u/ThatAstroGuyNZ

Over the Matariki long weekend I decided to venture into the Mavora lakes conservation area in Fiordland New Zealand as it was the first weekend in weeks that I had pristine skies.

What you see before you is a combination of blue hour foreground images blended with skies taken on a modded HA camera and star tracker.

The foregrounds were taken on my Sony a7 iii with a mix of the Tamron 28-200mm, Viltrox 16mm and Viltrox 35mm

The skies were taken on my HA modded Sony a6300 using a move shoot move nomad tracker, Tamron 28-200mm lens and Viltrox 16mm lens.

Managed to get some clear skies right before the moon rose two nights ago and figured I’d test out the new 35mm evo II.

The first image is an 18 shot stack with each image made up of 15s, iso 1600 and wide open at f1.8, stacked and edited in siril. The second image is a 36 shot panorama made up of photos at the same settings and the third photo is a 6 image panorama again at the same settings.

As I mainly do Astro this will mainly be focused on an Astro review but will cover some daytime testing as well. The first thing I notice is how much light this little lens lets in, I could physically see, in real time, the milky ways nebula on screen before I took a photo, never in my life have I experience that and it was pretty wicked to see.

Overall as an Astro lens it performs really well, it sits in a good spot of just wide enough to cover a good portion of the sky, but close enough in to not lose detail.

The images felt sharp even towards the edges, there were no artefacts, no coma, no fringing and over all the lens was light and felt easy to use. The aperture ring is incredibly smooth but not so smooth you’ll accidentally move it, the focus ring is the same. The one gripe I do have that may be changed in firmware updates is that when focusing to infinity you have to hit the absolute perfect sweet spot which is somewhere in the middle of the infinity range on the in camera focus range for my Sony a7 iii. I found to make sure the focus was correct I had to zoom to 11x digitally using my in camera focus magnifier to make sure the stars were sharp while focusing.

During the day the lens worked like an absolute dream, it’s autofocus was fast, and most importantly extremely quiet, there was some minor focus breathing but it was negligible, I found even at f4 images were incredibly sharp and presented some really nice colours. I really didn’t have any issues using it during the day and thought it performed extremely well.

The lens itself is a really great mix of lightweight and good build quality that sits right in between the air series lenses and the pro series lenses, in my honest opinion it is a go to prime lens for photographers of all walks of life.