Samyang 35mm T1.5 / f/1.4

Let's have a look at the Samyang 35mm T1.5. It's a fast wideangle full-frame lens from Samyang of Korea, available in a wide variety of lens mounts, although for this article I stuck it onto a Canon 5D MkII. The T1.5 is the cine version of the Samyang 35mm f/1.4 but with a slightly different body. Optically it's the same, so all the information in this post applies to both versions of the lens.

If you want to see more examples my review of Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains was brought to you by this very lens, as was my article on the Canon EF-M.

You and I know T-stops, but for the benefit of casual readers an f-stop is the ratio between the diameter of the maximum aperture of the lens and its focal length, such that an f/1.4 lens has an aperture that's twice the diameter of an f/2.8 lens, and bear in mind that the diameter expands in two dimensions so f/2.8 is actually two stops slower than f/1.4 whereas a T-stop is (looks it up) a T-stop is a measurement of the Transmittance of the lens expressed as the f-stop, minus the percentage of light lost during transmission through the lens breathe in.

Got that? A T-stop is an f-stop with a tiny bit shaved off to account for the light loss of all the glass and glass-air interfaces inside the lens.

At f/1.4.

The T-stop is always slightly slower than the f-stop because we live in an imperfect world where everything is broken and wrong. For coated prime lenses the difference is usually tiny. It starts to mount up with complex zoom lenses that have several elements, and it becomes a major problem with lenses that have non-standard optical paths, such as soft-focus lenses and mirror lenses.

The famous Minolta/Sony 135mm f/2.8 STF for example has a T-value of T4.5 because the built-in neutral density filter saps a lot of light. Macro lenses lose light because the image circle is spread-out at macro ranges, and mirror lenses lose light because it reflects off the mirror surfaces.

The lens is massive. It's lighter than it looks; it doesn't rattle. The T1.5 cine version has a smooth, geared focus ring, which is fine handheld, and a declicked aperture.
In this image the lens is at the infinity hard stop, which isn't quite at the infinity mark. Mine is a native EOS mount lens.
There are no electronic connections. The Nikon stills version of the lens has auto-aperture, but otherwise you have to stop the lens down manually. It's a bit like using those old preset aperture lenses from the 1960s - you have to focus and then twist down the aperture until the shutter speed is at a value that pleases you.

The filter thread is plastic. The front element moves back and forth inside the barrel; the manufacturer makes no claims of weather or dust sealing. I imagine that leaving a UV or polarising filter on the lens all the time might cut down on dust in the long-term. For most of the shots in this post I used a polarising filter.
The box comes with a hood, which I have never used and didn't miss, and a felt bag.

e.g. the bag is made of felt. Obviously I had to feel the bag in order to remove it from the box. That goes without saying. T-stops are a motion picture thing. Cinematographers like to get it right in camera because cinematographers are hardcore. If you get the exposure of a stills photograph wrong you can salvage it in the darkroom. Ditto for motion picture film, but imagine that you've just shot fifty-six individual takes of Liam Neeson jumping over a fence, with different lenses, and you have to splice those takes together.

If the exposure is the same all the way through you just have to worry about the natural rhythm of the cuts, which is difficult enough. If the exposure is different you have to adjust the lighting and perhaps colour balance of each shot, which wastes time. Imagine having to do that in the days of film, when there was no Adobe Premiere. Imagine Ridley Scott shouting at you for getting it wrong.

Why did I buy the Samyang 35mm T1.5? I've always wanted a fast wide prime. There are several choices but I plumped for a fast 35mm. Why 35mm? 35mm is a vintage focal length from the days of the Leica/Contax rangefinder wars. It's a gentlemanly focal length, a bit staid, but it won't let you down. A couple of years ago I took a holiday with just a 35mm f/2.8 Olympus Stylus Epic, which I then ended up taking it to Berlin as well, and I didn't feel underdressed.

Why f/1.4 and not f/2 or f/2.8? Fast prime lenses have a split personality. Wide open they can see in the dark, and the wide aperture gives the photographer more control over depth of field; stopped down they're very sharp. I've shot a lot of medium format film over the last few years, and medium and larger formats have a particular look. The narrow depth of field combined with good central sharpness, equals a kind of 3D pop-out effect that's hard to replicate with smaller formats.

A little bit of the medium format look, shot with a YashicaMat (top) and a Mamiya RB67 (bottom, cropped from 6x7).

