I bought a new camera lens!
It’s a TTArtisan AF 27mm F2.8 – which means it has autofocus, a 27mm focal length (40mm full-frame equivalent), and its lowest f-stop is 2.8. ‘TTArtisan’ stands for ‘The Thinking Artisan’, by the way.
I bought this lens for three reasons:
Size: I wanted a pancake lens that would make it easier for me to carry my mirrorless camera around everywhere.
Focal length: I wanted a 40mm full-frame equivalent prime lens because 27mm and 40mm are the two focal lengths I am most comfortable shooting at (which are 18mm and 27mm on my mirrorless, APS-C camera, by the way). I even did a whole ‘one focal length at a time’ exercise last year to figure this out.
Availability: The Fujifilm XF27mm F2.8 R WR lens that I actually wanted has been out of stock since the end of last year.
This TTArtisan lens is one-third the price of its Fujifilm counterpart, so it’s not as good. But I didn’t want to wait any longer and I was willing to deal with whatever shortcomings it had.
The plan with my most recent photo walk, then, was to try out the new lens to see how it performs. And you know what? It does pretty well.
Yes, it has issues dealing with strong light sources: bright lights get overly glow-ey and, if you face the sun, your whole photo gets washed out. But these are things you can work around.
And yes, it has vignetting that gets worse the wider-open you shoot it. But (a) I rarely shoot wide open and (b) that vignetting is ridiculously easy to fix in post.
Finally yes, it has some interesting colour and contrast characteristics: its colours a little muted and its contrast is slightly soft. But that is what you would call the character of the lens.
I didn’t have time to do a long photo walk yesterday, so these are the only decent photos I managed to take. I think they came out quite well :)
Half-open train door at Southern Cross Station
Road expansion joint in Collins Street, Docklands
St. Brew Dining area on Friday afternoon (when this cafe is closed)
Roast meats in the window at China Bar on Elizabeth Street
Coop’s Shot Tower inside the Melbourne Central complex at sunset
My initial thoughts about this lens are that I quite like it. It’s less pancake-sized and more scone-sized, but it’s still much smaller than all my other lenses.
The photos I took with it weren’t brilliant right out of the box, but it took only a little tweaking to get them to where I wanted. And frankly that’s to be expected with a lens that costs a little as this one did!
So I’m very happy I bought this and I’m looking forward to talking lots more photos with it.