Samyang 35 mm f/1.4 AS UMC review - Focusing

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Samyang 35 mm f/1.4 AS UMC

30 March 2011

Arkadiusz Olech

10. Focusing

The lens is a manual instrument so the focus can be set only using the big and comfortable ring on the barrel. It’s a pity Samyang didn’t equip this lens with at least a simple “screwdriver” which would allow us to set the focus automatically on more advanced Nikon reflex cameras and Pentax or Sony bodies as well.

The depth of field scale, situated on the lens’s barrel right below the ring, helps a lot during focusing.

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It’s worth reminding here that, although the tested lens is a wide-angle instrument, its fast aperture makes the depth of field rather shallow. At the maximum relative aperture when we are taking a photo of people situated in the distance of 3-4 meters the DOF is only 0.5-1.1 meters wide. On significant stopping down it becomes a lot easier to take a photo because the lack of autofocus is less painful there. For instance by f/5.6 if we set the distance scale at 5m the image is sharp in the distance ranging from 3 to about 16 meters. In the case of f/8.0 aperture the usage of the same 5-meter distance allows us to get a sharp image from 2.5 metres to infinity.