Nisi 100mm Holder for Laowa 12mm

In my first impressions article about the Laowa 12mm f2.8 lens, I also mentioned that I ordered a filter holder for it. There are actually two different ones available. There is one directly from Laowa (in two variants), and then there is this one from Nisi. I could not find many comparisons, but from those that I found, it looked like the Nisi one was the better option.

Build

Whats great about this holder (and also the Laowa one), is that you can use this ultra wide angle lens with 100x100mm filters, and with a relatively small polarizer (86mm). Normally, if you have a 14mm lens or a wider one, you have not only to use special holders, but you need bigger filters, 150x150mm or even 180x180mm. This becomes much more pricier and of course also much harder to work with. The bigger the filter, the more chances to get it dirty, to break it and similar.

The build quality looks very nice. The metal base with the plastic holders look very well made and solid. The CPL goes in easily and rotates smoothly. Filters go in a bit harder, but I presume that’s because it’s new, and will change a bit over time.

The holder fits on the lens hood mount of the lens. I fits fine, but I think its a bit looser than it should be. When I tried to rotate the filter, I rotated the whole assembly. But I managed to fix this easily with a bit of sticky tape over the thread. Now it holds much more securely.

Use

The filter holder is in three parts. You get the adapter ring, the filter holder and a 86mm circular polarizer. Installation is very easy. Just screw in the polarizer into the adapter, than attach it to the lens, and put the filter holder over it. You then have two small wheels on the sides to rotate the polarizer. You then use it as any other filter holder.

Sample shots

I tried few shots with different setups, with and without the polarizer, with and without any filters or the holder. And here are few example shots, unedited, just to show the vignetting.

You can see, that the polarizer is visible a bit in the corners. But you can also see, that the effect the polarizer does is really not great. That a problem with polarizers on ultra wide angle lenses. But with a bit of moving around, I managed it to look a bit better, but not much. It more to be used in different situations, not on a blue sky.

With the filter holder and no polarizer, you can see almost nothing in the corners. But you have to rotate the holder exactly straight or you will see it a bit in the corners. On the shot with the filter attached, you can see parts of the corners covered. This is not from the holder, but from the gasket on the filter. I don’t have any Nisi filters, so I tried this with Fiber Hittech filters, and the gasket on those is a bit smaller than one would need here.

Base image, no filter or holder attached.

The polarizer attached, but rotated so it’s not visible.

Polarizer rotated for maximum effect.

No polarizer, but the filter holder attached.

With 10 stop ND filter.

With polarizer, 10 stop filter and 3 stop grad filter.

I will be using this more, and will post a full review in few weeks, after my Dubai trip. I think I will use this one there a lot :) Same for the Laowa 12mm lens.

LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D lens – first impressions

I mentioned few days ago that I ordered a new lens, the LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D from Venus Optics. And since the seller was very quick on delivery, I just got it today. And of course I immediately went out to try it out, and here I will share with you some of my fist impressions and fist photos I took. You can also get a full RAW file from one of the shot at the end of this post, so you can see the results of this lens for yourself.

Specifications

The LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D lens is a ultra wide angle lens with very small barrel distortion. It’s a fully metal build lens, that is completely manual. Here are the specsifications of it to be exact:

Focal length: 12mm, Aperture: 2.8 to 22, Angle of view: 121.96 degrees, Aperture Blades: 7, Weight: 609g.

A great thing, if you use filters is, that with either the Laowa or the Nisi filter holders designed for this lens, you can use standard 100x100mm square filters here. This is just great, as most of the time, you are forced with these ultra wide angle lenses to go with 150x150mm filters. Those are just less practical, and of course much pricier. My Nisi holder for this lens is already on the way, so I will revisit that soon.

Build quality

The build quality looks great. The lens is completely from metal, even the lens hood. It feels very solid and well build. It’s also relatively small for a full-frame lens. Regrettably, it’s not weather sealed. The only plastic part is the lens cap, which is not attached the best way, but it is OK. The focus wheel and the aperture wheel feel smooth and the clicks of the apertures are easily recognizable.

Usability

This is a fully manual lens, so you have to focus and set everything yourself. Focusing was a bit stranger, as I had to rotate the focus ring much more than on other lenses, and for most of the time, all is in focus anyway. It’s just how the ultra-wide-angle lenses are. The camera will not detect the F stop, so you will not see it on your screen or in Lightroom. I will have to get used to this over time.

My Canon 5D Mark IV was able to detect exposure, but in the few tests, it usually was around 1 stop brighter than I would think the correct exposure is. Still, if one compensates, this is not a problem.

How wide is 12mm?

