Understanding the wide-angle macro lens

- Recording these practicing photographer segments does not usually require a lot of willpower, but this one did. It's been tough, I gotta say, in these last few days. The reason being, I bought this lens. I had this idea that when you get a new piece of gear, there's a whole lot of learning that goes on about the technical specifics, and with a lens, about how it changes the way that you see, so I thought, oh, I oughta get a lens, and kind of go through that whole process with you. And there's this lens that I'd had my eye on that I've been curious about for a while, and this is it.

And so I bought it. And then had this great idea that I would actually unbox it on camera, so it's just been sitting in my room while I've been here, and I haven't been allowed to touch it, and it's been driving me nuts, so I'm very excited to be here today to finally open what this thing is. This is a brand I've never heard of, a company called Laowa. This is a 15 millimeter F4 wide angle macro. So it's a very odd combination of things. I don't really know what it's gonna do.

Presumably I can get really close to stuff but still have a really wide angle. We'll see. This lens is about $500, it's gotten some good reviews. So I'm really glad I'm gonna take it out of the package now. You might think, why should I watch you take something out of the package? Well, we're gonna talk a little bit about some specifics of buying a lens. I went ahead and just bought this lens 'cause it's a pretty obscure piece of gear. If you're shopping for a more normal lens, just like this 24 to 105 or something, you can certainly go out and buy it, but these days there's a lot of online, there are a lot of online rental services that you can rent a lot of different lenses from, and that's a great way to audition a lens, give it a try, see what you think of it, and if you like it, send it back and go buy one of your own.

Even if you're buying lenses outright, e-Bay really changes things. One of the reasons I thought, OK, I'm gonna go ahead and invest in this lens is I know that if it turns out I don't like it, I can put it on e-Bay and sell it pretty easily and make back a lot of my investment. So there's not a lot of risk these days for trying a new piece of gear like this. Because I want the option of ditching it later if I don't like it, I'm going to be very careful with it. I want to make sure that I save all the packaging. I want to be sure that the packaging is intact and that the lens is in good shape. So I'm just going to open this. I've never seen a bag in a-- a lens in a vacuum-sealed bag, this is great.

I'll be able to eat this lens later, it won't have spoiled. From this I can't actually open the lens. I think I'm gonna need a tool of some kind. Oh, here's one. So I'm going to use this tool to slice open this bag here. OK, right off the bat, this is very interesting, it appears-- does this lens have some kind of tilt mechanism? I wasn't expecting that.

I'll have to look into that. I also bought a filter to put on the front. Again, my idea is I want to, I always want to take care of my gear, but I want to be very careful right now in case I don't want to keep this lens. Very often extremely wide-angle lenses like this will have a very bulbous front element, and this one definitely does, but it's nice because it's been engineered in a way where I can still get a filter in front of it. Oh, there it is. OK, so when I ordered the lens, I went ahead and ordered a filter.

Of course, you need to be sure that you're ordering the right size and check out the lens specs to find out what size filter you need. These things are always a drag to get open. I'm going to do this without a tool even though I have one. So one of the other things I'm going to do, right off the bat, is inspect the optics of the lens. I once bought a nice lens, a Canon lens actually, took it out of the box and saw that there was a huge bubble inside the very front element. The lens was completely useless. I had to put it right back in the box and send it back.

So it is a good idea to give your lenses a good inspection when they're right out of the box. Make sure the optics look OK. Wow, this is really weird. Look at that rear element there, very, very small in the back. So I don't see anything weird in there. Everything turns on the lens, the rings are working. I feel OK keeping this lens and giving it a try. I'm going to go ahead and put this on. This is a UV filter, it does nothing to alter the light that's coming into the lens.

It is there simply to protect the lens. And now I've got it all out. Oh, there's a sunshade also. I'm just gonna stick all this back in here. I don't want to set aside a single piece of packaging in case I want to sell it later. You might say, well, the same thing's true for returning it. I'm gonna keep this lens longer than the return period. It takes a while to learn a lens. It takes a while to figure out if you really want it. I suspect I'll hold on to this for at least a couple of months as I try to figure out if it's something for me or not. So returning's not really going to be an option. I mentioned lens rental earlier.

You can learn a lot about a lens just in two or three days. So that is a perfectly reasonable way to test something. A lens like this is so weird that I think it's going to take me a while to get a handle on it. I've no idea what I'm going to see when I look through here, which is actually kind of exciting. That's not normally the case with a lens. When you buy a telephoto lens, you usually have a pretty good idea that you're going to see something far away. This is-- boy, I sure hope there's a manual in that box somewhere. Oh wow, this is really cool.

OK, this is going to be very interesting. So I'm not gonna actually shoot with this lens yet, but next week you are going to see me shoot with it. And the reason I want to show you the shooting process is there's a lot to learn about a tool. Tools teach us as much as we teach them. I have the idea, I have some preconceived notions of this lens. It's a macro lens, and all that means is that I have a very, very small minimum focus distance. I can get very, very close to things.

But it's wide angle, meaning that even when I'm this close, I still have a field of view that comes out to here. So in theory what that's going to let me do is very strong layering in my image, having a really intense thing right in the foreground, something magnified tremendously, but still have background elements to work with. That's interesting for a number of reasons. I can create compositions that relate a foreground element to a background element in a way that they normally don't do. That's my expectation of this lens, but there may be much more to this lens than I think.

And by intelligently examining the lens while I'm shooting, trying to pay attention to it, trying to unlock its secrets and figure out what it can do, I can up to speed with this lens much quicker than if I just stumble around and maybe years later realize, oh this lens is good for this or that. One reason to try to get up to speed quickly is that as you learn what a particular lens is good for, you will start seeing the world in that way. That makes it easier to recognize potential shots. When I first started shooting with an ultrawide lens, I'd didn't have an eye for ultrawide composition.

Now when I'm moving through the world, I can put things together and go, you know this would work with a 16mm lens, pull it out of my bag and use it. So that's why it's a good idea to intelligently go after a new lens and try to figure out how it works, and that's what we're gonna do next week.