Wide Angle Lens Experience: Laowa 9mm f2.8

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to borrow a few Fujifilm X mount lens to experiment and play around with (thanks Camera Electronics) as I was interested in getting a wide angle lens to complement my current kit of Fujifilm camera lenses. There were a few reasons for expanding my kit to include a wide angle. I was interested in a wide angle for night sky photography, landscapes and cityscapes. Secondly I was also looking for a wide angle for doing some interior and architectural photography.

The options that I was interested to try were: Fujifilm 14mm f2.8, Fujifilm 16mm f2.8, Fujifilm 16mm f1.4 and Laowa 9mm f2.8. I’ve now gone through the hundreds of photos I have taken when I had these lenses on loan. I thought it would be a bit of fun for me to do a quick write up on my experience and thoughts using each of the lenses. Spoiler alert, I bought the Fujifilm 14mm f2.8 lens.

Disclaimer: this isn’t a sponsored post. All opinions are my own and this is not intended to be a comprehensive technical lens review. There are plenty of photography websites that are excellent for that. This is simply my experience as a enthusiast X shooter.

I thought I would start with the wild card. I had no intention of trying out an ultra-wide like the Laowa 9mm f2.8 lens as it was unlikely to be one that I would buy. However it was available and kindly offered to me, so I snapped at the chance to play with it. It was by far the most fun lens of the lot! It’s a tiny little manual lens that fit perfectly on the small Fujifilm X-T10 of mine. The lens felt like a solid, well built and weighty lens in you hands. An all-metal lens.

It was the first time I’ve ever used a manual lens on my X-T10 so it was a bit of a learning curve for me. I spent most of my time learning to focus and using focus peaking. For the images where I nailed the focus I found the centre focus pretty good but the edge sharpness not so great. I intentionally shot into the sun to see what the sun flare would be like. Not something I typically do in my day to day shooting however it was an experiment after all. As expected it created a very washed out image, perhaps more so than the fujinon lenses. I managed to pull back the contrast and colours using the raw files though, so no real issues there.

I really loved the different perspective you get with the lens though. To be honest of the lenses I tried out, this was the most fun. The lens allowed me to generate some fun and creative images that I really liked. The distortion was also very well controlled and impressive. It certainly lives up to “zero distortion” label. When I held the lens perfectly in line with the verticals, I could barely see any distortion. I don’t recall correcting that much distortion in post-processing either. There was a fair bit of natural vignetting with this lens though when I looked through my images. This is typical of an ultra-wide angle lens on the f2.8 end of the aperture spectrum. Easily correct in post-processing though if it’s a bother.

For those of you who live in Perth or are familiar with Perth, these images were taken in and around Cathedral Square in Perth. It was the perfect place to experiment with a ultra-wide angle lens given it’s iconic buildings. The images below are a mix of SOOCs, edited JPEGs and edited RAWs.

In conclusion, I’m so glad I got a chance to play around with this lens. I don’t have a lot of experience with third party lenses for the X mount series, but I found this to be a very high quality lens. It got my creative juices flowing and also got my out of my comfort zone by forcing me to learn to manually focus using this lens. Looking online, I have seen so many unique and beautiful images produced using this lens so I can see a lot of potential with this lens. If I had around $700 to spare, it wouldn’t mind having this around as a “fun” lens! Thanks for stopping by today.

J.