At f/1.4 with a 35mm-format camera you still have to get very close to things in order to achieve the pop-out effect. At middle distances the depth separation is subtle, but it's there:

Never let it be said that I don't have any photographic ideas. I do have photographic ideas. Three or four of them at least that I reuse a lot. As you can see the bokeh is decent but nothing special. This seems to be typical of fast wideangle lenses.

Optically the lens is perfectly usable for reportage wide open, with a bit of glow around highlight edges; sharp in most of the frame at f/2.8, all of the frame at f/8 except the last few hundred pixels in the corner. It also seems to be better at close-up and medium distances than infinity, or alternatively it could be that I'm rubbish at focusing a wide angle lens manually at long distances. Here's a 100% crop of the seagull at the top of the post, taken at something like 1/8000th at f/1.4:

That's pretty good for f/1.4 and would look even better if I turned up the sharpening with Photoshop.

Also, seagulls have teeth. Isn't it amazing what the natural world can produce all by itself? The hair, the beak, the eyes; honed over millions of years by natural selection. Our own creations are crude in comparison. Until we can build machines that create themselves we will remain in the shadow of the natural world.

Why shoot at f/1.4 in bright sunshine? Over the last two decades it seems to have become standard in press photography to use fast wide angle lenses wide open in bright sunshine, I assume because photojournalists aren't allowed to retouch their images, and a combination of the narrow depth of field and vignetting of wide apertures draws attention to the subject. Consider this image of the Badwater Ultramarathon from July 2013, shot in the bright sunshine and searing heat of Death Valley:

This is my mental image of modern press photography. The EXIF data is gone but my hunch is that it was shot with a 35mm f/1.4 or 50mm f/1.2 wide open, which in theory is insane - it's Death Valley in late morning or early afternoon - but that's how press photography is nowadays.

Earlier generations associated grainy black and white film with veracity, because that's what photojournalism looked like in the 1960s. For my generation black and white is an affectation, and the look of "reality" is 24mm f/1.4 at f/1.4 in bright sunshine with harsh shadows and washed-out colours, and everything is sand or dirt. The look has permeated computer games to an extent that muted brown is now a cliche of Modern Warfare and Call of Duty. It's another example of how the medium shapes our view of the world and becomes a message in itself, next paragraph.

This is by coincidence one of my greatest sexual fetishes.

I wonder if people in the Victorian era associated hard-hitting news with the look of woodblock engravings. Who knows. The following four images were shot at f/8 and f/1.4 respectively, followed by 100% crops from the centre and corner, with no sharpening or correction of any kind. I didn't use the supplied lens hood. The very first image has a tiny bit of flare in the extreme bottom-left:

There's a teeny-tiny bit of CA on the artist's jacket and the post, but it's minuscule.

You'll have to trust that I focused correctly - Samyang lenses are notorious for misaligned focus scales, and for focusing past infinity. My impression is that the lens isn't great at infinity focus.

This is the same image, but with sharpening and some CA correction, which suggests that the perceived lack of sharpness is more a function of glowy edges than poor resolution. Serves you right for photographing a landscape at f/1.4. On a more serious level the lens might not be great for astrophotography unless you stop down to f/2 or so.

The lens is available for all of the popular full-frame lens mounts and the likes of Micro Four Thirds as well, and to confuse matters Samyang also sells a completely different, autofocus 35mm f/1.4 for mirrorless cameras. Furthermore the lens is available under a variety of brand names, of which Rokinon seems to have captured the public's imagination the most, because it sounds hard.

Samyang also sells a 35mm T1.5 as part of the XEEN range of professional cine lenses. I assume the optics are the same, but the XEEN lenses are made of metal and have a common physical design. They're a lot more expensive.

It's an advert for a film in which Mussolini comes back from the dead. It's fascinating to imagine how politicians from the past might fit in with the present; my hunch is that Mussolini, Stalin, Ramsay MacDonald and the like would adapt much more readily than Hitler, because they were essentially opportunists whereas Hitler had a very narrow focus on a limited range of political ideas, wedded to a certain time and place that has long passed.

This was taken with my mobile phone. Sylvio Berlusconi must really like being Prime Minister of Italy. I imagine he can use the role to pass laws that benefit his business interests, but otherwise being Prime Minister of Italy seems like more trouble than it's worth.

There's a tiny bit of mostly-barrel-with-a-bit-of-moustache-style distortion. PTLens has a profile for it.

In fact every image in this post is the product of bursting, pent-up sexual frustration, including the image of the seagulls. Because they're naked, that's why.

