Lens News

I really like extreme lenses. Extremely wide, extremely fast, and extremely long lenses will all allow you to create unique images that stand out from the crowd. When I heard about the Sigma 8-16mm lens I wanted to get my hands on one and start shooting, so I asked my editor if I could borrow one from Sigma for testing. He wanted to know what I was going to do with it, so naturally I told him: take portraits. You might, as he did, find this a little odd—taking portraits with a wide-angle lens, and a very wide lens at that. After all, don’t photographers usually use long lenses for portraits?

Why are photographers taught to use long lenses for portraits? There are four basic tenets behind this reasoning: narrow angle of view, shallow depth of field, flattering perspective, and a comfortable working distance between you and your subject. However, flip these “rules” on their head and you’ll see why I like working with wides: wide angle of view, great potential depth of field, unique perspective, and, oddly enough, working right in your subject’s face. In short, I use the special nature of a wide lens to give my portraits a new and unique look.

If you stumbled upon a rare Novoflex 600mm pistol grip “bazooka lens” at a yard sale for $17, we imagine you’d lay down your cash, grab the case, and quickly head for your car. That’s exactly what our weird lens guru Mathieu Stern did recently in Paris.

"My" Leica M8--a loaner from Leica for review--came with a 50mm f/2 bar-coded Summicron. The 18x27mm sensor turns this into a 67mm lens in 35mm terms: rather long for someone whose standard lens on 35mm has for decades been a 35mm. So as soon as I got the M8, I started using other, older lenses. There is, after all, an enormous choice, from 12mm (18mm...

Zeiss has just added three fast prime lenses to their Milvus line of premium manual-focus lenses for DSLR cameras—a 15mm f/2.8, an 18mm f/2.8 and a 135mm f/2 telephoto. This expands the respected Milvus line to nine lenses offering optimum image characteristics, premium coatings, smooth bokeh, and uncompromising build quality.

Zeiss has introduced a new line of six high performance lenses designed for high-resolution DSLR cameras from Nikon and Canon.

The new Zeiss Otus 1.4/28 lens offers users of shorter focal lengths the quality of the ZEISS Otus family for landscapes and architectural photography—or any other images they take with a wide-angle lens. The ZEISS Otus 1.4/28 with ZE (or ZF.2 mount for DSLR cameras from Canon and Nikon) was created for pro photographers and features inner focusing, a dial window and the well-known yellow labeling of the dials for easy legibility.