Laowa 15mm f/4.5
£1249/$1199 The world’s widest full-frame shift lens, the Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-d Shift gives pricey tilt lenses a run for their money
Our verdict on the world’s widest full-frame shift lens
Already one of our favourite manufacturers when it comes to offbeat glass, the Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-d Shift only adds to Venus Optics’ standing as a producer of exotic, esoteric and excellent lenses. On paper, what the Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-d Shift offers is quite extraordinary: it’s the world’s widest full-frame shift lens, offering ±11mm of shift. But while these properties make it an excellent option for genres like architecture and interiors, unlike the best tilt-shift lenses the Laowa 15mm only shifts – it isn’t able to tilt for selective focus, so no ‘toytown’ effects. It’s also a fully manual optic, with no electrical connections or EXIF data, and there’s no weather sealing – but then, it’s also around half the price of traditional tilt-shift lenses. So how does it fare, and do these limitations hamper its performance?
Key features
The Laowa 15mm Shift lens has a 110° angle of view, and produces an enormous image circle with a 65mm diameter, with the maximum possible vertical shift of ±11mm.
As part of Laowa’s Zero-d (‘zero distortion’) line, optical distortion is incredibly well controlled – something that’s essential for this lens’s intended purpose. That’s made possible by a complex optical formula featuring 17 elements (two of which are aspherical) in 11 groups.
With five aperture blades the lens can render beautiful 10-point sunstars for striking night cityscapes and even daylight work. It also boasts an impressive minimum close focusing distance of just 20cm, enabling you to push the limits of your creativity or the proximity of your subject.
Build and handling
This is a very sturdy and robustly built lens, featuring metal construction that will withstand various knocks and scrapes. However, you won’t want to chance many of those since the front lens element is a bulbous and protruding affair.
With no lens hood and (as of yet) no filter solutions to offer any protection, you’ll want to take good care of the front glass – though, thankfully, a substantial metal lens cap is provided.
The lack of hood means that the bulging lens is susceptible to raindrops, too. And being that it isn’t weather-sealed, you really don’t want to chance any moisture entering the lens – particularly with its shifting mechanism that offers more points for fluid to enter the lens.
That all aside, this lens is a joy to handle and use. Its shift axis can be rotated by 15° intervals (meaning that you can achieve 45° diagonal shift) through a full 360°.
The Laowa also features a long focus throw, which is especially useful when you’re trying to achieve focus on a DSLR
(obviously on a mirrorless Z-series body you have the benefit of focus peaking).
We also like the shift mechanism featured here. While some lenses use small and fiddly dials to control shift, the Laowa has a third ring below the focus and aperture rings that offers more purchase and a greater degree of control. Once the desired amount of left/right/rise/fall shift has been achieved, a twisting pin locks it in place.
Performance
The Laowa 15mm Shift is a joy to use, though it goes without saying that if you’re new to manual-focus lenses then you’re in for a steep learning curve – and if you’ve never used a shift lens before, you’ll need to spend some serious time learning how it affects your framing and composition.
At the same time, if you’re experienced in using tilt-shift lenses then you will no doubt experience many moments where you reach for the nonexistent tilt control here to achieve perfect perspective. It’s by no means a deal-breaker, though it does require a little adjustment if you’ve got used to taking tilt for granted.
The shift function does a fantastic job of correcting perspectives and vanishing points. If you’re using the lens for ‘true’ architectural work, to render accurate and undistorted images of buildings as they actually appear, you will enjoy the nearperfect lines you can achieve (nearly as much as you will hate the uneven roads and pavements that become apparent as you do so). And if you’re using it to render distorted perspectives, which exaggerate the shapes of angular structures, you will appreciate how the very feature designed to produce accurate images can also deliver the most creative ones.
Armed with a tripod and a mirrorless camera, the Laowa 15mm Shift becomes almost effortless to use for shooting those potentially troublesome buildings and interiors. Indeed, freed from the tripod it can even become a formidable street photography lens, adding an extra dimension to wide-angle documentary and reportage images.
This lens can produce incredibly striking 10-point sunstars when you stop it down, adding dramatic points of interest to your shots. However, some people might find their size and spikiness a little too overbearing as they threaten to become the focal point of your images.
Despite employing a special coating, the lens doesn’t always play well with direct light at those wider apertures, as flares and ghosting can streak across the frame. Flare is controlled much better as you stop the lens down, but this will also produce notably hexagonal bokeh and ghosting due to the five-bladed aperture.
Sharpness
Sharpness in the centre of frame is excellent, even wide open. But, sharpness drops off fast as you move away from the centre and becomes mediocre in the middle and corners. We’d expect any ultra-wide optic to perform relatively poorly for corner sharpness, due to how close we have to shoot our sharpness test chart. But the Laowa 15mm Shift lens’s off-centre sharpness drops off faster than most equivalently wide lenses.
Fringing
Usually a lens produces most fringing in the corners of frame, however the Laowa 15mm Shift generates more aberrations in the mid frame (the regions surrounding the centre). Here fringing is prominent enough to be noticeable in typical shooting, especially at larger apertures. At least centre and corner fringing is fairly well controlled.
Distortion -1.01
There’s minor barrel distortion, but the lens performs pretty much true to its ‘Zero-d’ (zero distortion) moniker – an impressive feat for such an ultra-wide optic.
N-photo verdict
The Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-d Shift offers comparable perspective correction and a superior wide-angle perspective to tilt lenses that cost nearly twice as much. Though it lacks weather sealing and electrical contacts, it handles superbly and offers a native option for Nikon Z-series mirrorless shooters.