There are lots of alternative lenses in the 35mm range. At the top of the financial tree Nikon and Canon make weather-sealed autofocus 35mm f/1.4s; Sigma makes an apparently terrific 35mm f/1.4; Zeiss sells a manual focus 35mm f/1.4 for several lens mounts, plus an autofocus 35mm f/1.4 especially for the Minolta/Sony system. I haven't used any of them. Are they any good? Probably.

Note in this photo the distinctive colour shift from "bokeh fringing" - branches away from the focal plane are green, closer purple.

The people of Rome are like honey badgers. They park wherever they want. Here's some more purple fringing on highlight edges, which as before goes away when you stop down and can generally be Photoshopped into oblivion.

35mm is however a venerable focal length that, as with 50mm, crosses financial boundaries and appears to be difficult to do badly; until recently Canon and Nikon made 35mm f/2 lenses that were amongst the cheapest in their prime lens range. The two lenses were replaced with a more expensive f/2 with image stabilisation and an f/1.8 respectively. In the mid-range Tamron also sells a 35mm f/1.8. Judging by the reviews they all have unimpressive bokeh, are usable wide open, nice at f/8.

At the bottom of the pile is Yongnuo, a kind of mini-Samyang famous for its flash units. Yongnuo makes a 35mm f/2 that looks like a clone of the old Canon 35mm f/2. It sells for less than a hundred English pounds and apparently isn't very good.

I know very little about vintage 35mm lenses, although from what I have read the otherwise-reliable Olympus OM range of compact primes apparently wasn't all that hot at 35mm. In the early 1970s Nikon launched a 35mm f/1.4 which was subsequently modified for AI and then AI-S. It's much smaller than the Samyang 35mm and is apparently still on sale new, although you have to ask and it's very expensive. It has a certain amount of investment value, but on an optical level it's apparently not as good as modern lenses. As far as I know Canon didn't sell a 35mm f/1.4 during the FD years, instead opting to one-up Nikon by selling a 24mm f/1.4 instead, but that's a whole 'nother focal length.

The best 35mm lens I own is my aforementioned Contax 35-70mm f/3.4, which I never use because it's slow and awkward.

That's it. Can't think of any more to say. Might as well stop before the bad words come. While in Rome I only saw an image of Cara Delevingne once. A few years back it seemed as if London was plastered with a mixture of adverts featuring Cara Delevingne and posters for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, to an extent that I now associate 2014 and 2015 with images of Jennifer Lawrence surrounded by flames. Then the posters were gone and now London seems like an alien place; the new posters are strange and unfamiliar, the iconography means nothing to me. I miss those posters. I associate them with a certain time in my life, and now they're gone forever.

Unitor 28mm f/2.8: Everyone's Dreaming of All They've Got to Live For

"Smelly tongues looked just as they felt". So sang The Residents on their classic debut album Meet the Residents, which was released in 1974 to general critical indifference and poor sales.

Sometimes I think about The Residents. The band fills me with a profound melancholy. When I was young it seemed that there was an axis of strangeness, consisting of The Residents, Negativland, the Evolution Control Committee, the Church of the Subgenius etc etc, with Frank Zappa as their elderly patron saint, and on the fringes there were Stereolab and the Pizzicato Five and St Etienne - bands who briefly found a way to translate weirdness into record sales.

It was an age of videotape mash-up montages of televangelists and Gulf War footage, and multimedia CD-ROM projects that poked fun at the New World Order of George Bush - the George Bush - and also Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh and lots of other names that mean nothing nowadays. just as your world will mean nothing in a few years.

The axis of strangeness made the world less boring. There was no chance of it overwhelming the industrial might of the allied powers, but as a kid I assumed that it had been around forever and would continue to thrive in the modern world.

Dilworth is a strange and lovely man

Dragons do not grow old, but the same is not true of little boys, and as time went on the axis faded. The individual components of the axis still exist but they are obscurities whose time has passed. In retrospect they seemed more important than they really were at the time because they appealed to music writers, but that generation of cultural commentators has also grown old and retired. The new writers of the purple internet have a different set of idols.

Part of The Residents' mystique was that they were wilfully obscure, and even today they refuse to give out the real names of present and past members. The problem is that no-one cares any more. The Residents no longer have control over their own obscurity.

