The weirdest prime in the world

Okay, this is a story for the photography nerds. If you came for the actual picture: Yes, it is yet another shot of Edinburgh castle, this time on a beautiful sunny January day.

But let's skip another bloomy description and get to the nerdy story. I got a new prime for my E-M5 (and, technically, any µFT camera). It is a legacy lens of a whole different kind: a Fujian CCTV 35mm f/1.7 lens. You can pick it up for a mere 20 quid.

This is a fully manual lens with a few particuliarities. For starters, you can screw the front lens element off (to insert macro rings, I suppose). The body caps are shit (constantly-falling-off rubber-made push-on no-fixture things). The lens isn't made for µFT, but is supplied with a screw-on adapter that has no fixation, so that you can accidentally unscrew the adapter instead of detaching the lens from your camera. It is obviously fully manual, so you have a ring for aperture and focus respectively.

This sounds like a real mess, but it is surprisingly one of the coolest lenses I have used. Since the resolution is pretty shitty anyway and you will never get a supersharp picture, you don't need to bother too much about perfect focus and manual focusing works actually very well; as you manually control it, you really feel like the lens does what you want it to do. The aperture ring is fully smooth without any fixed stops (which is an extremely cool feature if you want to use it for shooting movies). The 35mm focal length is pretty much a slightly tele standard lens (70mm equivalent).

Now, about the resulting image. As you can see, the lens is somewhat sharp in the middle, but everything gets absolutely blurry the further you get away from the centre (look at the bottom right corner). I shot this picture at f/1.7 but that is no bokeh-blur. There's extreme colour fringing and heavy vignetting going on in this shot. The weirdness of some fringes in this particular shot resulted from my petty post processing skills though.

After a single day I already love this lens for three reasons. Firstly, it is fully manual and like to control exactly what my things are doing; in comparison with any µFT AF lens, this is much more intuitive to use and does exactly what you expect it to do. Secondly, the toy-like quality of the results makes for a very particular, old-school, crappy-but-enjoyable look; the "make it look old and lomo" post processing that many people love is basically integrated into this lens. Thirdly, for 20 quid, this is by far the cheapest lens I have ever bought; if you own a µFT camera, this is quite definitely the cheapest lens you can get, and it is a lot more fun than many much more expensive options.