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.

Sophie F3

I decided to take my old Nikon F3 for a spin, and use up some of the Kodak Portra 160 I have lying around. So I popped off to Brompton Cemetery again with the lovely Sophie Rose Jones, and a warm coat.

Ms Jones had a vintage Biba dress from the 1960s, my F3 was made in 1986, judging by the serial number, the Portra 160 and Epson V500 that I scanned it with are new. Sophie herself was born in the 1990s. Brompton Cemetery itself has been around for donkey's years.

Lens-wise I used a Samyang 85mm f/1.4, which is an anachronism. It's a recent design that was launched a couple of years ago and is still available new, under a plethora of brand names - Rokinon seems to be the most popular in the UK. The light was fading and most of these were shot wide open at 1/30th, 1/60th, but the F3 is stout, especially with the MD-4 motor drive which - as you can see - is cleverly designed so that the camera doesn't tip forwards when it has a heavy lens. Without the MD-4 the F3 is surprisingly petite.

For full-on Nikon F3 effect I should have had a 105mm f/2.5 or the mid-80s 80-200mm f/4. Also, Sophie would be wearing leather trousers and she would have huge poofy hair. The F3 was an aggressively 80s camera, with a body styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro that introduced Nikon's famous red stripe. In fact it was the first professional Nikon to be styled rather than simply built, and was launched at a time when Nikon was starting to embrace the consumer market. In their contemporary product line-up it was referred to internally as "Super Nikon", versus "Simple Nikon" (the FE), "Compact Nikon" (the FM), and "Little Nikon" (the EM).

Portra 160 is very flattering and appears to have been designed to photograph white people standing in foliage. I exposed these images at ISO 100, but Photoshop has since done its magic as well.

The F3 was an oddity in Nikon's pro line. The F2 had been an evolution of the original F, but the F3 was a clean break, with a new and more compact body style, an electronically-timed shutter, Olympus OM-esque TTL flash, new motor drive etc. It remained in production for over twenty years, and actually outlasted the F4 and almost the F5. Although Nikon boasted of its space-age technology, it had a basic, minimalist specification; centre-weighted metering and that's it, top shutter speed 1/2000, flash sync 1/80, neither of which advanced on the F2. Spot, matrix, multi-spot, 3d automatic multi-pattern colour matrix, the F3 knows not these things. It has a very basic LCD readout in the viewfinder, with a simple backlight that doesn't work very well. In 1980 LCDs were still very novel - commercial LCD calculators and wristwatches had only been around since the early 1970s - and Nikon erred on the side of caution, suggesting that the display would need replacement every six-seven years. In practice I find the LCD almost completely useless - it's small, a bit out of the way, dim. LEDs were the way forward.

The F3's heyday spanned the 1980s. It was launched in 1980 and was still a front-line press camera after the launch of the F4, in 1988, and so it was present for the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the other events that took place at the very end of the decade. It also had the odd distinction of being the top press camera at a time when photojournalism was being pushed aside by live television news. The rise of electronic news gathering and portable video cameras during the 1980s meant that news became a television thing. Challenger exploded on television; the SAS stormed Prince's Gate on television. The crowd at Hillsborough died on television, the Berlin Wall fell on television, the Gulf War was television. News stories were no longer broken with photographs, unless they were too remote for video, in which case no-one in the West cared much about them. Instead, the photographs were there to accompany the video, as a kind of permanent record for archival purposes.

Kodak Tri-X

The F3 was the first colour Nikon, too. Newspapers adopted colour printing in the 1980s, so that they would look like television. The World Press Photo Awards dropped its Color Picture Stories category for 1981 because all news was in colour now. In the 1960s and 1970s news was in black and white; in the 1980s the real world that we saw on television was colour, and it moved. Purely as a means of recording reality, photography was made obsolete by television, just as photography had made painting obsolete in the late 1800s.

As fate would have it, two of the most iconic photographs of the 1980s were taken with Nikon's semi-pro models, not the F3. For his famous June 1985 National Geographic cover shot of the Afghan Girl, linked above, Steve McCurry used a Nikon FM2, which was the F3's compact, hand-powered counterpart, and a few years later Charlie Cole used an FM2n to take one of the most widely-circulated images of Tiananmen Square's Tank Man. Cole was one of several photographers who captured the event - Jeff Widener, who won the Pulitzer Price for his take, used a Nikon FE2. He had brought an F3 with him, but in the preceding hours "a stray rock had struck my face while photographing a burning armored car during the Tiananmen uprising. The Nikon F3 Titanium camera had absorbed the shock and thus saved my life." Thus making the F3 the second Nikon to die in the line of duty.

As of 2012 the F3 is a bit of a plastic antique, and it's available very cheaply on the used market. It doesn't have the romantic appeal of the F and F2, it's not as advanced as the F5, and it's less flexible than the F4. And it's not cute, it's too aggressive for that. There's a perception that it's too large and heavy for civilian use, but - again - without the MD4 it's no larger than a Pentax K1000 (for example) and smaller than most digital SLRs. On the positive side it's compatible with old pre-AI lenses and has a clear, usable split-image focus screen. It uses a pair of commonly-available LR44 batteries, which last for ages. The MD-4 takes eight AAs - plain old alkalines if you want - and when the MD-4 is fitted it powers the whole camera, so you can leave the LR44s in as a backup.

The F3 was the first pro Nikon that absolutely had to have batteries in order to function properly. The F and F2 had battery-driven lightmeters but were otherwise powered mechanically by the advance lever. In contrast, the F3 had an electronically-timed shutter that didn't fire without batteries. There is a manual shutter trip switch on the front, but it's awkward. The electronic shutter was supposedly a bone of contention with professional photographers at the time, although I'm skeptical of this myself; professionals had been using battery-powered F2 motor drives with belt-mounted power packs for years before the F3 came out. How hard can it have been to take along some LR44s? My guess is that wafflers were worried, actual professionals didn't care. Once the F3's frugal power consumption became widespread knowledge the controversy presumably evaporated. As of 2012 the battery issue seems especially feeble, given that later Nikons - the F5 in particular - were even more power-hungry. And nowadays everything is battery-powered. The modern mobile journalist is a walking power station.

The F3 remained in limited production until 2001. During its long life there were several variations. Mine is a standard F3. There was a popular F3HP, which had a larger prism with greater eye relief, and an F3/T with a titanium top plate, base, and back. There were also several limited editions, including a weatherproof, simplified F3/P. The F3 was also popular as a kind of test hack. Kodak used a F3 chassis to build the Kodak DCS, the very first digital SLR. NASA had their own specially-modified version of the F3, and Nikon itself tested the waters of autofocus with the F3AF, which had a bulky autofocus prism and a pair of special autofocus lenses, an 80mm and a 200mm.

The last variation of the F3 built in quantity was the F3H, a high-speed model that was launched in time for the 1998 Winter Olympics. It had a fixed pellicle mirror and a special motor drive that could speed through thirteen and a half frames a second, which is still impressive nowadays.

And that's the F3. Why did I buy one? "Girls on Film", that's why. The Duran Duran song. I always wanted a camera with a clattery motor drive, because I have fond memories of that video. Apparently the band recorded a Nikon, but I can't be sure they used an F3. Looking at the waveform, it's firing at just under four frames a second, but I can't tell if they shifted the tempo, so it could be a slow MD-4 or a fast MD-2. Perhaps we will never know.

Mamiya C33: Beyond the Infinite

Canon 5D MkII

Samyang 85mm f/1.4 / Tomioka 55mm f/1.4