In the 1990s I imagined that The Residents earned enough money to get by, but over time members left and died, and as I write these words the band is just a sick old man sitting alone in a room with a cheap plastic mask, doing video podcasts. When he dies or gives up there will be no-one left behind the curtain to operate the machinery of Oz. There will be no Residents revival; kids will not seek out vinyl copies of Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats. Meanwhile the Church of the Subgenius left behind a videotape and some books, and not much else. As with The Residents they wanted to be famous for their obscurity, but now they are just obscure.

Think of all the other bands that were on Factory Records. Not Section 25 and Quando Quango - you've heard of them - but Minny Pops and Crawling Chaos. They are not forgotten in the way that Vashti Bunyan is forgotten; they are genuinely forgotten, and today we're going to have a look at the Unitor 28mm f/2.8, an utterly awful lens of no distinction. It's an M42 lens from a long time ago.

The Machinery of Oz would have been a good title for this blog post, shorter and more relevant than the one I eventually chose. There's something about Sarah Cracknell's voice on "Mario's Cafe", though. She has trouble hitting the notes but her voice has charm. That was the idea. She was an ordinary person pretending to be a pop star, just like us. She wasn't an inhuman monster like Whitney Houston. The song itself is warm and evokes an image, although of course it's a sham - there is a real Mario's Cafe, but Bob Stanley had never visited it when he wrote the song. He picked the name because it sounded good.

It's an art form. It's not supposed to be real. Juke box music. You're a fool if you base your life on a lie. I have visited cafes. They are illusions. Real people go to McDonald's, and perhaps in fifty years there will be folk songs about McDonald's. The only people who visit cafes are media types who are acting out a role. Bob Stanley wrote the song in 1991, and even then he was attracted more by the idea of eating in an authentic greasy spoon than by the food; for this writer in 1997, post-Britpop, the act of visiting a cafe was an adventure, not an organic part of everyday life.

I imagine there were features in The Face in the 1980s about cafes. George Orwell probably wrote about them in the 1940s. Rewind to the 1600s and you'll find noblemen visiting cafes for the novelty of visiting a cafe. Did they have fried bread in the 1600s? Yes, apparently so, at least in North America. I bet they didn't have squeezy tomato ketchup bottles. Plastic hadn't been invented yet.

The furry subculture has its roots in human self-consciousness. Unlike other animals we are aware of ourselves as actors on a stage, and some people are unsatisfied with what they have.
And perhaps it is also an echo of Alvin Toffler's concept of Future Shock. As we hurtle into the video age some people want to insulate themselves from the outside world, literally insulate themselves with layers of fur.
I make a point of writing these blog posts in the nude, so that no-one can accuse me of being terrified of The Future; my body is ready.

When was it released? The lens, I was talking about a lens. When was the lens released? I have no idea; it's one of those OEM lenses that was made in Japan and then imported by the rest of the world under a variety of different names. Late 1960s, early 1970s. I have found copies with Vivitar and Carenar badges. Twelve million years ago I got one free with a Fujica ST701 film SLR, and shot some film with it; even with my ordinary film scanner the poor quality of the lens was apparent, but how does it perform on a digital SLR?

There is Brasil. Thank you, Boris Johnson. London will miss you.

Not very well. In its defence, it's possible that something is broken inside the lens, but judging by the very few samples I have seen on the internet it really is very bad. On the positive side it's physically solid and well-made. It's big - so big that my ST701 won't sit flat on a table - heavy, made of metal, the focus is smooth and the aperture blades still work. In fact it's surprisingly attractive, especially the distinctive blue lens coating, but like so many things that are attractive on the outside it is rotten and empty on the inside.

I shot the following on a Canon 5D MkII with an M42 adapter. The lens focuses to infinity without hitting the mirror. Close focus is quite far, at about eighteen inches from the front of the lens. Wide open the lens has strong vignetting. It almost seems like mechanical vignetting, and as per the images elsewhere in this post the lens vignettes even with a slimline polarising filter:

The weather is depressing, even for England. The lens makes everything look depressing. Earlier on I took some photographs of a kitten playing with Cyndi Lauper's debut album She's So Unusual, and the lens made even this upbeat scene feel sick and wrong. Alas I cannot share those pictures with you. In the middle it's soft at f/2.8, sharp-er at f/8 but nothing to write home about:

I used Photoshop's "auto contrast" but no other editing. It's not a contrasty lens.

