Sometimes a plain, central composition works too, just make sure you can balance the peripheral objects, here the flower in the top left bugged me so I had to use a brutal vignette to suppress it a little.

Oh yeah, the lens. It’s nice for what I call macro but what isn’t actually macro. It focuses very near so you can get close-ups of flowers which is a bit of a hobby for me.

To avoid always having to stick to a central composition just take the photo with the subject dead-center, and crop it to adhere to either the rule of 3rds or just balance it with something in the background. Here I was going for a Fibonacci spiral composition.

Here’s that convex focus plane I was talking about. That’s what makes the edges look spherical. Works well for symmetrical compositions, not necessarily fully central but you can see that the flower is losing sharpness towards the top. This is one of the limitations of the lens unfortunately.

Purple Haze…
This is not a steamy bathroom, I wiped the lens with some alcohol swabs to clean it – it’s just old and grimy.

This photo doesn’t really show the potential but it’s just a reference, so I can compare the lenses.

This is the last lens I’ll be showing on this exact bedside table as I moved out shortly after this series and I’m not even remotely attached to the pine quality of probably ikea.

I’ll still use the DIYcam for testing, just for consistency, and I do have the lamp, cup, tin and CD stack somewhere. As of now, I have 4 new lenses to show and test out, including this exact lens… You’ll see.

This is an old portrait lens with pretty strange parameters and some quirky features.
There is a whole lot of distortion, and like I described previously, the focus plane here is very convex, similar to the Prinzflex 28mm lens I reviewed.

It also has a smooth aperture ring which is perfect for filming.

Nice depth of field here, the lens is set at 6.3 but with enough space from the background, you can get separation like this.

I think this was shot at 1/60, and took a few attempts due to wind, at ISO 800. Still good enough image, light was nice, nothing special but it takes reasonable photos and that’s neat.

All of these samples were from about 15 mins around my garden as this thing is actually embarrassing to take out of my house. Here’s a crow, it’s pretty sharp – editing of these photos is done within reason, I don’t sharpen them, I don’t correct vignetting or distortion. Just some contrast/lightness corrections.

This test shot is rather tight on the old DIY cam – I had to use extension tubes to get this too as the minimal focus distance on this lens is 8m… I still couldn’t focus on the front of the camera properly.

Again – it’s just a bit of fun, don’t expect to wow your audience.
Note that the sharpness on the areas in focus is pretty good. There is also something quite smooth about the image.

This Canon, I mean cannon, I mean “Prinxgalaxy”, is just your average 400mm, except you can use it as a baseball bat (tried&tested). It has no stabilisation and is an F6.3 so good luck photographing kingfishers in the rain, however its price is just 5% of the Canon 400mm, and you can pick up a 2x teleconverter for M42 mount lenses for around £10 too, though then you end up with an F8.0.

It’s fair to say I don’t use this lens very much, you can only really use it in the UK (weather joke incoming:) between the 15th and 16th of June, at around 3pm, for 4 minutes, pointing at the sun – then you’ll get a good photo of your dog.
Jokes aside, the lens does perform reasonably well when filming, on a steady tripod with an extra lens mount. The best feature of it in fact, is the smooth aperture ring. I use this to make my own fades when filming and even to change perspective – a shallow depth of field portrait suddenly becomes a deep cityscape – something you can’t really do in post.