Internet opinions, whether right or wrong, tend to stick. It's a lot easier to say, he is right than he is wrong, and still be regarded as trustworthy. Right now I feel obligated to try to turn the tide of opinions of the Heliar 15mm f/4.5.
The Heliar 15mm is a tiny lens with either L39 thread mount or leica M bayonet. I got my self the L39 version half a year ago to be able to shoot really wide sceneries with a small film camera. But I also knew I was leaving Nikon for a smaller mirrorless system. One of my visions about the new system was to get a few really small lenses that make up a pocket system, one lens on the camera and two in my pockets. One wide for landscapes, one wide normal for street and a short tele lens for portraits. Simply an everyday pocket system for when I shoot medium or large format or when I don't want a bag at all or don't want to be recognised as a photographer wherever I go. With the Heliar 15 being one of the very few lenses fitting my vision on the wide angle side, I at least had to give it a try, however bad the talk about it on digital sensors were. When I got myself my first fuji X, an x-e2, i ordered a cheap L39 adapter too. At first using it wasn't easy at all. Being used to an optical viewfinder adapting to an EVF was hard enough, with the Heliar 15 it was overwhelming. 4.5 is dark indeed when one shoots a lot en gloomy light. Furthermore, on 15mm most things are in focus or only so slightly out of focus, so one can't use the same work flow as with longer or faster glass. I struggled with it and being part of my "pocket system", it was mostly sitting on a the shelf along with the fujinon 27/2.8 pancake and the super light nikon series e 100/2.8 tele. The system was new and I usually ended up with the camera bag with the larger lenses. The one time I tried to bring it in my bag I almost destroyed it. Being of a negligible size it dropped out of my bag through an ever so small opening in a zipper and bounced down the marble staircase.
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| Heliar 15mm wide open, 1:1 crop; edge smudging? |
Boing, doing, doing, tock, tock, tock!
For certain, there is nothing wrong with the build quality of this lens. At a glance, it looked 100% unharmed (so did the stairs). Later on, I found out that the ring with the brand, name and specs (the one around the front lens) was glued rather than threaded and was slightly loose. I was worried over if there was any internal damage or slight off lenses so I shot a few test pictures and started peeping. The lens was still, after bouncing down the stairs, way better than I had expected from all the down talk I had read. Judge for your selves, is this bad for a 150g 15mm lens. It might not be as sharp in the corners as it is on film, but is it unreasonably sharp or does it show a lot of the colour shift people complain about?
Ofcourse, there is this odd habit of light falloff in the corners, even stopped down, when holding a cokin ND filter in front of it (can some please explain how that happens to me?). There is also the lack of filter thread. But for example, compare it to the much larger, equally priced and brand new Samyang wide angle lenses and it holds up quite well.
This weekend the pocket system, and thus the heliar, eventually got to show its colours. I went for a trip with my large format gear and still wanted a digital option. Me, some friends of mine and my hat went out to the Island of Öja and suddenly when I found myself of colour sheets, this sunset appeared.
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My hat on vacation - Fuji x-e2 with Voigtländer
Heliar 15/4.5 stopped down to 11. |
This picture would never have been taken with a larger lens. In my book, it makes the Heliar 15mm the very best lens for the job. It's sharp enough for the shot, it renders colours beautifully, it fits both on my camera and in my pocket.
If there ever was anything wrong with this lens, it was with me not being able to handle it right. I suspect that goes for a lot of the Internet too.
