![]() Similar to other Laowa lenses, the 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 is a very solidly built lens with an all-metal construction. NIKON Z 7 + 0mm f/0 ISO 64, 1/30 Build Quality and Ergonomics As a result, I ended up using the lens at 10mm a lot more than other focal lengths. I had a lot of fun photographing with the lens, and although it was not a great candidate for photographing grand vistas and overloooks at the wide end, I found myself walking around and looking for interesting foreground shapes and textures to fill the frame. If you have never previously used such a wide lens, it can be both fun and and a challenge to use. And in some cases, I moved the camera closer to foreground elements to exaggerate their sizes relative to the background and the sky. As you can see from the sample images in this review, I used the Laowa 10-18mm lens to photograph landscapes with very large elements in the foreground. See our article on using wide-angle lenses for more information on this subject. ![]() I cloned out my shoe from this oneĪnother thing to keep in mind is that at such focal lengths as 10mm-14mm, you will need to find interesting foreground elements, or your photographs will end up with a ton of negative space. While cloning those out in post-processing wasn’t too painful of a task since I was shooting landscapes with a ton of foreground elements, I definitely made a mental note to myself to pay more attention next time. After using the lens at 10mm, I ended up with a few photos of my feet and my tripod legs, which I did not notice at the time of taking pictures. Wide to the point that you might end up photographing unwanted elements without realizing it, if you are not careful. ![]() And now Venus Optics has modified the lens to work on Nikon’s Z mount, which makes it the widest lens you can attach to a Nikon Z-series camera without an adapter. This makes the 10-18mm a truly unique lens, which is also why it earned the “world’s widest rectilinear full-frame zoom lens” title when it was originally announced for the Sony FE mount in 2018. In fact, as of the time of this review’s publication, aside from fisheyes, there are only two lenses that offer a similar angle of view and those are the Voigtlander 10mm f/5.6 and the Samyang 10mm f/3.5 and both are primes. While 2mm might not sound like a big deal, it represents a difference of 8° in angle of view, which is significant. NIKON Z 7 + 0mm f/0 ISO 100, 0.6 sec An Ultra-Wide Zoom LensĪlthough we have previously covered the Laowa 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D lens and found it to be an extremely wide lens on full-frame cameras, the Laowa 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 beats that lens in maximum field of view by 2mm. A particularly interesting feature is the ability to use rear-mount 37mm filters, although as I reveal below, it is not a particularly useful feature to have for mounting thick polarizing filters. To make the lens particularly attractive for including bright sources of light to create appealing sun stars, the lens has a 5-blade diaphragm (more on this later). The front element is coated with Laowa’s “Frog Eye Coating”, which works similarly to fluorine coating that we see on other modern lenses. The lens has a rather complex optical formula comprising of 14 elements in 10 groups, 2 of which are Aspherical and 1 is Extra-low Dispersion. Without a doubt, the Laowa 10-18mm has quite interesting specifications, thanks to its ultra-wide zoom range and rectilinear design. Maximum Reproduction Ratio: 1:4 (0.25x magnification)įor detailed information about the lens, including lens construction and MTF charts, please see the Venus Optics Laowa 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 page of our lens database.
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