TTArtisan 17mm F1.4 Wide-Angle Lens Review

 

There are plenty of wide angle vintage lenses to be had quite cheaply, but those are full frame lenses, and on crop sensor bodies like aps-c and micro four thirds they’re not very wide at all.

And that’s where this little gem of a lens, crafted specifically for digital sensors, comes in!

On APS-C cameras, TTartisan 17mm F1.4 gives a very wide full-frame equivalent focal length of 25.5mm, while on Micro Four Thirds bodies it gives a full-frame equivalent focal length of almost 35mm – the classic street focal length!

Just like a vintage lens, TTartisan 17mm is manually operated – there are no electronics at all and both aperture and focus are adjusted manually. The aperture ring sits at the front of the lens, while the focus ring is behind it.

If you’re used to more modern lenses, you might think a simple manual lens of this sort might be difficult to shoot, but you’d be wrong! I love shooting this lens! Manual controls involve the photographer in a way that auto functions just can’t. Manual lenses engage the photographer, your thinking and attention are needed, your art is needed, and you become part of the shot!

It’s a bit like getting out of a quick, quiet and efficient modern car, and into a 1960s sportscar. In older car you’ll feel every bang of the pistons, every movement of the engine; you’re connected, it’s a machine and you’re part of it, in a way you never will be in a modern car!

And just like that classic car, TTartisan 17mm camera lens has everything you need and nothing you don’t. Like all of the best things in life, this lens is simple, and it’s very nicely made too. It’s all metal and feels very solid and tight in the hand. Its tapered shape helps to keep dimensions down as well, and there’s a screw-on metal lens cap, just like many vintage lenses used to have.

The coatings and glass are certainly not vintage though – the optical formula is a multi-element modern design and it’s printed on the body of the lens itself – a very nice touch, and one I’ve not seen on any other lens. This is a lens that celebrates its construction and design! The lens is multi-coated, and the coatings do an excellent job of resisting contrast loss should the sun happen to strike at the wrong angle.

It’s lovely to use too – the controls are nice and light, and everything falls easily to hand, with just the right amount of resistance to give confidence and accuracy.

There must be a catch, right? Well, actually, no. There’s no catch. This is a very well made, very well designed and very versatile lens, in the manner of vintage lenses from the days of film.

By shooting a manual lens you’ll get closer to your photography, you’re more connected, your hands and your eye will be more involved – in fact, you will become part of the process! Your hand becomes connected to the camera, your eye becomes a part of the lens; light takes on a new vitality, objects and shapes around you merge to become part of the visual field. A manual lens really is an extension of your eye, and shooting one is both exacting and liberating at the same time; with a little practice you’ll wonder why you ever shot anything else!

That’s why real photographers shoot manual!

As a photographer, I shoot a lot of vintage lenses from the film days, because I like the extra control they give to the photographer. But new manual lenses like this one have a great advantage over vintage lenses – they’re smaller in themselves, and they don’t need an adaptor to use on a mirrorless camera, which usually adds around half an inch in length! This really is a very compact lens!

TTartisan 17mm F1.4 is an ideal travel companion, and it’s usually the one I reach for if I’m going on a journey – in fact, over the past couple of weeks it’s been everywhere I’ve been!

A recent trip took me to the North of England, the North West in fact, to the magical city of Liverpool on the Irish Sea, and the eternally pleasant seaside town of Southport, a little further to the North. During that trip, this little lens was my permanent companion and stayed by my side the whole time.

And that’s a testament to this lens’s portability – it really is small and it’s no problem to keep it, and a camera, with you constantly. It’s light enough and small enough to easily carry around, and those same qualities make it unobtrusive too; it’s not a threatening lens like that of a monster DSLR might be, and people are not so intimidated by it, which makes it a great lens for street portraits!

You’ve got to get close to shoot people with this one though, and that’s not always an easy thing to do! But that said, your skills as a people photographer will develop rapidly if you go down this route! It takes some courage to capture street portraits at this distance but at the same time it develops your skill and diplomacy as a photographer; the ability to work with complete strangers in a way that gets them on your side and onboard with your project is a very valuable skill for a photographer to have!

And there’s just no substitute for street portraits made this way – right in amongst the action, right in the thick of it; with just enough distortion to give that unique looking wide angle effect! You can easily get this close with a longer lens of course, but your shots won’t look the same, and they won’t have that signature wide angle look!

But there’s another way to shoot people with a lens as wide as this; for this method, rather than staying close, pull back. Personally, I particularly love shots that capture lone individuals against large, industrial cityscape-type backgrounds, shots that place the subject in the city, with a backdrop that dwarfs them, highlighting their smallness and vulnerability, but strangely, their resilience and strength too. Lone, single figures (better if they’re sitting) for me just work, a single sitting human, perfectly balancing the massive forces around them, perfectly still, in a constantly moving, constantly bustling city.

Mounted on a mirrorless camera this lens gives an outfit with something of an old-school flavour – it’s a bit like shooting an old rangefinder – a small lens and a small camera make for a light and discreet kit, and I think it encourages a different shooting style too. I found I was less likely to take a modern, digital, rapid-fire approach, with lots of chimping, and my style really slowed down. I took my time to think, to look, to see what forms and shapes and images emerged before me, out of the endless movement of the street – and guess what? Using this approach I found my rate of keepers shot up, as I began to use my camera more thoughtfully.

This lens is stunningly sharp – that’s partly due to its design and optical formula, and partly due to its wide focal length – wide lenses are inherently sharp, and generally speaking the wider the lens, the sharper it will be. And this one certainly follows that rule, – all the more surprising when you consider its very wide maximum aperture of f1.4! This really is a lens that you can shoot all day long at its maximum of aperture of f1.4, and you won’t see any softness! It’s just not there!

(f1.4)

This lens doesn’t need to be stopped down to get a sharp image out of it although if you do, it becomes really razor sharp, and not even the tiniest detail will escape it! Its sweet spot is probably around f5.6 and f8 – at those aperture settings the sharpness performance is pretty much at maximum. I must say, I shot it permanently wide open, because it still gives excellent sharpness at this setting. And of course if you’re working in low light that big F 1.4 aperture means you can make the most of what available light there is.

(f5.6)

This being a very wide lens I wouldn’t expect it to make very much background blur, however, the minimum focus distance is only 20 cm – that’s very close – and that short focus distance, together with its f1.4 maximum aperture, means there’s plenty of blur available up close – a very unusual, and a very welcome quality in a wide angle lens!

The blur has a very attractive quality too – it’s dynamic and alive, it feels like it’s moving; it has an energy, and I think it makes just a hint of swirl too! It never seems to become rough or harsh, staying smooth right throughout the range, and in a lens so wide, that really is an unexpected bonus!

Some distortion is inevitable in any wide lens; on this one it’s fairly minimal and you won’t notice it unless you’re shooting pretty close – in those conditions it will give images just a hint of distortion, and gives a true wide angle aesthetic, which in my opinion works particularly well in street portraits!

Contrast is very strong, and the lens makes very punchy images right throughout the aperture range, thanks to very effective lens coatings, which do an excellent job in stopping this lens flaring out, should you happen to catch stray light rays.

Colours from this lens are delightful and quite unusual. They’re quite delicate and restrained, but at the same time saturation is strong, colours in the final image emerge strong, but with a gentle sort of feel. You’ll never find these colors overwhelming, but by the same token, they are certainly not underwhelming either! For me, this is something of a Goldilocks lens – that is, just right!