Tilt/Shift lenses are very complicated instruments, and Laowa has worked on making everything even more complicated by making their newest lens a macro lens, too. There’s no question that the new T/S 55mm F2.8 is big (168.55mm or 6.63″), heavy (1345g or 47.5oz), and expensive ($1249 USD), but it is also one of the finest lenses they have yet made optically. It’s a lens that you’ll pretty much exclusively have to use off of a tripod, but it’s also capable of producing extraordinarily good results. Sound interesting? Let’s dive into it together (which you can do in either my video review, linked below, or by reading on in this text review.)

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Thanks to Laowa for sending me a review loaner of this lens.   As always, this is a completely independent review.  All opinions and conclusions are my own. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with the 45MP Nikon Z8, which I reviewed here.

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The T/S 55mm is one of two lenses releasing simultaneously from Laowa, with a 100mm option also available.

As noted, the size and complexity of all the moving parts on a tilt/shift lens make it a difficult proposition to use handheld. There are at least seven different adjustment dials and levers of this lens, as it can move up to 12mm of shift and 10° of tilt.

The Laowa T/S 55mm will be available in a wide variety of lens mounts, including full frame: Nikon Z (tested here), Sony E, Canon RF, and L Mount, but also two medium format mounts, including Fuji GFX and Hasselblad XCD mount. The medium format availability tells us that this is a lens that is overengineered for the full frame image circle, which should point to some incredible performance.

Image quality is pretty pristine, and, of course, the kinds of images you can get are both unique and interesting.

So let’s dive deeper into the lens and its performance and determine if this is a lens that you should personally consider.

Build and Handling

This is a big lens. One of the first things I noticed about the lens is how big and heavy it was. It has a tripod foot, for one, and when you look at the profile of the lens, it looks a bit like a 70-200mm zoom in girth and length, and is in fact heavier than a number of the modern 70-200mm lenses.

The diameter is 85mm (3.34″), and filter threads are a large but common 77mm.

The length is very slightly extended by a surprisingly slim metal lens hood. It is very shallow, so I would say that it offers much protection value than it does shading value. Fortunately the T/S 55mm has proven to be quite naturally flare resistant, so it isn’t really needed.

This is a fully manual lens, so no electronics. Both focus and aperture control will be manual via the rings, though fortunately both of these work well. The aperture ring is located right after the tilt/shift mechanisms and has light detents only at the full aperture stops, though you can stop anywhere between those full stops if desired.

Between the aperture and focus rings are hyperfocal scales.

The aperture iris itself has an unusually high blade count of 15 blades, but you can see here that iris is still very circular even when stopped down to F22 (minimum aperture).

The manual focus ring itself is very nicely damped, and I’ll go into more detail on the manual focus experience in the section below.

The first third of the lens has a tremendous amount of complexity. after the lens mount itself there are two widening sections which contain first the shift and then the tilt sections. Both can be rotated 360° via small depressible levers.

You’ll probably find the shift section very uncomfortable on your knuckles if you are holding the grip and either of the main adjustment knobs are rotated to that side. There is very little clearance between the camera grip and one of those adjustment knobs (certainly not enough room for your knuckles), so I definitely recommend rotating that section to where those knobs are in the 6 and 12 o’clock positions.

The tripod foot section can also be rotated via yet another adjustment knob, meaning that three sections of the lens can be fully rotated.

If you are not familiar with tilt/shift lenses, you’ll either need to spend some time or do some research to become familiar with how everything moves and what kind of changes that will produce.

The lens can tilt up to 10° in either direction.

This can allow you to very clearly change the plane of focus. Where a typical lens has a flat(ish) plane of focus that can create defocus before and after the plane of focus, like this:

A tilt lens changes that plane of focus and allows for very unique images, where now the plane of focus is tilted to where half of the image is in focus. Adding a little shift to that allows focus to even skip the foreground and just a very narrow section of the image to be in focus, like this:

This can work to either focus the eye very specifically, but can also create those large specular highlights that we see above…something that you could create unless you had a subject very close to the camera. Software can try to imitate an image like the one above, but getting it organically is very difficult.

Tilting in the opposite direction will reverse that plane of focus, so now (next morning) only the building on the left is in focus, while the right side of the image is completely defocused.

