TTartisan 27mm f2.8 AF
Its an odd lens this, cheap, full metal construction and with auto focus. Gone are the days a sub £200 3rd party (really really 3rd party) lens was manual focus only, this little lens has AF, but is it really worth it?
TTArtisan 27mm on the sony a6700
Lets start with the good, at £130-£160 theres very little to complain about that cant be explained with… Yeah but its a cheap lens. You dont have to wait long to find those moments (see below) but they’re mostly forgivable.
And for that £160 what you get is pretty compelling, a 0.37m minimum focusing distance lets you get pretty close for those street shots without completely losing the ability to auto focus, and at 28mm we are talking about one of the classic street focal lengths.
Build
The build quality feels, being all metal, like it should be excellent, but it’s not really as good as it seems on first glance, the Aperture ring feels especially egregious, aesthetically it’s nicely designed, a nice full metal construction with cut and coloured numbers around the ring with a raised and ridged section at either end to make it easier to turn, but while this is a clicked ring (with no option to de-click, its £130-160 what did you expect?) the clicks are so feeble as to almost not exist. The sony 40mm has a solid Clunk when putting it into the A aperture setting to let the camera choose, and even with that its easily knocked out of A, but the 27mm is MUCH, MUCH worse, the clicks are so loose you can often find yourself suddenly shooting at f16.
In terms of size and construction this is a fully metal lens
Auto Focus
The focus ring also feels well designed, but badly constructed, while well dampened the ring itself wobbles and makes you wonder how long before the focus ring comes off all together, lucky then that this lens has AF.
The AF is there and it does work, albeit slower than any of the Tamron or Sigma lenses and its significantly slower than the SONY lenses, but when it works it works well enough and accurately, but it does suffer from completely giving up on focusing at times seemingly for no reason and often even when there’s distinct contrast in the target of the focus point.
Images
Image quality wise, the images are clean, sharp and pleasant to look at, as you’d expect for such a cheap lens, its a little softer in the corners but not overly so, and there’s a very distinct vignette around the edges of the image, though much of that can be dealt with using the Lightroom profiles available from the TTartisan homepage.
This profile is however a bit of a weird one, installing the profile is easy enough but regardless of what version of the profile you install they all put themselves in the Fujifilm profile directory, neither adding the profile to its own TTartisan directory nor the SONY directory. Instead every time you edit images from this lens you have to go hunting for its profile in the Fujifilm dir. Its good that they’ve done one, but you do wish theyd just spent the extra time to make the system feel a little more professional.
Conclusions
For what it is the lens is fine, and you can get good shots from it, its one of the few 28mm…ish lenses on the sony APS-C platform, and its very fun to use, but there are caveats. The focus is sometimes sluggish and the build quality is hit and miss but if you can accept the flaws, and like the images it creates then this focal length is perfect for budding street photographers and fun to use, and at this price there really is no reason not to give it a try.
Mistakes in the Marshland
I had some really tame Robins that let me photo them, but the more immediate failing was shooting during the day on a bright and clear day in Autumn and around lunchtime too!
Youtube
So, I’ve started a youtube channel, to HOPEFULLY help me learn, to help you learn with me, and so I can bring an audience to my photos. I’ll start linking these videos here as I do them, first one is here:
Coffee
So here we go, first project at the local Photography Society, the theme was coffee.
Now it took me a week before I could think of a theme, toyed with the swirls of milk in a black coffee, or just macro shots of the beans themselves, all seemed a bit simple for what we were doing.
Ultimately I came up with the idea of a beach or a pool that was the coffee cup, the plan being to have people swimming in the coffee.
Eventually the result was this, unfortunately getting the lighting to match between this shot and stock footage of swimmers wouldn’t really mesh with the lighting, I guess if id had more time and resources I could have procured some small models of swimmers and had the physically in the scene, but with the slight change to turn this into a beach/seaside scene I’m happy enough with this within the time constraints.
