone gave to me during a conversation in a forum(here's the link).

Before we continue, let me remind you that doing this can void your warranty, and there's a very high risk of ruining your lens very badly. There's also a very high chance that doing this will introduce decentering to your lens. I do not suggest you to do this if you are not confident enough to open a lens, sending it back to Laowa is a better idea, or alternatively you can ask a professional lens repairer around your area. I am not going to be responsible for your action should you do what I'm about to show you.

So with that out of the way, let's start, shall we. Here are the tools that you need:
1. A very good, sturdy, plus-shaped screwdriver.
2. A piece of paper(the usual paper for your home printer will work just fine).
3. A roll of double-sided tape.
4. A good lighting so that you can clearly see the screws and the holes inside your lens.
5. Flat surface, a table or something.
6. Rocket blower or similar, the one that you use to blow air into your sensor.
7. Micro fiber cloth, just in case you accidentaly touch any of the lens elements.

Basically, what I'm about to do is to add something in between the lens' rear element and its holder that connects to the focusing mechanism inside the lens so that there's an increased distance from the rear element to mimic added focus rotation on the lever to the direction of infinity focus. There must be a better way than this, but for now I am adding the distance by adding just pieces of thin layer of paper.

Step 1:

Put the lens on your table with the front element facing down. Remove the rear cap, and now you'll see the bayonet mount. On the bayonet mount, there are 4 screws that are holding the bayonet mount with the chassis of the lens. Remove those screws carefully. They are really tight, so be patient with them and do not use excess power as you may strip the screws and will make it harder to screw/unscrew them. There's an extra screw that screws-horizontally to the middle part of the bayonet mount, ignore that screw.




Step 2:

Remove the bayonet mount, now you'll see that the rear element is being held together by 4 screws that screw the rear element into the middle part of the lens that has something to do with the focus lever. Remove those 4 screws. Careful, avoid touching the glasses, they are difficult to clean. Ignore the screws on the outer part of this section, just remove the 4 inner screws that are holding the rear elements.




Step 3:

Once you unscrew those screws, take the rear element, flip it around so that the rearest element is facing down, and put it on the table. Put some microfiber cloth between the table and the rear element, so you can minimize the chance of the rear element gets scratched.

Depending on how bad your mis-focus is, you may need to layer the pieces of paper, or use slightly thinner paper. On my case, on the infinity mark, at f/2.0 only objects that are about 2 to 4 meters away are in focus. On the maximum rotation of the lens, only objects that are about 3 to 5 meters away are in focus. I will need to get at least to 4 or 5 meters so that it can reach optimal hyperfocal distance and get everything from that distance to infinity in focus.

In my case, a single layer of paper is enough. If your lens focus only to about 1 meter or less, then it's a good idea to stack multiple layers of paper, so cut more pieces or fold the 4 pieces so that they mimick stacked layers of paper. This is all just approximation by the way. If you only need the lens to focus a hair further, then don't use the regular home printer paper, use something thinner instead. You get the idea.

Now cut 4 small pieces of paper about 0.5cm x 0.2cm, and put some double tape on one side. Put these 4 taped pieces of paper to the outer plate that has the screw holes on the rear element. Put them on the surface that doesn't have the screw holes. Make sure that all pieces of paper have the same uniform thickness, otherwise you could cause some serious decentering on the lens. Remove the protective layer of the double sided tape.




Step 4:

Blow some air with the rocket blower to the inner core of the main part of the lens, where the rear element should be, and remove any dust that might have entered that part of the lens. Now place the rear element back to its place, and screw the screws back together. After you add the pieces of paper, you might need to screw the screws more carefully.

Step 5:

Again, blow some air on the surface of the part of the lens where the bayonet mounting should be, and remove any dust that might have been there. Now place back the bayonet mounting, and screw the screws back together.

Step 6:

Again, blow some air on the bayonet mount and the rear element to remove any dust on it, and then mount the lens to your camera. Try the fixed focus and see how it performs. You might need to re-do the whole thing and adjust the thickness of the pieces of paper until you get the focus to focus properly to infinity, not "to infinity and beyond".

Alternatively, if you are lazy and don't mind innaccurate focus markers, you can just find the new infinity focus point and mark it yourself with a pen or scratch it permanently using blade. The way to do this is to focus on an object that is faraway, at least 5 meters away from you, at f/2.0. Mark the focus position on the lens at the point where your objects are at the sharpest focus. That's it! Now everytime you shoot, just focus to that mark, and you'll get anything from 5 meters to infinity all in focus.