You may wonder how wide is 12mm. So did I. So here is a comparison, with the camera on the same spot, with the same settings. All photos have the exact same RAW edits done in Lightroom, with also the same white balance. The 16,24 and 35mm shots were done with Canon 16-35mm f2.8 lens.

Picture quality

First impression is that is really good. The photos look sharp (its a bit misty and humid today, so I’m not making any final verdict from today’s photos), with very little distortion. There is some vignetting visible and even when that is removed, the corners feel a bit bluer than they should be. I will have to look into this more, but either way, it’s not so hard to remove.

The lens catches flares quite easily, but that is no surprise with such a wide lens. Again, with few simple techniques (check my guide here) they are easy to remove. I did so in the attached sample images.

RAW file

If you want to have a look, here is a RAW file from the 12mm shot shown in focal length comparison. You can have a look at the vignetting, chromatic aberrations and sharpness. But again, take into account the foggy weather (and that I used this lens only for a few hours, should be better over time :)).

You can download the RAW file from here. If you cant open the CR2 file from the 5D mark IV, you can try this DNG conversion, that you can download from here.

Sample images

Here are few images to show how much you can get with this lens. The weather was not the best today, so they are not so great, but don’t worry, there will be more from this lens in the future :)

You can also see, this is really not the best for far away scenery. The city is just so tiny in the shot. Being close to big object is the complete opposite, you just get so much into one photo.

Luminar 2018 – review

Recently Macphun (now Skylum after the name change) released a new version of Luminar, the Luminar 2018. And since I had it for a while, and I had the ability to try it out with editing, here are my thought about it.

What is Luminar 2018

If I had to describe Luminar compared to other, mostly Adobe software I regulatory use, I would say it’s mostly similar to the develop part of Lightroom, without the library organization stuff, with some elements of Photoshop and from other plugins sprinkled in. It focuses on photo editing, so also all the tools that are available are photo centric.

Editing

When you first open Luminar, it almost seems barren. There are only few options and everything else is hidden. This is the biggest difference between Luminar and for instance Lightroom. While in Lightroom all options are open, and you change them directly. In Luminar you choose which ones you want to add. This makes it a bit less straight forward when you just want to quickly change something, but you could create a preset with the most used settings and just apply that to get to the start state you want. In the last update, they also added workspaces, which allows you to create sets of you most used filters and just add them all at once.

On the other hand, this allows for more freedom in editing. Again will compare this to Lightroom. Let’s say you want to darken the highlights. You move the slider completely to the left, and if you want to darken it more, you would have to use masks or gradients to get it darker. In Luminar, you just add the Highlights/Shadows filter again and again, as many times you want and so the effect multiplies. You can repeat an edit as many times you want.

User Interface

I went into Luminar without having a look at any tutorials or videos. Even so, withing maybe 15-20 minutes I got the hang of it and was onto editing. The UI is just so straight forwards. You open a photo, add filters to it, tweak the settings and repeat. There is also an option for using layers, if you want to modify parts of the photo or blend different effects, but the process is exactly the same as on the base layer.

While the UI is ok, there are small issues here and there I did not like. For instance, next to filter name are two arrows. One collapses the menu, the second one allows to reset the settings or delete the layer. And since if you click on the name, you get the same menu, it makes it needlessly hard to just collapse the filter. This can be so much simpler. Click on the name to collapse, and a bigger button to open the menu. Or where is the option to see the layer mask on the photo? The red overlay is pointless, especially if you use luminosity masks. And which luminosity mask is used?

For most of editing you will never encounter little inconsistencies like this. But I go directly to this, more advanced stuff, and there is a bit of maturity missing in some parts of the program.

Features

Luminar offers all of the basic features you would expect from a photo editing program but also a lot of advanced ones. From RAW development, to structure, radiance, clarity, dramatic, fog, polarizer, sharpenind, noise reduction and many more. Luminar also comes with a lot of predefined presets, so if you are really lazy, you can just use those and don’t even bother with the filters.

Again as mentioned, Luminar combines features that you would find in software like Lightroom, Photoshop, Color effex and others. It tries to put them all in one place for a more convenient approach to editing. Since you don’t see them all at once, it does not feel as overwhelming as with some other softwares.

Performance

Performance was a bit of a hit and miss for me. It worked fine most of the time, but then I also experienced some slow downs and problems. Especially when I tried to brush in a new layers, it would not update properly and instead of the brush strokes I seen just black squares. I tried it both on a Surface Pro 4 with i5 and 8gb of ram and also on a desktop with i7 and 32gb of ram, and I seen no huge difference in performance. You still have to wait a second or so for an filter to be applied.

