This lens is a little unusual. It’s a third-party lens made by Chinese company Venus Optics, which makes specialty lenses like ultrawide, macro, and even tilt-shift lenses for a variety of camera mounts. This lens is the Venus Laowa 15mm f/4 Macro.

Now, many manufacturers call lenses with magnification ratios from 0.25 to 0.5x or higher “macro” lenses. This isn’t one of them. According to the specs, it focuses all the way up to 1:1 magnification, so an object 36 millimeters long will fill the frame. The ultra-wide angle of view combined with the 1:1 magnification allows you to make quite interesting images.

One of the example uses for this lens, according to Venus, is for showing small insects in their natural habitat, but there’s a catch: the lens-to-subject distance at 1:1 magnification is just 4.6 millimeters. That’s about the size of your pinky’s fingernail, which means you will probably block almost all of your light with the lens in front of your subject at that distance. And you’ll probably scare the insects away, too.

Another catch is that the lens is fully manual without any electronics in it. This means you will need to manually focus, and your camera’s full auto-exposure mode will almost certainly not function. The manual focus and aperture rings, however, are nice and big, and with focus peaking on my Canon RP, I had no problems manually focusing accurately.

The lens body and mount are all metal, and the hood is plastic, which isn’t uncommon. Overall, the build quality was nice – it’s a very solid feeling chunk of glass.

In addition to a Canon EF version, Venus Optics makes this lens in Nikon F and Sony A and E mounts, and there is a Leica L mount version, too. I used an adapter with the EF mount to use it with my RP.

Speaking of the Canon EF version, you need to enable the “release shutter without lens” option to be able to use this lens because without any electronics in the lens the camera has no idea there’s a lens attached. On my RP, it’s custom function tab 7. If you use a body with in-body image stabilization like the R3, R5, or R6, you can use it with this lens after you manually input the lens’ focal length into your camera’s menu.

The quality of the images was good, with no flares or geometric distortion. There were no corrections applied in-camera, unlike my other lenses, because of the lack of communication between the lens and camera, but this didn’t cause any problems that I could see in the images when I went pixel peeping.

The major problem with this lens is the minimum focus distance. In my testing, I couldn’t get more than about 0.8x magnification without the front element of the lens hitting the thing I was trying to take a picture of, which is less than what was advertised. And when the lens was extended to its highest magnification, I found that the lens hood cast a lot of shadow on the subject. Removing the hood and adding a ring light helped a bit but not completely.

The lens design has a flat front element to allow the use of conventional filters, which helped me avoid damaging the lens when I rented it.

This lens also has a shift capability, where the lens body can be moved plus or minus six millimeters in the vertical direction, though I didn’t test this out myself. One major caveat is that the tilted image circle only covers APS-C-sized sensors. This capability is useful for taking pictures of buildings because it will keep the straight lines of the building from appearing to converge. To see this functionality in a $500 lens is unique – lenses with this capability often run into thousands of dollars.

I was excited at the prospects of taking ultrawide 1:1 macro images but was disappointed by the actual usability of the lens and not the build quality or quality of the images. Despite these limitations, I’m going to look at other specialized macro lenses from Venus Optics here on the Daily Space in the future, once I share reviews of the other lenses I own and use on a regular basis.

More Information

Laowa 15mm f/4 Wide Angle Macro product page (Venus Optics)