I've mostly been a wide angle landscape photographer the last 60 years but there was a Vitrox lens sale recently so a grabbed the hunking huge 135 lab to replace one of my exercise weights, er I mean to try do some abstract photography.
Not having a clue how it would behave, I took a "normal" shot of an old pump house with some plum trees by it. Picture #1
The sun was getting low and very warm for that picture and the next four of bluish Wisteria blossoms (almost too late for them).
#2 Wisteria blossom backdropped by nearby vegetation 20-30 feet away which produced big soft bokeh balls.
#3 Windy! Shot straight at a soft setting sun about to drop behind a building
#4 Now the sun is at upper right off the frame
#5 Wisteria blossom back-dropped by meadow glowing in the sun and distant redwood forest
Z8 camera hand held and hard to hold still so focusing wasn't easy for me - my first shots with this lens!
The lens looks beautifully made but the little screen is ridiculous, at least for my old eyes, plus it doesn't show you the current aperture correctly most of the time. I wanted to set aperture using the control ring but I kept moving it unintentionally, so I will disable it and use the camera rear dial from now on. Last exposures show my fumbling regarding setting aperture
My first Viltrox and I'm impressed! Triple arch sandstone feature capture in Valley of Fire outside Las Vegas a couple mornings ago with the Viltrox 14mm f/4.
I received a JLWIN tripod collar made for the Viltrox 135mm f1.8 lens, which is a beast to carry for very long. So I attached it to the lens and made another attempt at an abstract of a white sage bush growing in the wild back yard.
The original Z8 exposure was super rezzed in ACR and once in photoshop cropped down to 1.2% of original. Then I had to Gigapixel it up just a tad.
Distance to the white sage was 12.6 meters and the background vegetation is 26.6 meters away. That makes the background a little "busy" but I decided not to add any blur to it.
I like the tripod collar. It is cheap but seems adequately made. The one thing it can't do is allow rotation of lens. The collar is mounted on a cradle on the tripod. All I have to do is remove the cradle, rotate the lens 90° and attach directly to the gimbal for portrait orientation.
Dave
Original frame Viktrox 135mm f5.6 1/160 ISO 90
A crop from bottom center of first photo - 1.2% of original scene
Lens collar for Viltrox 135mm f 1.8 lens - attached to cradle on gimbal
Paid a visit to the Arcata Marsh with the Viltrox 85 EVO to learn depth of field and focus with it. The jury is still out because I swear I have the pin-point or single-point square right on target and green and image is severely out of focus. Had many misses on this outing - I don't have this issue with my 24-120 lens!
All images taken with Z8 & the 85 EVO and worked on in ACR & Photoshop
All are significantly cropped and I indicate the amount of pixels "left" I'm working with. On this trip I frequently found I only liked part of original image, which is one "penalty" of a fixed focal length and what ever the close focusing issues are!
Many of these I added in some vignette.
Dave
Cropped to 3.8 MP after super-resolution - f5 1/160 ISO 125
