Operation

The cheaper the product, the more complaints we have. I think we can all agree that's usually the case. Obviously for the amount of money I paid I wasn't expecting a Zeiss like experience when it came to the manual operation of this lens. In fact, it's probably the worse lens I've ever used in terms of operation. Both the aperture and focus ring are super stiff, it also doesn't help that the lens is the smallest lens I've ever used. Your only options are to use your thumb and index finger to operate the rings, factor that in with the stiffness and it could definitely take a while to nail focus. Another issue I had is when changing the aperture of the lens. If you go too far right you start to get a bit of vignetting, even with the lens hood off. Thankfully I typically use this lens to shoot wide open only. Also, if you shift it too far right while focusing there is a slight chance that you might pull too hard and remove the lens from the mount, I've had this happen a few times, though it could be the cheap adapter that I'm using. However when you factor in the price, these complaints become minuscule, I paid less than $40 for this lens, so if I have to reattach it to the camera from time to time, or deal with a little stiffness I gladly will.

Image Quality

Image quality was the least of my worries when purchasing this lens. It isn't sharp by any measure, even when stopped down. It's not a lens you would use for landscape photography, it's not ideal for snapshot situations and it can be a bit difficult in portraiture style work as well. The lens lacks contrast, and provides a slight vignetting over the image, at times, this can be appealing, but not in every situation. The lens only has one major advantage to it, and that's the way it produces an image. It gives off a swirly bokeh effect, similar to the Helios 44-2, except it renders the background a bit different. With the Helios 44-2 you get swirly bokeh balls, but with the Fujian, your background actually swirls in a way. It's hard to explain, and even harder to produce, but when it works it works.

Related: How To Get The Petzval Look

The entire point of this purchase and blog post is to figure out how to actually get the effect to render. Obviously, it requires that you use a shallow depth of field, but I recently learned that distance places a big factor in this as well. I also noticed that the effect really relies on color. Too much contrast can take away from the image, however, it is equally apparent in most black and white situations.

I took a friend of mine out on a portraiture session, strictly for this lens. I noticed that at f/1.4 the lens actually had a decent amount of the surroundings visible. In the subject is close to a tree then it doesn't blur the tree out like a typical f/1.4 lens, it just blurs out the background. I feel like what I'm saying doesn't make sense, so maybe I'll just show you.