opera 50mm F1.4 FF landscape performance
Landscape photography really challenges the optical performance of any lens. This is the main reason why 50mm lenses are still widely used by professional landscape photographers.
If I decide to carry only one lens for landscape purpose in both day and night (i.e. landscape and nightscape), it would be definitely a high quality fast 50mm lens. To cover wide fields, a 50mm lens could become an easily solution to capture multi shots for creating wide angle panoramic images or hyper resolution mosaic photos. In fact, as subjects are highly controllable in landscape genre, I prefer to create high resolution multi shot images through normal lenses instead of a single shot, so in practice my wide angle lenses are not frequently used for this purpose!
My new lens, Tokina opera 50mm F1.4 FF in Nikon mount was received around date of public release on October. This time coincided with the beginning of beautiful autumn in Northern hemisphere with plenty of gorgeous landscapes. Tokina opera 50mm F1.4 FF incorporates one of the most sophisticated optical formulas till now for a normal lens, in addition to plenty of state of the art technologies like spherical and SD (Super-low Dispersion) glasses, ELR (Extremely Low Reflection) coating, round-shaped 9 blade diaphragm and electric diaphragm (for Nikon F mount). I was wondering how these cutting-edge technologies render the light for superior performance in practice and it was the best time to go out in the nature to test the lens on one of the most challenging missions; Landscape photos.
The first light shot through this lens was a real surprise. I was planning a photography trip towards the heights of Alborz Mountains. On the way, I went through colorful villages in mild misty mountain valleys which are illuminated by the sun from behind, a typical challenging condition for lens coating to examine how it resists to ghost and flares. And the result is thoroughly fascinating without any sign of such issues!
At this location, all subjects were aimed at infinity with lots of details so it was a proper time and site to test sharpness on the field. I chose three 100% crops from different parts of the scene shown as follow.
| Left far corner | Center | Far right |
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f/1.4 |
f/1.4 |
f/1.4 |
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f/2 |
f/2 |
f/2 |
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f/2.8 |
f/2.8 |
f/2.8 |
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f/4 |
f/4 |
f/4 |
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f/5.6 |
f/5.6 |
f/5.6 |
Tokina opera 50mm F1.4 FF is a very capable lens to feed the sensor with as much resolution as it needs. Sharpness distribution is fascinating even at wide open diaphragms. In my test, the peak of sharpness was reached at f/4-5.6 and the lens maintained it through corner to corner.
After capturing these shots, I continued my journey path to reach one of the highest roads in Iran. At height of more than 3000 meters above sea level, the landscape of high mountains with clouds and snow was stunning.
This lens introduces cutting-edge technologies in coating and thoroughly I find it flare resistant on previous shots, so I decided to examine it under extreme conditions. I pointed the camera to the sun at the corner of the frame while the foreground was composed of pitch dark mountains. Finally I could barely find very mild flare at this critical conditions as shown in the following image. More over, the image remains very contrasty even at this critical lighting.
Apart superior optical characteristics of Tokina opera 50mm F1.4 FF, Tokina corporation promises a very robust lens which incorporates dust and weather resistant sealing under extreme conditions that is also very important for landscape photographers looking for a reliable go-to lens. The lens works flawlessly under cold humid strong winds at 3150 meters heights as well as conditions near waterfalls, where everything is completely covered by droplets.
Beside beautiful bokeh of this lens for which its 9 blade diaphragm is essential, as a landscape photographer deeply interested in nightscape and astro-photography, the shape number of diffraction rays around point light sources is important for me. For this purpose, I took photo of a village in twilight. The overall scene is lighted by scattered sun light from the atmosphere but, at the same time, artificial lights of houses and roads were present. As expecting from a 9 blade diaphragm, diffraction rays around these lamps and lights were pleasing with 18 diffraction rays.
In conclusion, the new opera 50mm lens delivers fascinating results in landscape photography under any challenging light conditions. The optical performance of this lens puts new standards for landscape photography in addition to the reliable build quality, specially at this category. I am very enthusiast to incorporate unique abilities of Tokina opera 50mm F1.4 FF on my astro-photography projects which challenged most critical settings of lens and share the results with you in next review article in the near future.