Pixiq

Here’s my philosophy about buying lenses: For workaday use, I prefer to those made by my camera’s manufacturer. I don’t mind used purchasing lenses because I’m going to use them anyway but everybody likes a bargain and some of the best deals on cheap wide-angle lenses are provided by Russian optics. Even when used with real wide-angle lenses, the focal-length multiplication factor built into most digital SLR’s robs us of truly wide-angle results, but ultra wide angles are expensive aren’t they? Nyet!

An EF 15mm f/2.8 lens for my Canon system costs about $650. A new 15mm lens from third-party manufacturers can cost $500 or more but I purchased a new 16mm Zenitar f/2.8 lens on eBay for $99. I’ve seen them sold directly by importers for $175, but either way it’s a good price, IF the lens is worth the investment.

What’s the bad news? The 16mm Zenitar f/2.8 is a manual focus (remember those days?) lens that will not couple with your camera’s metering system. Old school advice is to focus with the lens wide open, then stop down to the desired aperture so you can get correct exposure before making the shot. I’m too lazy for all that work, so I set the lens to my desired aperture, place the camera on Aperture Priority mode, and let it pick the shutter speed.

But, Mr. Bill, I can hear you saying, stopping the lens down the working aperture means the viewfinder will be dark and if it’s set at f/16, how will I ever focus? My favorite method for focusing with these inexpensive wide-angle lenses is to set the lens at its hyperfocal distance. The hyperfocal distance is a specific point of focus where any object that is between the distance from this point and infinity is in focus. Here’s how to do it: After you select an aperture you rotate the focusing ring setting that aperture opposite the infinity mark. On the 16mm Zenitar this produces a depth-of-field from about five inches to infinity that effectively turns my camera into a digital point and shoot SLR.

The good news is that the 16mm Zenitar is a rectilinear full-frame fish-eye lens that fills the 24x36mm frame or a cropped portion of whatever size your digital SLR chip may produce. Fit and finish are what you might expect from a 70’s era Japanese lens, but certainly worth every penny I paid for it. Image sharpness is more than acceptable at smaller apertures.

Above is the actual 16mm Zenitar f/2.8 lens I purchased on eBay for $99. It was new in a box, came with Canon mount, instructions in Russian, and four (skylight, green, yellow, and red) rear-mount filters. The filter’s availability doesn’t matter to me, because I haven’t used any of them except the Skylight that’s already mounted on the lens but die-hard filter users probably will. If so, be careful taking off the Skylight filter, it’s on there really tight.

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