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Hey there Captured on Zugerberg in Switzerland. Shot on A7II & 35/1.4ZA Sea of Fog by Mathias, auf Flickr

Hi all! Brand new member making my 1st post and asking for your opinion. This past Xmas I decided to get me an A7RII with a Sony Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm f/4, I'm still on the learning phase and ready to move on with other lenses, my choices are: the Sony Distagon T* FE 35mm f/1.4 or the Zeiss Batis 85mm f/1.8 - the idea is to use them for indoor photography with poor lighting conditions and maybe some landscape shots too. If you had to choose, which one would you go for first?

This one is a lens for which there aren't many samples or blog posts about, so let's try to make up for that. It is very light and well balanced on the A7r: I even managed to shot with it at 1/4s without IBIS. Colors It has the usual Zeiss colors, possibly even more so than my other Contax glass. There is a tiny bit of CA, but Lightroom gets usually rid of it just using the automatic settings. Vignetting Like most extreme wide angles without a connection with the camera (meaning: lenses for which the processor in the camera compensate this automatically even for raw files) it does have quite a bit of vignetting (this was a yellow-ish ceiling; in actual pictures the effect is basically unnoticeable from f/8). But just shooting a blank, out of focus A4 sheet of paper I created a DNG Flat Field correction file for each aperture. As you can see this eliminates the problem entirely. Besides, in real subjects it is hardly noticeable, and quite often improves them IMO. First picture straight out of camera, second picture after correction with FlatField Lightroom plugin. The few remaining "shadows" are actually imperfections in the ceiling itself. f/4 f/5.6 f/8 f/11 Vignetting in real life To perfectly clear the vignetting you'll need to stop down to f/11, even though already from f/8 is pretty much gone (all images uncorrected). f/4 f/5.6 f/8 f/11 Sharpness The lens is decently (for a Zeiss, so really good for other manufacturers) sharp at f/4, and at its best already at f/5.6. f/8 is barely distinguishable from f/5.6 in terms of sharpness (less vignetting, though). It looses just a tiny bit of sharpening at f/16 and more so at f/22, but it is still quite usable even if it will require a tad more coarse (i.e. for example a radius of 1 instead of 0.5) sharpening. Great news for landscape photographers! It is super sharp in the center, pretty sharp at the borders, and reasonably sharp in the extreme corners. Not bad at all for an 18mm, IMO. Besides, it even sharpens up considerably at shorter distances (where, btw, you will most of the time have a subject with a lens this short unless you're shooting large landscapes). I've used it for a "grunge" (or "weird", if you prefer ) male portrait with a LED continuous light and at 1.600 Iso I had to add luminosity noise reduction not because of noise (there wasn't any) but to REDUCE the sharpness...otherwise the facial hairs looked over-sharpened even with the sharpening set at the Lightroom super conservative default level. Smearing and magenta cast I can't see any smearing or magenta shift at the borders, even on the snow. Flare It appears to handle flair from exceptionally well to exceptionally badly (see next post); thankfully most times all it takes is a minute change in framing to go from the latter to the former. Distortion Distortion, as you may already know given it is kinda of a legendary pros of this lens, is basically invisible. For now I'm quite satisfied with my purchase; it is not a Contax 21mm in terms of corner sharpness, and that I already knew, but neither it is a 21mm in terms of price, weight and size. For me the tradeoff is well worth the loss of a bit of quality for the possibility to actually have the lens with me, instead that at home in the camera closet.

All shot with the mighty 35/1.4 on A7II. Golden Lucerne by Mathias, auf Flickr Mystical Pond by Mathias, auf Flickr Autumnal Portrait by Mathias, auf Flickr Cheers Mat

Title StaticandDynamic2 Made in "Sala dei Giganti" - Palazzo Bentivoglio - Gualtieri RE Italy with Sony Alpha A7RII and Sony Zeiss Distagon FE 35 f1.4 exhibition of paintings - artist Antonio Ligabue iso 100 f11 4 sec manual focus please visit https://www.flickr.com/photos/alandini/ for more shots :-)

They there I would like to share an image I captured yesterday when I visited "my home mountain" Rigi, also called "The Queen of the Mountains" in Switzerland. Beautiful view on top. The image was shot with the A7II and the Distagon T* 1.4/35 ZA @ f/8, 1/320s, ISO100 Ancient by Mathias Kappeler, auf Flickr

Love the close focus ability of the FE 35/1.4. Shot on A7II, f1.4, 1/8000, ISO100 Wheat by Mathias Kappeler, auf Flickr

Hey there Here is a short test video - nothing serious - shot with the Sony Zeiss FE Distagon 35/1.4 on the Sony A7II. It was shot handheld with no further software stabilization. The sound was recorded with the internal mic. S-LOG2 and XAVC-S was used at 24fps. Editing and grading done in FCPX which natively supports XAVC-S. I wish I had shot some of it in 60fps, I quite like the slow motion you can achieve with it. I went with a more natural grading and didn't apply any LUTs. Sorry for some bumpy and misfocused shots. I was just trying to find out the limits of this setup. As you can see, smooth focus pulls are hard to achieve handheld. The focus by wire technology is definitely no help for video either, but I do like the Distagon's cinematic rendering and the A7II's tilting screen and focus peaking.