Review on 📸 Rokinon 12mm F2.8 Ultra Wide Fisheye Lens for Sony E Mount Cameras - NEX and Full Frame Compatible by Elmito Yeager

Warning: I'm a photographer - that's been my main job for most of my adult life. I bought this because sometimes I wanted to play around with the ultra-wide. The vast majority of what I do is portrait photography and this lens isn't up to it. I try to rate it with these facts in mind and that's why this is a 2 star rating and not a 1 star rating. Pros: It's cheap and feels relatively solid (there's a lot of metal in its construction). . I like the hard plastic clip on the front lens cap. Can fisheye distortion be cool too? I do not know. My kid says I need to be more positive about everything. Cons: well, everything else. (Sorry son.) I really wanted to like this lens, but it's pretty bad. Focus confirmation is a joke with a 12mm 180 degree field of view. So plan on learning how to shoot from the hip using the (roughly accurate) focus scale on top of the lens barrel. Like the focus confirmation, f/2.8 doesn't really seem like f/2.8. I believe that's what the camera is told, but on my d850 I have to overexpose at least one point to get what I consider to be a normal exposure. The glass is high contrast and honestly I didn't bother to look for chromatic aberration pixel by pixel because it can be seen without magnification. What I noticed from my copy is that the entire right side of the image is soft (no sharp points at all, no matter where the focus is set). On a tripod, this is normal for long exposure night shots, but be prepared for a one-off penalty when photographing, and don't tilt the tripod up or down too much as there will be a visible shift in focus when mounted ( in a fixed focal length lens!). too vertical orientation. I tried it for a small street photo, but to get a reasonable shutter speed I really needed to increase the ISO. All in all, if you think of that piece of glass, I wouldn't bother. There are plenty of places where you can buy better quality used glass in the same ultra wide range for the same price or less without the frustration that comes with that lens.