Phew, this summer is flying by...so much for frequent, regular blog posts! I've been doing some travelling within Ontario lately and will definitely have some updates in the near future. In the meantime, here's an article that I wrote on a very unusual wide-angle lens, the Laowa 15mm macro.
The Laowa 15mm Macro lens is an exercise in fun and sometimes frustration, but it might cure your boredom…
The Laowa 15mm macro lens is exactly what it sounds like – an extremely wide angle lens that focuses as close as 1:1 macro. What that means is that you can (theoretically) photograph tiny things so close up that they take up the same amount of space on your sensor as they occupy in real life. That means filling the frame with a largish insect or smallish flower, for example. Very cool, but there are tons of macro lenses out there, as well as some other very good options for shooting macro without owning a macro lens at all, as you can see from this excellent article. The stand out feature of this lens, what really sets it apart is that it is so wide angle, encompassing 110 degrees of view on a full frame camera. That is also its biggest drawback.
Most macro lenses are 60mm or longer in focal length, which makes sense because many of those tiny things are either inconvenient or impossible to get super close to, but the Laowa 15mm is having none of that. Apparently, this Chinese lens manufacturer (that also goes by the name Venus Optics) wants you to get really up close and personal with the creepy crawlies…like, practically touching them with the lens. The other unique feature of this lens is that it shifts to decrease wide angle distortion, possibly replacing the need for an expensive tilt-shift lens in your kit.
Laowa 15mm Shift
Shift feature on Laowa 15mm
Wide Angle Macro photo using the Laowa 15mm
Laowa 15mm lens
Wide Angle close up photo of our pug mix, Becca
Wide angle macro shot of a bee on a flower, photographed with the Laowa 15mm lens
wide angle close up of a grasshopper, photographed with the Laowa 15mm lens
