This sunset at Surathkal Beach was captured using ultra-wide angle Laowa 12mm f/2.8 lens on my Canon EOS 5D Mark 4. This was created using Photo-merge to HDR in Lightroom done using 3 captures (1/4, 1/20 & 1/100th-second shutter speed) all taken at f/11 at ISO 100. The camera was mounted on my Sirui Tripod.
This lens is built like a tank. It’s solid glass and metal. It’s very tight and doesn’t feel like the elements will shift out of place if you bump it on a table. The front element is a bit bulbous but not nearly as big as many other ultra-wides in this spectrum.
The lens hood is removable and is metal to match the rest of the lens body. The focus ring is smooth as butter and has an excellent feel to it. That’s important since this is a fully manual lens. Manual focus, manual aperture. Moving down from the ring you have several sets of numbers: your focus distance, your hyperfocal distance scale, and your aperture ring.
This capture of the Surthkal Lighthouse is using the same lens at 1/8th second ISO 100 at f/11.
Having that hyperfocal distance scale is just fantastic. You can choose the best focus distance based on your selected aperture and then get your hyperfocal distance based off of that set of numbers. Easy.
This is an insanely wide lens—one that is hard to beat for how much you can get into a scene with a single shot. The absence of distortion makes this a great lens.
Architecture or real estate photogs, this lens is certainly a good investment. With this lens, you really do not need to worry about getting a fisheye effect on your images. The distortion is certainly there, but it’s so minimal that you really don’t need to do any lens corrections. No lens correction was applied here which is a full frame capture on my 5D Mark IV.