BEJO Photography: The Wisest and the Widest Lens: Panasonic Lumix G Vario 7-14mm f/4

I admit that the title of the post is kinda lame, but I want to talk about the Panasonic 7-14mm wide angle lens. To start off, let's talk a little bit about wide angle lenses and their common characteristics. Wide angle photography is all about trying to squeeze as much as possible into the frame; you can squeeze a very small room into the whole picture and make it look big easily. It is also about pushing far away things to become even more far away; it will make your background look really small and very uncompressed. It is also about making thin people fat (oops!); try to photograph a girl with this lens and put her on the edge of the frame, she will gain a few pounds instantly!

A warning when using wide angle lens: be wise! Don't over-do anything because wide angle lens is very unforgiving especially when we talk about perspective distortion and its very non-compressive behaviours.

The Panasonic 7-14mm f/4 lens with the non-standard lens cap besides it.

I didn't do much wide angle photography to be honest but there were times when a wide angle lens was really a necessity and I just had to get one to fulfil certain photography requests like shooting building interior, exterior, general landscape or cityscape. During my Canon days I would resort to my lovely Tokina 12-24mm F4 AT-X Pro DX II (what a lame and mouthful name!!) to get the jobs done. Now that I switched to Micro Four Thirds, the Panny 7-14mm was and is the right candidate to replace the Tokina in my system.

The Panasonic 7-14mm on my E-PL6 with 25mm f1.8 besides it. Look how small and tiny it is! It isn't bigger than the grip of my palm!

Onto the lens itself, what does the Panny 7-14mm do that the others don't do?

1. It's as wide as you can get without using a fisheye lens. At 7mm, it is equivalent to 14mm on a full frame or 9mm on APS-C so it is as wide as Nikon's legendary 14-24mm f2.8. It is quite crazy when you think about how wide 14mm on full frame, you can cover 115 degree field of view from the lens. Anyone sitting besides you will get into the frame if they move forward a bit.

2. It's so much smaller and lighter compared to its equivalent on other formats. Yeah I know I talked about this too much, but my Tokina is quite a pain in the butt to carry around and I ended up not carrying it anywhere, I just left it at home gathering dust. The Panny 7-14mm isn't big at all, in fact it is just slightly bigger than the kit 14-42mm lens even with the huge bulbous front element on the Panny 7-14mm.

3. It is as sharp as you can get! At 7mm f4, it is so crazily sharp, it makes my eyes bleed whenever I saw photographs that I took with this lens! Joking aside, the sweet spot of this lens is f4 at 7mm, so you don't need to stop down which means this could help you in poor lighting conditions.

What I don't like from this lens?

1. F4 is a bit too slow. Well to be honest I want an f2.8 for such a lens but that would turn this lens into a big heavy lens just like a Tokina. So I am still happy with f4, unless Panasonic or Olympus or whoever makes MFT mount lens is crazy enough to come up with 7-14mm f2.8 that is as small as this one if not smaller.

2. No way to attach filter on the front. There is no filter thread or anything, so basically you have to make some kind of DIY clamper to be able to attach filters on the front of the lens.

3. It is crazy expensive. Well considering the price of the Tokina, this lens is twice the price. I'm not too fond about its price and sometimes it's difficult to justify such a crazy price tag for a lens that I don't use too often.