‘Shift Just Got Real!’
Since getting my hands on their Laowa 7.5mm for my GH5 four years ago, I have been hooked on Laowa’s awesome range of lenses and as you can tell from my previous reviews (12mm and 9mm) my addiction to shooting wide angle grows with each new release. Hand on heart, I have tried other manufacturers for wide angle options, but for me personally and with how I like to shoot, none of the others comes even close - in regards to overall image quality, physical robustness and bang for your buck.
Laowa aren’t the sort of company to rest on their laurels either, just when you think ‘I’m sorted for wide angle now’ they’ll blow you away with a new development, in this case in the form of a 15mm f4.5 Zero-D(istortion) Shift lens - for those who don’t know what a shift lens is, we’ll look at it and it’s applications in more detail a bit later, but in it’s most leyman terms it corrects the angled converging lines that comes with perspective when shooting landscapes and architecture with a camera. If you’ve ever shot any tall buildings with a camera or your phone, you’ll notice that as the building grows in height, the top of building will seem to be disappearing away from where you are stood, it will almost look like it’s leaning backwards, the shift functionality of a lens corrects this.
Great Haseley Windmill, Oxfordshire
The aptly named - ‘Radcliffe Camera’
Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs
I was lucky enough to to test out the 15mm for L mount on the Lumix S1, and with travel still limited here in the UK, I took it for a spin in my home city of Oxford; whilst there aren’t any skyscrapers here, there is an abundance of stunning classical architecture to put the lens through it’s paces. Whilst I’ve been shooting wide angle for a few years now, I’m fairly new to shooting with shift lenses, having previously only shot with the Canon L 24mm TS lens on a couple of occasions.
How does shift work?
Using a series of elaborate compensating optics in tandem with the shifting mechanism, a shift lens ultimately allows you to change the positioning of the imaging circle in relation to your cameras sensor; effectively you can change the framing of your shot without having to change your position or angle of the camera, which is amazing, for example if there is something such as a railing obstructing your shot. Laowa’s 15mm f4.5 Zero-D Shift allows you to move the lens a whole 11mm in either direction.
Not only is this functionality great for shooting around obstacles (and rude tourists!), it also serves to correct the symptom of converging lines by fixing perspective. For example if you are shooting a tall building from the ground the bottom section of the building will appear straight but quickly converge up towards the sky, but by shifting the lens upwards it gives the same effect of being able to get off of the ground (with something like a step ladder) and shoot more of the building square on rather than from a low angle, which is amazing for large structures, especially with such a wide field of view; traditionally all of the lenses with shift capabilities have been in the 24 -35mm bracket.
Build & Handling
Laowa 15mm f4.5 Zero-D Shift for L Mount
A thing of beauty and marvel of engineering
I’ve spoken about my love for Laowa’s build qualities at great lengths in previous reviews and it’s much of the same when it comes to this lens, it’s built like tank, which in my opinion is great, not only is it robust, but the workings of the shift movement are equally as well built and as up to the task as the rest of the lens. On a few other shift lenses I’ve had my hands on in the past, the shift area of the lens (normally about half way along) can feel a bit ‘plastic-y’ in comparison to the rest of the lens, and seeing as it is having to support an awful lot of glass and movement in the front element it’s hard to put 100% faith in it, without the thought that the mechanism may give up on you one day constantly in the back of your mind - that's the thing with technology though right? Generally the more features something has, the likelihood is there is more things which can ultimately go wrong.
You don’t have to worry about any of those shortcomings with the Laowa 15mm Shift though (Phew!). Here, any part of the lens which isn’t the optical elements is full metal; yes that does have it’s trade offs when it comes to the overall weight (the 15mm Shift comes in at 597g) , but if you want something which is built to last, as is the case with lenses and camera bodies these days then I personally really don’t mind (plus it gives the arms a good work out whilst the gyms are closed).
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I know I’m going off on a slight tangent here, so please bare with me, but I really don’t understand this current fascination with wanting all this amazing new sensor technology capable of 8K etc. inside a tiny cramped plastic-y (albeit lightweight) body, whenever I pick up and try and shoot with one of these cameras it’s like I’m holding a friends newborn, I’m terrified I’m going to drop it and get hit with a crippling dread and the sweats. Give me a big camera body (S1 is perfect size for my hands) and well built lenses any day of the week (and yes I do see a chiropractor regularly…). It’s not that I don’t care about or look after my gear and I’m yet to have anything other than a slight knock when it’s been swinging around my neck on a camera strap (*problem solved with Peak Design camera clip - you’re welcome); but my friends call me ‘Stumblebee’ for a reason, being 6 foot 3 (and shrinking) I have pretty good hand eye co-ordination, however my feet are a different story entirely, I can literally trip over nothing, so I guess what I’m saying here is that while I never intend to go out and break my gear or not take good care of it, as a shooter (who relies on minimal gear) it’s great piece of mind to know that if a major accident were to happen then the likelihood of it ending the shoot is very small. Hence my love for robust gear!