Conclusion

Luminar does a lot of things very well. For a lot of photographers it could be the only program they would need to edit their photos. For me, it’s not enough. Where you need only to use filters on your photos, it’s great, it lacks short the moment you need to do more with layers and masks. Photoshop is just better there. I seen a lot of additions just within weeks, so it may be that one day it will be enough also for that. They are already teasing a library addition. With that could completely replace Lightroom, so I will revisit it once that is added, to see how it looks.

But if you are in a market for a new editing software or you are just a begginer, you should give it a try. Could be just what you are looking for.

You can see more about Luminar on the Skylum website here. If you decide to buy, you can use the code HDRSHOOTER for 10USD off.

To see all other reviews on the blog, please visit the Reviews category here.

Pocket Tripod Pro – impressions

So my luck with only backing Kickstarter campaigns that only deliver continues. Few days ago I received another delivery from one, that was a bit late, but arrived. This time it’s the Pocked Tripod Pro, a credit card sized, collapsible tripod for mobile phones. And today I will share my first impressions and some photos of it.

What is the Pocket Tripod Pro?

As I already mentioned, is a mobile phone tripods, that when not in use is the size of a credit card. Like this, it’s something you can always on hand, either with your documents or wallet. It comes packed inside the instructions, together with a fit card. As phones are of a different thickness, you would use the fit card to measure you phone, to know what width of the adapters you need. There is one size on the tripod (depending what you ordered) and others can be ordered separately.

How do you use it?

The Pocket Tripod Pro is very easy to setup. You just rotate it around the middle, and the flip the both sides up. You can also split it apart in the middle, in case you want you phone in landscape. Like this the legs are further apart, so more stable. Putting it away is the same procedure, just in reverse. Takes all only few seconds.

You can also take the adapters out and rotate them, in case you want to insert the phone the other way around.

Stability

I had not time to try it somewhere out yet, but I tried it at home a lot. With my current phone (Xiaomi Mi Mix 2), which is not the lightest one you can get, it was pretty stable. When in landscape orientation, with the split Pocket Tripod Pro, I could go from having the phone vertical to completely horizontal.

When in portrait orientation and the tripod together, I could go quite low, but not completely horizontal. The weight of the phone was just too much in that case. But around 45 degrees was no problem. This is of course with a 6 inch phone, with a smaller one it should be even more stable.

Final thoughts

For now, I’m quite impressed how small the Pocket Tripod Pro is and how stable it is while being this small. I don’t need a tripod for my phone often, but if I have this one always on hand, I think I will use it more. Especially for video.

You can find more about Pocket Tripod Pro on the manufacturers website here.

Last week I mentioned I got the Spark remote from Alpine Labs as a Kickstarter reward. And now, since I had time to play with it, I will share with you my thought about it. So here goes.

What can the Spark remote do?

Alpine labs is a company specializing on camera accessories. There are the makers of Radian time lapse device and few others. Spark remote, their latest product, is a camera remote. It’s can work in three different settings.

1. As a wireless infrared remote

It can work as a standard infrared remote, but with one special function. In the app, you can select what camera brand you want to control, so it works on all of them.

2. As a wired remote

Secondly, you can attach it to a camera directly by a cable, and use the button on it as a standard wired remote.

3. As a app controlled remote

Lastly, if you connect it to the camera by cable, you can pair it with the provided app, so getting advanced function. This can be used to take photos, do long exposures, HDR, Photo booth mode (similar to timelapse) or control multiple devices at once.

How is it to use the Spark remote?

The remote on it’s own is very simple to use. For the wired control, you just connect it to the camera and it works. For the wireless one, you fist have to go into the app, and set the correct camera model. You have to do that only once, as the remote remembers what you set.

For all else you have to pair the remote with the app, and use the build in function. They are all very simple to use, and offer all the functions you may need. The only one I could not find was bulb ramping, which should be possible here. Maybe after an app update.

I took me seconds to get all up and running, as it is just so straightforward. You connect the Spark remote to the camera, open the app, wait until it’s connected (if its not, you can go into settings and choose the remote to connect) and choose what you want to do. It’s all connected with a Bluetooth, so the range is quite good also.

Conclusion

The remote is small, works well, the app offers many functions. Alpine Labs states up to 2000 hours of work on one battery and replacing it is quite easy. The ability to work in multiple modes is quite handy. Sometimes one needs just a wireless remote, sometimes app control is needed. I like that you can have it complex or just completely simple. Overall I quite like it and it will have a permanent spot in my camera bag from now on.

You can find Spark remote by Alpine Labs on their Kickstarter site. Other Alpine Labs products on their official site here.