Performance in the corner is suboptimal, again at f/2.8, f/8:

Does it have a use? No. Any modern zoom lens outperforms it. The frustrating thing is that it doesn't even work as a special effect lens, because the corner softness doesn't look attractive, it just looks murky and depressing. Some lenses are soft around the edges but sharp in the middle in a way that draws you in, but the Unitor is just muddy. Indistinct. There weren't many good wide angle options for the M42 system, and the Unitor 28mm f/2.8 is not one of them. It is however a good paperweight and could be used by the military as a simple hand grenade training aid, the end.

Palinar 135mm f/3.5

Palinar 135mm f/3.5 / Canon 5D MkII / vodka and Mountain Dew

Off to eBay again. A while back I had a look at an old lens from long ago, a Palinar 35mm f/2.8 from the early 1960s. It was manufactured in Japan by one of Tokina's early incarnations and imported to the UK by a chap called Charles Strasser, who was himself an import (from Czechoslovakia). Palinar was one of those made-up brands, and the lens was also sold as a Soligor, Hanimex, Sears, Lentar etc. Every time I check eBay another brand name appears - as I write these words eBay has a Solitel 135mm for all of £8. As the saying goes, if it floats like a butterfly but stings like a bee, it's a duck.

On a Pentax Spotmatic. It's very compact. It appears to be single-coated. Minimum focus is just under six feet, which is I suppose the price to pay for the compact design.

I used a 5D for the flavour images, reason being that it was a dull day and I needed higher ISOs.

And, yes, all brands are made-up, but some brands are more substantial than others - obviously, giants such as DeHavilland or Woolworths are unlikely to vanish overnight, and in America the likes of Pan-Am, Branff, and AMC will almost certainly still be around by the year 2000. People will always need to fly and/or drive places.

Palinar, on the other hand, was invented on a whim and vanished unmourned sometime in the early 1970s, if Google Books is to be believed. The lenses still turn up on eBay.

The subject of this post is a short telephoto that would probably have been sold as part of a kit, perhaps paired with a 35mm f/2.8. It would have complemented an SLR's standard 50mm lens at the long end. 135mm is a classic focal length - from what I remember it was the longest that could be easily focused with a rangefinder - and of course nowadays it has been displaced by 70-300mm telephoto zooms, although there are a few 135mm primes still on the market.

It seems that the focal length is easy to design for, and 135mm primes are amongst the best-performing lenses available (the vintage Zeiss Jena 135mm f/3.5 and the modern Canon 135mm f/2.0, for example, always do well in tests). On the other hand it can be awkward, too long and slow for indoors, not long enough for birding or aeroplanes, nowhere near long enough for safaris. On an APS-C camera 135mm becomes a more useful 200mm.

My assumption is that if I see a photographer with a modern 135mm, he has probably thought long and hard about his choice, and he knows what he's doing.

As you can see, the minimum focus distance is frustratingly long. Also, cats can leap a surprisingly long distance.

Proto-Tokina made lenses with a special screw mount, and fitted adapter rings for popular camera models - mine has an M42 adapter. It's unproblematic on a Canon 5D. The front element group unscrews and the lens is easy to clean up, although as with my 35mm f/2.8 it was surprisingly free of fungus and even dust. The lens is solidly made out of metal, which might explain why it has survived so well for so long.

The aperture uses a preset system, where you set a stop ring to the appropriate position, and when you want to meter or take the shot you quickly twist the aperture ring so that it hits the stop. It's really easy to use and, if you're filming, the stepless aperture is a nice touch.

A full-sized crop of the centre of a 21mp full-frame image, wide open (top) and then at f/8 (bottom), with no sharpening. The difference is noticeable but not really *notable*.

Ditto in the corners. There's some greeny-purple CA, which I could heave easily fixed. As you can see it's not bitingly sharp, quite probably no better than a modern 70-300mm zoom, but again I don't have a problem with its performance. If there's any distortion, I can't measure it.

A real-world example, shot wide open at ISO 400. It's a manual focus lens, and I use the 5D's EG-S manual focus screen, which seems to work.

By all accounts the classic Zeiss 135mm f/3.5 is sharp across the frame wide open, and of course if you want a 135mm there's no reason not to buy that instead - they consistently go for £50 on eBay.co.uk - but I didn't want a 135mm. In fact I bought this lens because it had one of Tokina's M42 adapters, and also the Palinar name stood out.

eBay has masses of old 135mm lenses for almost nothing because no-one wants them, but very few Palinars. They're half a century old, and no-one cared much about the brand, so old examples have been thrown away, which is a shame because the two I've used so far have been optically pretty good; the original owners would have had no complaints.