I hope you find this post to be useful. Cheers and God bless you! :)


Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Using Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 MFT on A Trip to Northern Norway and Svalbard - A Review of the Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0

Hello all, sorry for the absent from this blog, I just want to share a quick new post about this new amazing little lens that got me so excited: Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 for Micro Four Thirds. At a glance, you can tell that this is a one-of-a-kind lens in the ultra-wide angle genre, due to the fact that it offers a really wide focal length, paired with a very large aperture that you never encounter on an UWA lens in any format and mount so far, without going to fish-eye teritory or aperture less than f/2.8.

The little Laowa 7.5mm f/2

To boot up, this lens delivers the equivalent field of view of 15mm in full frame terms, which is really wide, and perfect for stuffs like landscape, architecture, interior, vlogging, environmental portraits, and just overall wide-angle-ly stuffs. Coupled with f/2.0 fast aperture, it's now passable as an astrophotography lens, night landscape, and similar niche photographic genres.

This wasn't taken from the Svalbard and Norway trip, but it should show what the Laowa could do. Warning: the stars were added in post processing using stacked layer from another photo, but the rest are from the real scenery.

The size of the lens is really small. I mean, really really small. Smaller than the Panasonic 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II kit lens that comes together with the GX7 when I bought it. It's no pancake, but it's smaller than most non-pancake primes for MFT. It is lightweight, but not to the point where it feels cheap and plasticky.

Laowa compared with the kit 14-42mm II from Panasonic

This is a manual only lens, meaning that there is no autofocus, there is no electrical contact to the camera body, and the user will need to set both the aperture and the focus manually by rotating the ring-levers for the respective functions on the lens. This lack of auto-focus and aperture may be a deal breaker for some, especially the auto-focus, but keep in mind that this is a wide angle lens. You can figure out the hyperfocal distance of the depth of field area for this lens, which is about 3 meters or 4 meters at f/2.0, and everything from there to infinity will be acceptably and relatively sharp. That basically means, just set the focus lever to infinity, and leave it there for the rest of your life, and you'll get sharp result, as long as your subject is at least 3-4 meters away.

Do you want bokeh? Here's your bokeh. I don't think I'll ever shoot bokeh stuffs with this lens anymore though, unless I really have to.

For a test drive, I took the lens on my recent trip around northern Norway to places like Honningsvag, Hammerfest, Tromso, as well as to the northern edge of the earth in the island of Svalbard where I visited Longyearbyen, Barentsburg, Pyramiden, and some other places around there. The trip required me to have a wide angle lens to photograph the sceneries, and my pre-ordered Laowa came just right before the trip.

Honningsvag, a lovely quiet little town that used to be a very busy fisherman center.

The timing couldn't be better, I wanted to carry the Laowa for its wide 7.5mm focal length instead of the somewhat limiting 9mm of my Olympus 9-18mm, which was proven not wide enough during my New Zealand trip a month before this trip. The Panasonic 7-14mm that I have is wide enough, but it is larger and heavier than the Laowa, so it's not really my first-choice although it is sharp, has an AF, and could produce wonderful IQ. Just a few extra grams on the 7-14mm could add so much burden to my shoulder over a long period of carrying the lens in my bag, which obviously makes the Laowa a very compelling choice for this trip, for both its light-weight and wide focal length.

Inside the Hammerfest Church. The f/2 aperture helped me to get stable shot at relatively good shutter speed and low-ish ISO, so I don't need to rely on tripod.

I visited these places on the month of July, so there was a lot of sunshine. There's even no sunset on some places that I visited during that period of time! This is a natural phenomenon commonly found in Arctic region called midnight sun.

The settlement of Longyearbyen in Svalbard, with the sun in the frame. This was about 11pm in the evening!

The trip, while not emphasizing on landscape photography significantly, was nevertheless a good chance for snapping general travel photography pictures. That means cityscapes, landscapes, street photography, candid portrait, documentation, and other genres of photography commonly incorporated in travel photography. For most of the time, I had my Panasonic GX8 with either a 14-140mm or a 12-35mm f/2.8 bolted on it to cover most of my photography and video needs, but I also brought my Laowa 7.5mm which was bolted to my GX7.

Fisherman village near Honningsvag. Cityscapes like this easily fit into the 7.5mm field of view of the Laowa.

In northern Norway, the lens was employed many times to photograph many landscapes and cityscapes of the visited places. However, in Svalbard, the opportunity to photograph landscapes was more limited due to the fact that we were not allowed to wander alone and/or without a rifle in less-populated area because of the danger of polar bears roaming around. I was limited to photograph landscapes that were "readily available" nearby the settlement which did not require me to have a qualified guide and/or a rifle.

Camp Barentz, named after the founder of Svalbard or Spitsbergen. Even to photograph this scene, I needed to have a guide armed with both rifle and a flare gun to guard me from the danger of Polar Bear.

I was expecting this lens to be a full replacement for my current wide angle lenses in this trip, and with that in mind, here are some things that I found from using the Laowa lens for a few days.

What I like from this lens?

The thing is just acceptably sharp at f/2, but it starts to show some real magic at f/2.8. Stopping down to f/4.0 will give you the optimum result. The little lens seemed to be sharper in the center of the frame than in the edges or corners at its larger apertures, but the difference of sharpness between center and the corners are not that significant, so you won't be bothered anyway.

Spending a short fun time in Tromso, Norway.

Micro contrast is pretty high, and there's almost no chromatic aberration, at least on my copy of the lens. That means, this lens will generate a very high quality looking image without the need of too much post-processing in regards to contrast and lens-correction.

The scenery of Longyearbyen settlement. They have no sun during winter, and sun 24/7 during summer.

Distortion, while present, is not too bad for an ultra wide angle. It doesn't show up in your picture immediately, unless you shoot stripes or square patterns in your image. My Panasonic 7-14mm f/4.0 would show less distortion on the final result, but that's beause there is some auto-correction happening in the camera body. My Olympus 9-18mm f/4-5.6 would do the same thing too. Keep in mind, the Laowa doesn't have that magical digital correction like the Panasonic or Olympus lenses, it's a full manual lens.

The city of Tromso, taken from above the hill of Storsteinen.

Build quality of this lens is good. It feels sturdy, there are lots of metal parts being used in the body of the lens, and there is no "loose" part jingling around in the lens. The manufacturer provides a small petal shaped lens hood that does nothing to kill the flare, but at the very least helps to protect the front element of the lens. I quickly replaced the hood with a more useful 46mm-58mm step up ring, so now I can use my whole array of 58mm filters that I can interchange between the Laowa and my other lenses like my 12-35mm, 14-140mm, 35-100mm, and 75mm.

Yeah, it takes filter now, so you can mount your filter holder and put some crazy NDs right there!

Speaking of the step up ring, the 46mm thread on the front of the lens means the lens now provides the opportunity for us to put filters on it. Say what you want about filters, but the ability to put at least an ND filter is a real bonus here. Heck, I can now put my old Hitech filter holder, and snap a Lee Big Stopper together with two 0.6 Grad NDs to create "the perfect landscape setup". No vignetting, no cow poo, just a real awesome filter setup. (By the way, a 105mm polarizer ring on the Hitech holder does show up on the corners of the frame, so I guess you can't really use a 105mm polarizer on a holder with the Laowa)

Typical scenery of Svalbard/Spitsbergen, very rocky, with very little vegetation, and lots of pointy mountain, hence the name Spitsbergen. I should have used a grad ND for this, but rather, I applied digital grad ND on post.

On the contrary, my Panasonic 7-14mm doesn't have filter thread, so I am forced to stack layers of images and post-process them to mimic a long shutter ND filter. That forced me to buy the Olympus 9-18mm which has the filter thread, but the lens is frequently not wide enough for my kind of landscape photography. So thank goodness for the filter thread on the Laowa lens.

Hammerfest panoramic, stitched in-camera using the GX7. Even sometimes 7.5mm is not wide enough, but thankfully I could panorama this scene easily in camera.

Ironically, I have to confess that I did not use my grad ND nor my Big Stopper that much during the trip. But still, the fact that there's a filter thread on the Laowa gave me that "peace of mind", knowing that I could quickly grab those filters with the Hitech holder and quickly install them on the Laowa if I really need to.

Environmental portrait of me with the little town of Honningsvag behind me.

What I don't like from this lens?

No autofocus. This means you have to rely on 1) hyperfocal distance 2) manual focus assist and 3) smaller aperture to get tolerable depth of field on your subject. I do wish that this is an AF lens, but then it's a wide angle lens, so I can getaway with focusing it to hyperfocal and get everything in acceptable focus. This means I should focus it to the maximum focus lever rotation which is on the mark that's a little bit beyond infinity.

The Laowa being bolted onto my GX7. Thankfully, the GX7 does have some manual focus assist features that helped me getting precise focus with the Laowa.

