Samyang 12mm F2 manual focus

(The photos are below.)

Not only is the Samyang 12mm F2 the first used lens I bought for my X-T4 camera  – it's also my first (and so far only) manual focus lens for Fujifilm's X mount.

Now, I have to say that working with manual focus on a wide angle lens (12mm on the Fujifilm APS-C sensor X mount corresponds to 18mm in full frame terms) might not be the best place to start if/when you want to play with manual focus.

Often, you'll find that a lot of what's in front of you seems a bit far away. I certainly don't get the "up-close subject in focus... out of focus... back in focus" experience with this lens like I do with for instance a 35mm lens (which would be the 33mm in X mount) on some of the old film SLRs I have.

And even though there is focus peaking to help you, I still find it hard to separate subjects from the background – but I guess that has to do with the physical realities of the focal length.

Also, I don't always find the lens as sharp as I would like. But that could have something to do with either me or the copy I have (or both!).

However, you can (I read somewhere) set the lens to F8 and set the focus to infinity – and provided there is enough light you can just walk around and shoot and everything further away than a metre should be in focus.

This is a fun and fast way to shoot – but I bought a manual focus lens to play with autofocus, not to set it and forget it 😉

One last thing before we get to the photos: I've heard that this lens should be great for astro photography. This is not something I've tested (I bought it for A: architecture and B: to try out manual focus) – but I'm sure someone else has.

The photos

Here are some of the photographs I've taken with the Samyang 12mm F2 and my Fujifilm X-T4 camera.

You can press or click on each photo to view it in a larger size, or you can view it on Flickr. Here, you can view a bit more info, download the photo in different sizes and view the license for that particular photo (some of them can be used for free, even for commercial purposes, under a Creative Commons license).

You can also view the photos as a Flickr album.

Let's go: