First contact with the 7Artisans 35mm 1:0.95.

The images in this gallery are processed from raw. The processing includes adjustments for sharpening, exposure, contrast and color saturation. No lens profiles, lateral color aberration correction, defringe or any other lens related corrections were applied.

Telling the f-number of a picture is sometimes a challenge with this lens. Although I tried to keep notes of the aperture I set the lens to, the aperture ring sometimes moved between successive shots. So I ended up computing the aperture afterward using metering formulas when the actual EV didn't match my memory. So the aperture values assigned to the pictures in the gallery are sometimes approximate vatues

I like this lens very much since it will capture nice images without much annoying artifacts in a very wide range of lighting conditions. With the lens wide open the subject can be positioned almost anywhere in the frame and it will look sharp. However the lens is not the best choice to capture high resolution pictures of very busy landscapes like a house surrounded by trees when shooting at f/8 or wider because of the curvature of field and the possible fringing on high contrast parts of the scene; setting the focus point off-center or at a larger distance sometimes help if one wants the edges sharp. This is not a real problem though when pictures are viewed normally.

Here are the points to keep in mind when using the lens.

1. The manual focus ring is a joy to operate and focusing is a quick and easy task with the Fuji-X cameras, but one still needs to be careful. My small finger can easily turn the focus ring and the aperture ring. Use peaking and a film simulation with much contrast like Velvia when shooting raw on Fuji X-cameras to help with focusing if needed.

2. I am getting T-1.1 to T-1.2 as the T-stop of the lens wide open (relative to f/4) when using spot metering . The T-stop value measures the light transmittance of the lens depending on the opening of the iris.

I previously reported the T-stop to be somewhere between T-1.2 and T-1.3.That result was based on average metering and it was biased by the lens vigneting. Using spot metering factors out the effect of vignetting wide open.

3. Light coming from the sides and out of the field of view may lower the contrast in parts of the image. A lens hood solves that problem. I have both a metal and a rubber hood. The metal hood is enough most of the time. The lens cap goes on the front of the hood (58 mm). Most of the pictures in the gallery were shot with a 49mm rubber hood slipped over the front part of the lens.

4. I have seen no lateral color aberration but there is longitudinal color separation and that creates fringing in high contrast areas that are slightly out of focus. You can judge by yourself by looking at the pictures in the gallery.

5. The field looks relatively flat when focusing at close range but I think the field has much curvature at long focus distances especially in the corners. The curvature pretty much controls where LOCA will appear in the image. Curvature of field is something to be aware of and one can take advantage of it.

6. The focus point does not need to be dead in the center when shooting at the maximum aperture with this lens. The focus point can be set anywhere in the central 60% portion of the frame and the subject looks in good focus.

7. I can take a landscape picture that is in focus everywhere if I set the aperture to f/11 (the dot between 8 and 16 on the aperture ring) and if I set the focus to infinity. The pictures I took at f/8 and focused on a tree 20 to 30 m away show curvature of field and are not in focus everywhere. Maybe it's better to set the focus off-center to get more of the scene in focus then.

I calibrate the infinity position on the focus ring either by setting the aperture wide open and by focusing on some feature on the horizon (at least 300 m away). The infinity position can also be found by taking a sequence of pictures while turning the focus ring to a different mark for each shot starting from the hard stop and by later picking up the best picture among them when at the computer.

8. The aperture ring is unclicked on this lens and is very easy to move. That defies traditional still photography intuitions: never assume the aperture is still where it was for your last shot! The positive side of that behavior of the aperture ring is that the aperture ring operates as a quick "dial the background softness" type of control. Here is how that works. First set the focus and then turn the aperture dial to get the background look you want. So some will dislike the feature and others will like it.

9. The resolution of the lens in the center from a distance of about 2m. The 7Artisans lens reaches the resolution of my old Zuiko 50mm 1:1.4 at f/4 and f/5.6 however the 7Artisans falls behind at f/2.8. That Zuiko has about the same resolution as the Fujifilm XF18-55mm if I look at the wide and mid focal lengths, which is not bad at all.

In summary, this lens allows for a lot of creativity and the images it creates look great and still show good contrast when shot wide open. The contrast improves by stopping the lens down to f/4-5.6. The cost to pay is some imperfection in the out of focus details caused by LOCA and by the wavy focus field. To make sure there is no ambiguity here, a busy landscape like a house surrounded by trees might show some fringing (often there is none to be seen) and it will be out of focus along the edges up to f/8 when viewed at 1:1; the result depends on the composition but in any case landscapes are not the king of composition the lens is designed for unless stopping down to f/11.

I might be wrong in my interpretation of the results but the images should speak by themselves.