My First Time. . .with the Rokinon 14mm

I would like to begin by offering my apologies for going nearly 2 months since my last blog post. Between new baby, thanksgiving, travel, work, Christmas, and a new, yet to be disclosed development I have had virtually zero free time.  Rest assured, my resolution is to blog more often.  I'm shooting for a minimum of twice a month.  On to the show!

I mentioned a while back that I recently purchased the Rokinon 14mm lens. This is a funky lens. It is a lot of fun, but it is also quite difficult to figure out because it is a fully manual lens.  This post is a quasi review, but given that I am a fairly inexperienced amateur photographer, this is going to lack all of the techno mumbo-jumbo and comparisons.  This is, like, my opinion man, based on my short experience so far.

The biggest trick with this lens is to get the damn thing to focus.  It is really hard to do, especially when handheld.  The trick I have learned so far is to use Live View (the LCD screen) as opposed to the viewfinder.  Then zoom in as far as I can on something near the Hyperfocal Distance.  While this can be done while handheld, it is a bit more difficult than I originally thought it would be.

Another thing to note is the focus ring is very smooth, and by "smooth" I mean VERY SLOW. I feel like I turn the thing and turn it and turn it and it only barely registers a difference in focus.

The third reason focusing with this lens is a challenge is because the focal markers have no bearing on reality.  I find that about 90% of the time I am using this lens, I have the focal ring near the "infinity" side of things, even when shooting something 12 centimeters away.

The fourth thing to note about a full-manual lens; the camera has no idea what settings are being used. It doesn't really matter until you get the pictures into Lightroom and you have no idea what aperture you were using for a particular shot. Again, for my typical uses it doesn't matter too much, but sometimes it would be nice to know so I can learn how the lens behaves at different stops.

The final quirk regarding full manual settings is that there is no communication between the camera and the lens.  To provide context, when shooting my 24-105 I adjust the aperture through the dial on the camera. On the Rokinon, the aperture is adjusted via a dial on the lens. It is not a bad thing, but it is a little odd. Typically when looking either through the viewfinder you don't notice any difference in light when you adjust the aperture (this is not necessarily the case on live view, but it is a setting in you camera so YMMV). On the Rokinon, you notice it. As a fun exercise, I held the Rokinon up to the light and looked through it while adjusting the aperture ring, and yep, I could see the "iris" shrinking as I did so. I'm sure that this is nothing new to people from old school SLR/35mm shooting, but to those of us in the digital photography world. . .woah!

Alright, now that you have dealt with a wall of text, I'm sure you are curious, "how does the thing shoot?". The answer is, not too shabby.

I lost my (Rokinon) virginity with this picture

Aside from goofing around at home taking wide-angle, close up shots of Kyra, Tasha and Andrew, the first picture I took was actually unplanned.  Kyra and I decided to go look at a condo in Greenwood way back in November.  The unit itself was pretty shabby, small and run-down, ugh.  but it had a little deck off the west side of the building. I stepped outside and saw this pretty sunset.

If i haven't made it abundantly clear by now, time is something of which I do not have.  Which is OK. . .for now. However, once summer hits I'm out, but I digress. My time restrictions generally mean that I need to stick close to home so I end up looking around for fun places to shoot in/around the city. I was anxious to use it after first getting it and decided to bring it to work and get a sunset shot from the pier.

  Ok, ok.  It really isn't a very petty sunset picture, but it was kind of fun to take.  You see, the sunset was actually pretty meh but it looked OK if I under exposed the shot.  However, as we all know, underexposing means you lose most of your details.  So, I decided to take three shots and Photoshop the exposures together.


I took one picture, without me, exposed for the sunset. Then I took a second picture with me, tying to expose for everything else, but I didn't turn out too well so I took a third picture and exposed for me.

 


 At some point near Thanksgiving we were feeling a bit-o cabin fever-it had been storming for over a week and we finally had a sunny day so we decided to head to Golden Gardens to go for a walk.  Naturally I brought my camera.  This is actually the same day and location as the "Great Ball of Fire" picture from my Sunday, Sunset Sunday blog.  I wanted to get down and dirty so after the sun went down I crawled down some rocks and perched just above the Sound.  This was actually more precarious than you would think.  I was in Crocs, the rocks were very slippery, I was in a crouch and only had one hand with which to steady myself.  Honestly, I'm kind of "meh" about this shot.  There really isn't anything interesting going on and the rock, despite my best efforts, was drastically underexposed, but I took the picture and learned.

More details on how this was shot available in the other blog post.

Stack of ~18 4 Minute exposures
Each one f/2.8, ISO 100

 I had purchased a book on night/star photography shortly after getting the new camera.  I was exposed to night sky photography during my Manshower "aka the shitty backpack" (blog post to come. . .about half written).  I was excited when the forecast called for clear, cold skies.  I was even MORE excited when Jack called and asked me if I wanted to head up to Gold Creek near Snoqualmie Pass.  Since there is no Milky Way during the winter months I wanted to take my shot at star trails.  I set up the camera with my intervalometer and walked away for an hour.  After some post processing (blend mode "lighten" in Photoshop) boom, this is the result.

One of the best parts about this lens is how much fun it can be to just play around with randomly.  It's wide field of view allows you to get "wide" shots from very close.
For example, this picture was just us goofing off.  I was showing off the lens and simply held the camera above my head and took the shot. no thought beyond that. . and it turned out great!












Finally, what would any post be without a candid dog pic.

I guess, that I would conclude by saying if you were ever on the fence about buying this lens, just do it.  It is cheap and fun.  I will say, after the initial "excitement" wore off I found myself using this less and less.  I usually don't even carry it in my camera bag unless I think I will have a good use for it.  I'm sure that when summer comes that I will have ample good use for this great little lens.  Even more so. . .perhaps I should challenge myself.  I'm thinking of setting up a challenge where I only shoot with this lens for the next XXX amount of time/shoots.  Forcing myself to use this lens will only help me get better at using it and developing an eye for where it can be useful.

I think I will do that.  I hereby challenge myself to shoot this lens through to the end of the month.