BEJO Photography: zoom lens

Hello everyone, today I want to talk about the Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 that I acquired few months ago that has been my main lens since December 2014 until today in my Panasonic GX7. To start, the 12-35mm f2.8 is what considered by many as the professional grade lens from Panasonic for the Micro Four Thirds cameras. This lens has the constant f2.8 aperture at all zoom settings, complete with weather sealing and a very effective Power O.I.S. Stabilization which is very useful for Panasonic shooter.

First of all, this lens covers full frame equivalent of 24-70mm which makes the zoom range of this lens really useful as a general purpose mid-zoom lens with moderate wide angle territory at its widest zoom up to normal portrait territory at its tightest zoom. This could be the perfect event photographer and wedding photographer lens for covering wider shots as well as a good solid walkaround lens for general travel and day to day use.

Let's start, what do I like from this lens?

The size of this lens is very similar to my Panasonic 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 as well as my Olympus 75mm f1.8 which I admit is on the big side for the Micro Four Thirds world, but then again, this is only as big as your APS-C 18-55mm kit lens for Canon or Nikon DSLR which is actually a LOT smaller than the real 24-70mm f2.8 of the real full frame. The lens comes with lens hood and pouch. I recommend to use the hood all the time, not only to protect against flare, but also to protect the front element of this lens.

The sharpness of this lens is definitely very sharp as expected from a professional grade lens, and the f2.8 aperture really helps to gather a lot of light especially on low light situation. Combine that with a good optical stabilizer in the lens, this lens does very well in low light and can save you a few stops of light so that you don't have to go higher than ISO 1600 when shooting in dim light conditions.

I love the fact that this lens cover all the standard normal prime lens focal lengths such as 14mm, 17mm, 20mm, and 25mm. This makes me approach the lens as some sort of a collection of prime lenses in a single lens as opposed to a lens with zoom capability. I shoot very often deliberately at dedicated focal length and leave it there to simulate the field of view of the prime lens that I have in mind. This makes this lens the best lens for street photography. Again, coupled with the fast aperture of f2.8, this lens is very flexible when shooting streets.

Autofocus is as fast as the lens can be which is as fast as every other lens that I've reviewed in my blog. There was one or two instances in my personal experience where the focus was actually locking and armed but it actually mis-focused completely although it was on single small point autofocus and the light was good(mid-day sunny outdoor light). This happened at least once every 40 or 50 shots which isn't bad by any means and not worrying at all, but at least you should know. To compare, my 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 only misfocused once or twice during good light, it only misfocused when it was really dark and the camera metering can't get more than -3EV.

On a side note, people seemed to talk about the rendering, contrast, and color of this lens. I do kinda understand about the contrast, but I don't find anything special in particular of this lens when we talk about the rendering or color, it's all the same to me with any other good Micro Four Thirds lens. I can assure you, this lens is sharp, contrasty and worth the money!

Bonus point for this lens, it has a quite close minimum focusing distance at all focal length, making it useful to get an emergency macro shots if you need to. Also this lens handles flare like no others! Very little flare although not completely flare-less like the 75mm f1.8.

What are the things that I don't like from this lens?

As I mentioned before, there were a couple of instances where the autofocus missed the object completely. Also you should know that this lens is a bit soft at 35mm at f2.8 on the closest focusing distance although it is very sharp at longer distances.

I also need to mention that this lens is a tiny bit heavier than the 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 although not by much. You can feel it when you handle the lens for an extended period of time.

I do wish this lens max out at 40mm instead of 35mm but now Olympus has that 12-40mm f2.8 as an alternative to this lens. If you need longer distance, you can get that Olympus version which is as sharp as this lens but minus the stabilizer.

Other thing that I don't like from this lens is the fact that the lens hood is very easy to get knocked when shooting, resulting in a strong vignette in your photos when you don't realize it.

Be mindful when shooting at 12mm, the perspective distortion starts to kick in at that focal length, better switch to 14mm if possible to avoid significant perspective distortion and keep your verticals as straight as you can.

Conclusion

After using this lens for a few months now, I can safely say that this lens is very good. The focal length range do makes me feel a bit limited sometimes, but that's how all the full frame 24-70mm lens are behaving anyway. I do love the sharpness of this lens, the fast aperture, the build quality, as well as the stabilizer and the weather sealing of this lens. The macro capability of this lens is also surprisingly helping me a lot of times.

I do, however, question about how much sharper this lens is when compared to Panasonic 14-140mm f3.5-5.6. It turns out that the 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 is also very sharp and the 12-35mm isn't that far from it. So I do have to say that if you don't need fast aperture and you need flexible focal length range, go get the 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 instead and save your money; you won't be able to tell if the 12-35mm is sharper anyway unless you pixel peep at 100% on your computer screen. If you, however, need the big aperture, the weather sealing, and the constant aperture, go get this lens and let me assure you it's worth the money. Or if you already have a dedicated lens to cover anything above 45mm focal length, then this lens will make sense to back it up.

Let me share some sample photos:

Landscape at 12mm? Check!

Street photography? Check!

Flare control when shooting at the sun?
Very good, but not totally perfect. See that purple spot?

More street photography.

Close up semi macro photo.

The big aperture makes it very flexible to shoot
in conjunction with off camera flash techniques.

More flower with off camera flash techniques
to reveal ultimate sharpness.

It is very punchy and contrasty!

More close up work.

More street photo stuff.

This lens is heavenly when used in street photography.

Again, street photography.

This is how wide the 12mm is. (24mm full frame)

This is as close as it can get.

See that detail in the wood pieces?

I hope this review helps, until next time and God bless you :)

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.