There is a small built-in lens hood, but a lens of this type cannot accommodate screw-on filters or filter holders. With some care, I found it was possible to hand-hold a 100mm square StarGlow filter in front of the lens to add a soft focus effect to stars. With our usual approach we cannot get decent values on the vignetting of fish-eye lenses. What I can tell you is that the vignetting figures are significantly lower than those of rectilinear ultra wide angle lenses, especially compact ones. Sony A7III | TTArtisan 11mm 2.8 fisheye | f/8.0 While subjects such as auroras are forgiving of soft images, Milky Way photos demand stars be sharp corner to corner. The 11mm TTArtisan does quite well. When used wide open at f/2.8 stars do exhibit astigmatism at the corners that elongates stars into radial streaks, though images are still tight and not bloated by spherical aberration.

However, while some lenses behave badly when refocused with clip-in filters, the TTArtisan still showed good star images across the frame, trading the astigmatism at the corners for mild coma and some image softness. With no automatic lens profile available, correcting vignetting required dialing in manual corrections, here +60 Vignette and 0 Midpoint in Adobe Camera Raw. Credit: Alan DyerThe 11mm I tested was for Canon’s mirrorless RF lens mount, but versions of the same lens are available for Nikon Z, Sony E, and Leica L and M mounts. Vignetting: Definitely there and visible, but quite frankly far better than I expected (it's something around 1.5 stops wide open, and it's under a stop by f/4). As sometimes happens with really wide lenses on digital cameras, there's a very small amount of color shift in the extreme corners, as well, probably due to crossover pollution from the Bayer filtration when light hits at a non-telecentric angle. The sun stars created by this lens stopped down past f/8 almost look too good at times; you get 14 very distinct rays that are well disciplined. However, at lower aperture values, the stars can be a smear mess, and if you're diffracting the light source too much on an edge, things also get messy. When shot wide open at f/2.8 the old Canon 15mm was rife with coma at the corners. The Rokinon 12mm had less off-axis coma than the Canon but it was mixed with some astigmatism and softness. The TTArtisan had worse astigmatism than the Rokinon but crisper star images overall. Stopping down the lenses to f/4 improves the lenses’ performance but some astigmatism remains in the TTArtisan. Credit: Alan Dyer

With the sun close to the corner or just out of the frame the situation is worse though – as is the case with most lenses by the way. Wide open we have some patterns that look like internal reflections that go away on stopping down (see comparison above). I haven’t used this one. In terms of weight and size it sits inbetween the aforementioned AstrHori and this TTArtisan lens.

My final shot of the outing was shooting up into this tree. I’d been shooting with the add-on Visoflex viewfinder and whilst up until this point I had found its articulation useful, I’d not found it essential. For this particular shot, the fact that the Visoflex articulates 90 degrees upward was very useful indeed. I held the camera in front of me pointing directly upward and yet was able to shoot with my eye to the viewfinder with comfort. My first couple of shots were mostly an exercise in attempting to understand the specifications in practice. When you’re only used to shooting with lenses as wide as 18mm, having something with this field-of-view initially feels quite jarring. And that’s before you take into account the fact that it’s a fisheye optic. The TTArtisan 11mm fisheye isn’t rangefinder coupled either, so focusing took a moment to acclimatise to as well.

Focusing and aperture rings are smooth but a little bit too tight for my taste (some like it that way), I have the feeling they will loosen in the future One thing that will become very clear if you try to shoot a flat surface up close is that this lens has considerable field curvature, and it doesn't appear to a perfect curve, at that. Thus, consider this as you're shooting with this lens: perhaps the central third of the lens on each axis is going to be at or very near the focal plane you choose. Flat objects outside that are going to go soft. I’ve written here before. I’m a still life advertising and event photographer based in Japan. I do weddings, embassy powwows, corporate events, audiophile meet-ups, and shoot everything from jewellery to headphones. If you want to see, read, or listen to my opinions on lenses, cameras, and audio doo-dads, by all means hit me up at my blog: ohm image, and my YouTube channel: Fauxtaku Lounge.The fast f/2.8 aperture of the TTArtisan 11mm makes it easier to use shutter speeds short enough to freeze the motion of an active aurora, or to shoot 4K videos of auroras, as many mirrorless cameras are now capable of doing. A fish-eye lens is great for capturing overhead passages of the Space Station and other bright satellites. Credit: Alan Dyer While Artisans’s 35/2 fairly impressed me, the 11/2,8 is tighter still. Its focus ring turns on a hermetic helical over 90 degrees, that, considering the view angle, is enough to achieve accurate focus from infinity to 0,17 metres. In comparison to a classic Voigtlander, or Leica, the twisting action is positively sandy, but next to a number of twenty year old Zeiss lenses, not to mention loads of lenses from China and Russia, it is perfectly acceptable. Even at longer distances loCA are hardly a problem, if you zoom in to 100% you can see a bit of color fringing but nothing that will ruin a shot. Alternatives You don’t have to take my word for it either, everyone at the photowalk saw how much I was enjoying myself… and actually, many of them were apparently really quite enamoured with it too. Like anything in photography though, how useful this lens is in practice is going to come down to the individual photographer. But, the real point is, until recently, there was no 11mm f/2.8 fisheye lens in M-Mount… there is now! The TTArtisan 11mm f/2.8 Fisheye might be imperfect, bonkers and really quite niche, but as an M-Mount photographer, I’m a lot more pleased it exists than I expected to be! Open full-size image in new tab. Same image at f/2.8 with 200% zoomed-in crop boxes showing star performance. Significant coma and loss of sharpness in corners. Some chromatic abberation. Open full-size image in new tab. 2 min. single exposure at f/3.5, ISO 1600, Canon EOS Ra, Bortle 3 sky.