7Artisans 28mm f5.6...inexpensive and brilliant!

28mm Love: I love the M Mount, I love Leica, I love shooting manual and I love inexpensive and good lenses for the M Mount. The 7Artisans 28mm f5.6 is just that. I love the 28mm focal length. It’s a focal length I find ideal to shoot documentary shots at weddings and for street photography. I find 24 mm too wide and 35mm too narrow for the kind of shots I visualize.

I fell in love with 28mm when I bought the Leica Q in 2015. Since then it has been my most used focal length. I also own the 7Artisans 28mm f1.4 M mount for my Leica M9 Monochrom. So when 7Artisans asked me if I wanted to try their latest 28mm f5.6, how could I refuse.

Packaging: The 7Artisans 28 f1.4 was not half as good as this one in terms of packing. The outer box looks good and the brown pouch looks great.

Real life shooting: Now, 28mm at f5.6 or narrower is a whole different proposition than an f1.4 lens. While it narrows down the possibilities in terms of subjects and subject background separation, it also makes life easy if you don’t want to worry about manual focusing and getting critical focus bang on. Just set it to 2.5m to 3.5m at f8-f11 and shoot away. Pretty much everything will be in focus. The lens is ideal for Zone Focusing, pre focusing and shooting from the hip if you want to be a discreet street photographer. At a minimum aperture of f5.6 obviously it needs a lot of light so is best suited to shoot outdoor during daytime.

Composition: While using f8-f11 at 28mm one has to be careful about composition. It’s a great option for layering i.e. when you want a foreground layer, mid ground layer and background layer in your picture and you want all the layers in focus. It requires patience and a keen eye and timing to get all the elements in place. You want to avoid overlapping figures. It is also important to have some figure ground relationship and some geometrical elements in the picture. A 28mm f5.6 is not for everyone. It demands a certain discipline, knowledge and perseverance.

Build and Performance: The 7Artisans lens is tiny, very well built, looks great and comes in very attractive packaging. By no means does it look like a $299 lens. The infinity focus lock is beautiful and useful.

It is a great one lens solution for travel. At f5.6 pretty much every lens is sharp and so is this one. The lens worked brilliantly on my M9 Monochrom and also on my Lumix S1R which is a hi res sensor. I also borrowed the M10 Monochrom from my friend and tried the lens on it. The colors and contrast are brilliant and there is no visible distortion. On Photoshop RAW I used the Leica 28 f5.6 profile correction. Focus and aperture rings are smooth. The lens feels solid but is very light at 130g. The only weird part is the filter size at 35.5mm.

Pictures from the M10 Monochrom