After an abortive foray into Tilt &Shift a few months ago, it's time to have another go. In May I bought a Nikon 24mm f3.5 PC-e lens. After about a month of pain, I sold it again and bought a Zeiss 25mm f2. I spent hours trying to coax satisfactory images out of the Nikon to no avail. To this day I'm not sure where the problem lay but by the end of the month the lens was preventing rather than enabling pictures.A couple of weeks ago I considered a s/h example at MPB and while discussing it with them, it was bought by someone else. I was disappointed, the price was good and the lens looked ok. A week later the same lens was back on the shelf, having been returned. Additionally it was in their year end sale with £100 off. I was nervous about buying something that another photographer had returned and spoke to them for reassurance. This was given and I pressed the buy button. The new example arrived yesterday and looks to be a bargain. A visual inspection confirmed no functional flaws, the cosmetic wear suggested a well used lens which I take to be a positive endorsement. Optical test indoors are already more positive then the previous example ( which I now suspect, might have been faulty).The first outdoor session went very positively - a delightful dawn with frost and mist at a relatively unvisited jetty on Coniston. The conditions were too good to risk using just the new lens so I doubled up with a 16-35mm and a 50mm. There were three key questions to ask about this lens:
Overall sharpness unshifted
Sharpness and extent of acceptable sharpness from near to far.
My ability to achieve the potential sharpness of the lens.
I made a number of exposures in Landscape and portrait format across the three lenses. My instinct is that that circumstances when this lens will be particularly useful is in portrait format images where I'm looking for the optimum near to far sharpness. Jetty's are an interesting subject (though admittedly over photographed) and offer distinct choices. In this instance the portrait orientation didn't yield any pleasing results on any lens and the best outcome was from the 24mm in landscape format. In the attached mage, I also decided to crop to 16x7, thus effectively losing much of the foreground sharpness so expensively won. The image must come first however, another post will contain more specific test images.Returning to the initial questions, the overall sharpness (note, of this sample) is excellent over the normal aperture range. The effect of diffraction at the smallest apertures of f22/f32 is however more extreme than any lens I've ever used. This to the extent that, if replicated across all samples, I fail to see why those stops are even offered.The near to far sharpness is excellent if focussed and tilted accurately.Even on first usage, I managed both to obtain sharp images and to begin the process of being able to do so reliably.