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Clean lines all-round
Nice lens flare in the corners
Ergonomically if you’ve never used a shift lens before then this lens will take a bit of getting used to; as it’s not just the aperture and focus rings to operate here, it’s also the wheel which sets the shift amount along with the tab which allows you to change the angle of the shift. It took me a couple of shots to get the muscle memory in place to not turn the shift wheel when I had meant to rock the focus wheel, but it’s no different than when you switch between manufacturers who put the lenses focus at the back or front of the lens.
Like the rest of the body the lens cap for the 15mm is solid metal and screws on in place, so it won’t come off in your camera bag or ping off unexpectedly in the middle of the street (looking at you 12mm Zero-D lens cap!). The grips for the three adjustment wheels are also metal and are made up of decent grooves which makes operation even in January snow super comfortable.
‘Put in a shift’
Panoramic Vs Standard shot
Another really neat function of a shift lens is the ability to keep the camera locked in one spot and vertically shift the lens from left to right (or right to left if that’s how you swing, I’m not judging) and take a series of images which you can then combine in your chosen piece of software (I use Lightroom) to create an awesome wide angle panoramic. As you can see in the photos above, both captured handheld, the shot on the right is a single shot on the 15mm, but the panoramic to the left was all captured from exactly the same position, I simply shifted the lens to capture the other elements on the side, this shot was made up of roughly 10 shots in total. You can take this even further and shift the lens vertically too which would give you an even larger field of view… but my hands were getting cold and I didn’t have a tripod!
I can’t wait to try out this feature on some landscapes or cityscapes in the future, hopefully not much longer...
Image Quality
From my prior experiences to using shift lenses and when it comes to moving the image circle the usual expectation is that you’re going to have to work your way around (shooting to fix in post) a fair bit of vignetting and heavy distortion in the corners of the frame. But there are no such quirks here even when shifting the lens to the full 11mm, with little if any corrections required once the images are in Lightroom.
As you’ve come to expect from Laowa’s lenses, the image is nice and sharp across the frame (even when shifted to the max) with no noticeable chromatic aberration or fringing even when pixel peeping!
Depending on a number of factors the amount of shift required to correct converging lines differs from shot to shot; during my early uses of the lens it was easy to push it too much for the given shot, which resulted in a strange elongated effect; on all occasions this was corrected by lowering the shift amount on the lens itself and/or slightly altering the angle in which I was pointing the camera body.
Who’s this for?
The fact that Laowa have been able to fit both a shift functionality and keep it Zero-D in such a small (…weighty but still small) package is an absolute marvel of engineering in my eyes and something that really excites me to see the boundaries Laowa with no doubt-ably push in the future.
This lens being great for architecture really goes without saying, even when using it as a standard wide angle lens without the shift function, it’s nice and sharp across the frame and as usual the zero distortion works a treat. The field of view, combined with the Zero-D and shift functionality makes this lens perfect for interior architecture, real estate and similar applications.
I wouldn’t recommend using it on a shoot day one without having spent half an hour or so getting used to the shift mechanism and the operation first, but let’s just say you do walk on the wilder side of life than me, then the learning curve and the ergonomics of this lens won’t give you anything to lose sleep over; and once you’ve got your head around how it works and it’s applications then it’s an absolute breeze and a really fun lens to use.
Traditionally shift lenses have been pretty niche pieces of gear, used mainly by professionals in the architecture and related industries. But with this 15mm lens and it’s more than reasonable pricetag, Laowa have not only created another awesome wide angle lens, but have made the functionality of shift more accessible, as well as bring it bang up to date with a much wider field of view than traditional 24mm shift offerings.
I wish I had this lens in New York last year; it would have been perfect for skyscrapers which at times looking up from ground level grew past the clouds, as well as views of the seas of buildings from one of said skyscrapers (fingers crossed I can test it out from The Edge in the future).
Camera in front of The (Radcliffe) Camera
Keeping safe with the Laowa 15mm Shift on the Lumix S1
‘Check this shift out man’
Specs Appeal
Focal length: 15mm
Aperture range: f/4.5
Minimum focus distance: 20cm
17 elements in 11 groups
110 degrees field of view
Dimensions: 79 x 103 mm
Weight: 597g
Starting at $1,199
Available in L Mount, Canon EF & RF, Nikon F & Z, Pentax K and Sony FE
If you follow me on social media you’ll know I have sung Laowa’s praises on numerous occasions, not only for their brilliant range of lenses (which are available for all systems), from their newly announced cinema line and upcoming Argus series to wide angle and macro or even a wide angle macro - check! But it’s what they do for the photography and cinematography communities which is amazing; during the pandemic, with the lack of photography shows they have put on multiple ‘Learn from the masters’ online classes; with live Q&As and inviting speakers from a plethora of disciplines and countries - macro shooters, food photographers, vlogging and webstreaming.
So whether you’ve just started your photographic journey, or you’re an experienced shooter, I thoroughly recommend checking out their past classes and signing up to their next live stream over on their social media channels.
Image Gallery
Please see below for some more sample images using the Laowa 15mm f4.5 Zero-D Shift mounted on the Lumix S1 and let me know in the comments below, is a wide angle shift lens something you’re considering adding to your arsenal?