Things to note here: at f/2.0 it will make anything that's about 5 meters away from you in focus, and everything beyond about 20 meters away will be in "acceptable" focus, but not perfectly tack sharp. I don't know if this is a defect, de-centering, or if it's just the nature of this lens at that aperture. At f/2.8, it displays perfect focus from 5 meters away to about infinity. At f/4.0, it will render the perfect sharpness across the frame from at least 3 meters away. So during the trip, I did most of my shooting at f/2.8 and f/4, unless I really really need to shoot at f/2 for indoor documentation or other low-light situation.

Ultra wide environmental portrait of me with the city of Tromso behind me.

With that in mind, one might pose a question, can we still use the Laowa at f/2.0 for Astrophotography? I will need to do further test on this matter, since I don't have a clear night sky in these last few days. Also during my trip to Norway and Svalbard, the sun was there all the time 24/7, so I did not get a chance to do astro at all. However, judging from the fact that f/2.0 only produced an acceptable sharpness at infinity, it may potentially cause less than satisfactory result for Astrophotography. But looking at what it produced on my test shots so far, I think I can still do it, albeit with heavier post-processing techniques to regain sharpness on the stars.

What is so-so?

Flare is kind of in-between. I don't find it to be that distracting to be honest, unless you are shooting into a strong light source really often, in which case, you might going to encounter some large-nasty-circular flares on your photos that can be anywhere from the edges to the corners of the frame.

Enjoying a good morning in Tromso. Notice the flare on the lower edge of the frame. That's what you get mostly when shooting with a strong light source in your frame.

I do shoot a lot of sceneries with the sun itself actually in the frames using the Laowa during the trip to Norway and Svalbard. And when there's a flare showing up in the frame because of the sun, all I did was simply adjust the composition and angle a little bit, and the flare disappeared, with no significant change to the overall composition of the particular frame. As I said, most of the flares were present at the edges of the frame, so if I was unable to change the composition at all, I can still crop a bit and get the flare cropped out, so it's not really that big of a deal for me. At the very least, I can say that the flare in this little Laowa lens is more controlable than the flare in my Panasonic 7-14mm f/4.0, even when the Panasonic lens is mounted onto a Panasonic body, because the flare in Pan 7-14mm shows up more in the center area of the frame rather than on the edges or corners like the Laowa.

Crop it, and the flares are gone. Taken near Camp Barentz.

There's also a hint of vignetting, especially on larger apertures like f/2.8 or f/2.0. The vignetting can be easily corrected in post processing, using Lightroom or similar software. However, I somehow don't get bothered by the vignetting because I like how the vignette somewhat helps the viewer to focus more on the center of the image, where the main objects are usually placed in the frame. However, please keep in mind that I am one of those guys who always add a hint of vignettes to the images, so there's that.

The ghost town of Pyramiden. An ex-Russian-miner community, now abandoned. Notice the vignetting, it helps to get your eyes to focus on the landmark instead of the edges of the frame.

Final words?

Last but not least, think again. For a relatively acceptable price, you get a small, lightweight, compact, wide angle(NOT FISH EYE) with truly wide focal length, with an aperture larger than f/2.8. This was UNHEARD OF in the MFT world. Granted, it's a manual lens, but adding auto-focus will probably: 1) add more weight or 2) increase the price or 3) compromise the sharpness or 4) 1-3 all of them together at once.

Lightweight lens means more fun. I can now discover fun compositions like this one using the Laowa lens. This was taken near the city center of Hammerfest.

So for me, all of those great aspects of the lens really outweights the small few negatives that plagued the lenses. I really think this lens is a great product. Though it's not without flaws, it's a product that pushed the boundaries of lens design and manufacturing to a more forward direction(eventhough it's just a manual lens).

Typical scenery of northern Norway region.

As the trend of larger and heavier lenses as well as bodies continues to happen in the Micro Four Thirds format, this lens reminds us back to the original philosophy of MFT: small, lightweight, sharp, and high quality.


When the words about this lens came out in the rumors and forums, I was really really excited. It was all that I want from a wide angle lens. Now that I have it, though it's not 100% perfect, it really meets all the expectations that I have for it, and I am having fun shooting with it as well as really become inspired by the lens. In my experience, it performed well enough during the trip to Norway and Svalbard, and I will surely take it on my next trips.

Again, the fisherman village near Honningsvag, but from a different angle. Walking around trying to discover new landscape compositions is no longer a burden to me, thanks to the lightweight Laowa lens.

Overall the Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 is a great little lens that invirogated the Micro Four Thirds world once again with a forward-thinking, boundary-pushing product. I hope you find this review to be useful. Thank you for reading, and God bless you :)

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