Rokinon FE14M-C 14mm F2.8 Ultra Wide Lens for Canon (Black)

I bought this for a 4-corners trip anticipating starry skies. I didnt know there was monsoon season in the american southwest. So I had one good clear night. It is a great lens for astrophotography (i think, Im just learning)and for landscapes and big skies. Colors are nice and good contrast. I tried using this as a walk-around lens and ran into huge problems with the manual focus. Im 50 with bad eyes. I can manage a manual focus Yashica 50 and 28mm pretty well, but this lens has such as wide focus range and the view is so wide, large turns of the focus ring make imperceptible changes through the viewfinder, so tons of my pictures were out or focus. When it was in focus, I was very happy with the results. If you can afford it then an autofocus option may be better if you want to use this for more flexible needs, but if just using at infinity then I cant imagine a much better UWA lens at any price. These were all shot with on a canon 6d

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Cons: - Manual lens, but you know that, right? Thankfully its depth of field at anything over f/5.6 is deep enough to cover most situations, those close-ups require patience. Perhaps its my eyesight, but I have a hard time seeing the image clearly enough to gauge precise focus. I usually resort to a test shot or two. - no range rings to assist with depth of field - even with the fixed hood, its bulbous glass makes it a big target for rain; I hike in the Pacific Northwest, so you can understand the challenge to keep it clean - the mustache distortion begs for post-process fixing on images with long horizontal lines Pros: - great images -- crisp, but it gets a bit blurry right at the edges/corners - only $350! - fast @ f/2.8 - solid lens cap -- my lenses get bounced around a lot and I appreciate the extra protection. Updated 10/22/2013: I continue to believe this is one of the best lens values on the market. If youre a competent photographer and can handle a totally manual lens, you will be hard-pressed to own a better lens value for the price. I have some photos from this lens that rival or exceed the quality of Canon L-glass lenses.

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This lens is wonderful. It is one of the top rated nightscape lenses that is currently available on the market. Here is what I have found: Pros: 1. This lens is cheaper by orders of magnitude over similar lenses. To get a fast prime lens like this usually costs upwards of $2000, for a mere fraction of that price this lens blows away the competition. 2. Sharp. This lens has great optics and takes sharp pictures corner to corner by f/8. Wide open it is is a little softer in the corners, but that is just how it goes, unless you want to spend $5000 that probably wont change. 3. Almost no Coma or Chromatic Aberration. For those who dont know, coma is when points of light appear as streaks or smears. The only time this is really encountered in a practical situation is when you are photographing stars. Even on the much more expensive canon and nikon lenses the corner stars appear as ugly streaks, this lens has some of the best coma correction available Cons: 1. Fully manual. This may or may not be a con for you, but in the age of auto-focus, and auto everything, it certainly takes some getting used to. My first 20 pictures with this lens all looked terrible because I was focusing wrong and underexposing. Once I spent some time learning how to properly use a manual lens those problems disappeared. 2. Distortion. This is not really a good lens for architecture. There is rather significant mustache distortion in this lens. This can be corrected in post processing by finding the correct lens profiles online, but that is not ideal if you are photographing buildings and man made structures for a living. However that being said, if you use this lens for landscapes, nightscapes, or pretty much anything that isnt architecture then you will never notice the distortion and shouldnt worry about it. 3.. Focus scale is off. This is the only reason I gave this lens 4 stars instead of 5. From reading around this seems to be a common problem with these lenses. For some reason the focus distance scale is not set correctly. If you google this lens you can easily find a guide to correcting the focus ring and setting it to the correct distances. However upon doing this I found out that it is actually more subtle than just a wrong distance scale. With my particular lens I found that I obtained maximum sharpness for objects ~1mile away when I set the distance scale to between the 7ft and 10ft marking on the lens. This is quite a ways away from where the infinity mark is. However at night when attempting to photograph the stars, I found that I obtained maximum sharpness of the stars with the focus set slightly past infinity. Most of the time one would expect that 1 mile is essentially infinity when it comes to lenses, but for some reason there is a huge difference between 1 mile and infinity. Once I conducted enough tests and examined the test shots at 100% I was able to use simple masking tape to re-label my lens for the correct positions for various situations. It should be noted that this is really only an issue if you are shooting wide open at f/2.8. By f/8 everything will be razor sharp and in focus no matter where you set your focal point due to the enormity of the depth of field of such a wide angle lens.

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This lens can do some pretty cools stuff, but it takes a little work and knowledge of your camera. Remember you have to manually focus it and the focus ring is so big that it takes forever to feel like you have your subject just right. However, I didnt get the lens for close up photography, but more for landscapes and mainly for astrophotography where you just set the focus to infinity. When i do focus on near subjects I have a hard time getting a clear image. It is amazing what you can see at night with this lens and a long shutter speed. Below is a picture of a vacation home we rented and it came out amazing. Again slow shutter speed and a tripod are the trick. All of the images were shot with this lens at night. Some of the images look like there is daylight, but you can tell by the night sky this is at night. In fact, it was a completely dark field using 30 second exposure times. Really fun to shoot. Hoping to get a cool shot of the milky way one night.

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I was looking for an ultra wide for my full frame Canon 6D that, for the present, would fit my budget. Given the reviews this lens seemed to fit the bill, especially given the chip that permits automatic exposure and indicates when focus is achieved. Thus far I am very pleased with the lens: meets the ultra wide criterion, is sharp, and the chip works well. It complements my 24mm-104mm Canon L lens (as well as others).

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