Hey everyone Nico Carver here. Today I have a mini review that i'm really excited about.
This is the Venus Optics Laowa Argus 35 millimeter f/0.95 full frame lens for canon RF mount and
it's available starting today, September 10th with a retail price of 899 us dollars
and it's also available for Sony and Nikon mirrorless full frame.
I'm going to summarize my impressions up top here and then i'll jump into the details the reason you
get this lens is if you're interested in the f 0.95 f 0.95 is a very bright aperture and it
meant i was able to do some novel things that i've been wanting to try like shooting live video at 24
frames a second of the milky way which i think is pretty wild now the video angle is one area where
i wish i had a Sony camera as canon's video low light performance isn't the best compared to say
something like a7s series with the really big pixels unfortunately i received it right after
the peak of the Perseids as that would have been a great application of shooting video at f 0.95
i did get the chance to take a number of photos and i am really quite impressed with the milky way
performance with or without a star tracker also for anyone like me who gets limited time at dark
sites and wants that insane speed this is great for like constellation shots and things like that
now the downside of very fast focal ratios on lenses is usually there's some trade-offs
in terms of you get more extreme vignetting and the star performance especially away from center
you get a lot of sort of weird aberrations that you can only usually get rid of by really stopping
down the lens but that's sort of then defeats the purpose of the insane speed so i'm going to talk
about all these details but before i do let me just say that if you're interested in purchasing
this lens um i'd encourage you to purchase it from my friend Noah Buchanan at Hunt's Photo and Video
and i'll put his email in the description and right here and you can just email him
uh to get set up to buy the lens and this copy is a sample copy that Venus Optics has lent to
me i'll have to sadly send it back soon here but i really appreciate that they sent me this
to check it out for astrophotography okay let's jump into the details now
so as i mentioned the the headline feature of this lens is of course that it has a very bright
wide open aperture f 0.95 is more than a full stop brighter than f 1.4 meaning to achieve the same
brightness across the scene at 1.4 you'd have to expose for twice as long that's what a stop means
and so it's why we call these lenses faster and i think the law is a pretty unique lens on the
market uh compared to all the other ultra fast wide lenses we've been seeing um because most of
those have been limited to an aps-c image circle while this one is a full-frame 35 millimeter lens
um if you do follow lens news like me you might be wondering why are we seeing
suddenly all of these faster than f1 lenses and it has to do with the move to mirrorless
camera bodies because the mirrorless cameras have the much shorter flange distance
which means we can get faster lenses faster lenses did exist back in the day i mean even the 60s
zeiss made the famous zeiss planar f 0.7 for nasa's apollo missions with the idea of using it
to shoot the far side of the moon with a modified hasselblad camera and then a little bit later on
uh one of the ten copies that zeiss made for nasa was purchased by director stanley kubrick to make
his film barry linden where he was the first to film scenes completely by candlelight on film
stock which is i think was iso 100 and so anyways why am i telling you all this well i'm a bit of
a camera and camera lens nerd and i've always been fascinated by that nasa kubrick connection
and this is why um when i got to talking to venus optics through my friends at hunts photo and video
i was really interested in these ultra fast lenses that they're making because i always thought it'd
be really cool to do astrophotography video of the night sky that sort of better approximated
really being there with a wide-angle lens and getting the feeling of the actual stars twinkling
from the atmosphere and and everything like that and i gotta say this lens really delivered i i
do wish my camera was a bit less noisy because you can see some noise there but i definitely see the
potential for these clips because they're a more immersive way to show off a location and what it
really feels like to be to be there under a dark sky especially in this milky way one is that's
just how the star clouds and lagoon nebula look like in my opinion from a sort of dark portal 3
zone and that's where this was shot in terms of photo performance for astrophotography i think
it will mostly appeal to those that shoot a lot of milky way
or aurora or meteor showers uh 35 millimeters is really wide enough on full frame that you can fit
in a lot of the sky uh full constellations like cygnus here or you know the whole milky way core
area with sagittarius uh or from cassiopeia to the andromeda galaxy as i did here
and personally this wide you know i i look at the whole picture and i don't care so much about
zooming in on the corners but if you are a pixel peeper the stars aren't very flattering at f 0.95
and they don't really get much better until you're stopping way down to like f4
at 5.6 but in terms of just you know taking pictures with it that are they're wide angle
and not really worrying about mosaics and things like that i think this lens is going to serve you
very well especially if you're short on time and you really want that photographic speed
okay i'm almost uh out of time i'm sure so i'll just wrap up by mentioning a few specs here
it's very well made in my opinion it seems like a lot of metal it's 755 grams it takes uh 72
millimeter threaded filters it's all manual manual focus and manual aperture with no communication
to the camera it does seem to have a permanently attached metal lens hood there is plenty of room
for a lens warmer around the focus ring which does turn very nicely and then lastly the iris can be
uh in d clicked or clicked mode which i think is pretty cool there's a little switch there
well that's it for this five minute friday i might return to the lens in a future video
when i eventually get to a shootout at this focal length the 35 millimeters but i'm still working
my way up to that so far i've done a shootout at fisheye 14 millimeters so there are a couple more
shootouts to go before i get to 35. this has been Nico Carver nebulaphotos.com clear skies everyone