A short afternoon walk with the new Thypoch Ksana 21mm f3.5 ultra wide angle lens. Not my strong suit but after I made my own profile for the lens I was pretty darn happy.

today I walked in the Hyde Park neighborhood in central Austin. Lots of wonderful, little 1940s and 1950s houses, many painted exuberantly. I hadn't gotten a lot of use out of the 21mm lens I bought a couple weeks ago during the last cold snap. I'd used it on an SL2 just to try it out but, of course, the real test is when you put the lens on a camera type that it was designed for and you go out and shoot it for a while. And Hyde Park was a fun testing ground for my primitive use of the lens.

21mm lenses are problematic. Depending on the camera sensor, the angle of the prevailing light and the phase of the moon there is always the possibility of some color shifting at the edges and in the corners of the frame. I made a color profile for this lens in Lightroom and used it on all the frames here. It consists of a tiny bit of geometric correction, some vignetting correction and, most importantly, some mild linear masking on each side of the frame which allowed me to simply use the green/magneta slider to remove a slight magenta cast that occurred on the left and right sides of the frames. The work of five minutes and the profile could then be used on all the files with a batch synchronization. Yay Software! 

The Ksana (zany name?) 21mm is very sharp and creates very saturated files. I love those attributes. I can always adjust saturation but it's nice to start with data rich/detail rich files when you can. I used the lens on an M240 camera today, in the raw/DNG format. I set the white balance for daylight and used auto-ISO with a minus 2/3rd stop compensation for most of the images. I brought along a Leica zoom optical finder that gives me framing for 21,24 and 28mm lenses but I found that it was easiest to just use an EV-2 EVF finder and turn on live view instead. Worked very well and made composing quite accurate. Considering that you can pick up the Leica branded version of this finder for around $175 on the used market I would suggest picking one up unless you want to spend a lot more money buying zoom finders or individual bright line finders to use with wider lenses. You won't be able to use the camera finder of ultra-wide angle coverage (21 and 24 are a "no go") but you will still always be able to use the camera finder for very accurate and quick focusing. A decided plus with very wide angle lenses...  One note though, the EV-2 works only with the M240 cameras and variants and not the M10 or M11 cameras!!! Don't buy one for your M11 --- they make another, much pricier finder, just for that model.

The advantage of the Ksana 21mm over some other lenses is that it's very, very small and, by extension, very lightweight. If you love shooting with an M rangefinder camera it's a good, solid addition to an M only gear kit. But if you also shoot with a mirrorless system like the Leica SL cameras or any of the other mirrorless cameras in the market you can finder lenses that are better corrected for partial frame color shifts and which are available with faster maximum apertures and also AF. In my case I wanted to be able to make a complete, do everything (almost) kit for my M stuff. If I were a more rational and thoughtful planner I might not have bought the lens as I also use Leica SL type cameras and already have a Sigma Contemporary 21mm lens for the L mount that is pretty darn good. If I were a bit more frugal I'd make do with the Sigma instead. Live and learn. 

But, as you can see from the images the Ksana 21 really does deliver nice results. Especially if you take the time to build a suitable profile with which to add into your post production with this lens. 

The lens is quite attractive on a black M camera. And it does what it's supposed to do. I never can imagine I'd need a faster 21mm as one of the lens's attractive qualities is its deep depth of field at apertures like f5.6 and f8. The value of a 21mm f1.4 eludes me. Or escapes me. Or both. 

Here are bunch of images that serve as proof of practice. Make them big if you want. They have a lot of detail to share. Buy or don't buy....we don't care here because it doesn't benefit Mr. Tuck in the least.