Jojo
Well I dont really have any where to put these, so here they are, recently my sister got a dog, a cute as hell King Charles Spaniel called Jojo. Ofcourse, following that I’ve gotten to photo the little devil a number of times. So rather than find somewhere to shove a few better examples, I figured they’d do here!
Things don’t go to plan
Hunstanton Beach
Friday Jun12 2020 -
Finally, I’m allowed out legally and technically, checking the weather my local area is going to have a rough day of dark grey skies and rain. I decide to get away.
Looking online Hunstanton becomes the destination, a lengthy beach, with an old Victorian lighthouse topped by some spectacular cliffs and a bizarre rock strewn beach. The weather? warm, 18-19 DegC, patchy cloud. With high tide at around 22:30 that gave a good hour or so around golden/blue hour to get some shots of the sun going down along the cliffs.
However, on arrival the problem was evident, the weather was awful. Thin mist covered everything, the beach was only partially visible from the cliffs, the sea couldn’t be seen from the beach, disaster.
I often hear that Landscape photography is a lot of luck, and part of the trick is increasing that chance by being in the right place at the right time, well this day luck wasn’t with me.
Hunstanton Cliffs
Foggy, Grey, not what i wanted
Well it had taken nearly 2:30 hrs to reach the beach, so I wasn’t leaving without trying to get a few pictures, and 4 hours was spent wandering up and down the beach and cliffs in search of a good (ish) shot or two.
Some wood from some old structure on the beach became the first opportunity for a shot, long exposure to smooth out the sea, close to the edge of the waves, zoomed to compress the depth of the image, tripods out.
Hunstanton Beach
Lessons learned, dull day, unstable tripos, rubbish picture. Better luck next time.
Of the 6-8 photos I took of this location, this is the best one, and its rubbish. The weather too foggy for the shot i wanted, the sky too grey to give it any contrast, and to top it off this shot is the sharpest of the bunch, and even then its still soft. Now I know why I see you tubers placing CDs onto the sand for their tripods to stand on, the softness of the pictures I got are, I believe, due to the tripod slowly sinking into the sand. End result a lot of blurry, useless photos.
And that sums up my trip, small mistakes ruining photos, the weather blurring the sea with the sky, and the rain frustrating all day.
ultimately 3 shots make the cut, barely, nothing ground breaking, nothing amazing. A shot of the cliffs and beach, one of the wreck of the sheraton, and the last of the lighthouse through a ruin. All will be added to a new page in my travel shots, but I feel on the fence about what I think about all of them.
But thats what happens, sometimes you plan everything right, and yet the weather lets you down anyway.
Breaking the Quarantine
Here I am, 2 months into the covid19 fun and games, and on the vulnerable list. So the last time I’ve been outside somewhere that wasnt my garden was to hike Kinder Scout in the peak district… In March.
Well today, I’m breaking Quarantine.
3am - waking up this early seemed like the best idea, get up and get out, should be able to park up for 3:30 and be on my way to Coombe abbey for golden hour. First mistake there of course is I’m not a morning person, so 3am became 3:30 before id gotten up, and my walk went from 3:30 to 4, but we make do.
All of this did mean I committed a cardinal photography sin. I ended up chasing the light, and what a sunrise it was, just a shame that it was visible in odds and sods through a thick hedgerow, and mostly gone by the time I made it to Coombe!
Coombe Abbey Country Park Visitors Centre
Some shots were taken, rushed and unrefined with what little of the light was left, but at least I got to see the rabbits and sheep!! So many Rabbits, so many…
A few macro shots later and homeward bound and its not even 6am.
The world as it is currently is still pretty much a no go for me, and i’ll have to work out new things to take photos of that I can shoot from home, but at least for one day I got to sneak out before the world had woken, and get a 2 hour, wander around done, it may only have been about 4 miles but at times like these that’s all it needed to be.
Mark Elwick