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