Those types of images aren’t for everyone, but one thing is certain: you just can’t create them organically without having a tilt lens.

But we’ve also got 12mm of shift, which is 1mm more than the Laowa 15mm F4.5 Shift (which I reviewed here) or 2mm more the Laowa 20mm F4 Shift (which I reviewed here). I don’t consider 55mm to be as useful for shifting as compared to wider focal lengths, but I do appreciate the broader latitude in shifting that we’ve got here. Shift lenses are very useful in a number of settings.  One significant one is that they allow one to adjust the lens in such a way to offset the inevitable “keystoning” effect that comes when you try to compose images to include the details you want.  Things like trees and buildings lean towards the center, and often your resulting image looks little like the scene did when you viewed it (though again, this effect is less pronounced on a narrower angle of view like we get from a 55mm lens).  A shift lens like the T/S 55mm overcomes this by allowing you to physically move (shift) a section of the lens up to 12mm in either direction (with 360° of rotation) to allow you much more control in properly aligning lines by actually controlling the plane of the optics relative to the sensor.

This can also be useful in creating panorama images. 55mm isn’t particularly wide, but by shifting one direction, back to center, and then to the other side and taking a shot in each position, like this:

I can then merge those images very easily into a panorama with next to no loss of image because the perspective is consistent across all three. Here’s the result of quick combining the three.

That panorama is 13794 x 5142 pixels, so can you imagine how big of a high resolution print you could make from that?

You can rotate that whole section and then do the same thing vertically, capturing a high, middle, and low image, like this:

You can then combine those into a vertorama, like this:

Once again we have an extremely high resolution image here.

Obviously there is a lot of flexibility in how you can approach a given subject with a tilt/shift lens, and the T/S 55mm also sports a fast maximum aperture of F2.8…plus macro. The possibilities are endless.

The heavy weight of the lens necessitated a tripod collar. The foot itself attaches via two locking knobs, allowing you to remove the foot if desired. The foot is Arca-grooved, so you can go right onto most tripods with it and won’t have to worry about adding a quick release plate.

The foot isn’t quite as robust as what I would like, in that there is a bit of flex in it. I found that when I tried to line up my test charts, I would get a bit of sag that would require me to frame high and then allow everything to sag down to the correct position.

Minimum focus distance is 27cm, and you can achieve 1:1 (1.0x) magnification with very high performance at that distance.

The lens itself is all metal and glass, and has a high grade of construction. The knobs don’t feel cheap or fragile, which is very important as they will endure some stress over years of future use.

There is a nice anodized finish to the T/S 55mm, and it does feel like a premium lens. That’s appropriate, because it is priced into the premium range at essentially $1300 USD.

Manual Focus on Nikon

Manual focus is an overall positive experience on my Nikon Z8. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. Clear, useful EVF. On paper, the EVF of the Z8 is nothing special, but, in practice, it works very well. I’ve got much higher resolution viewfinders on Sony cameras, but Sony viewfinders do some weird things when the shutter is half depressed. And I typically want the shutter half depressed when manually focusing, as this helps stabilize the viewfinder while I focus. Nikon’s viewfinder is clear and makes it easy to see focus moving as I turn the manual focus ring.
2. Effective IBIS (VR). I’ve been impressed with the real world stability of Nikon’s in camera VR. It works effectively and allows for both a stable viewfinder experience as a I focus and also stable results when I take the shot. To my knowledge, no manual focus lens to this point has included lens-based image stabilization, so having effective in-camera stabilization is very important.
3. Useful manual focus aids. There are three primary manual focus aids that I’ve utilized when manually focusing, including the onscreen focus confirmation box (put it where you want focus to be, and it will turn green when proper focus has been achieved), magnification of the image to visually confirm focus, and focus overlays (peaking). With some lenses Nikon includes a directional arrow that points you the direction you need to turn the focus ring to focus in the right direction, but that isn’t always the case. I’ve found that the focus box is quite accurate, though, and it makes manual focus fairly easy.

The Laowa T/S 55mm is a purely manual lens, with no electronics, and that subtly changes the calculus, however. On the positive side, Nikon is unique among the brands I test in allowing one to manually create some proper metadata for a lens. You can manually input the lens name, focal length, and maximum aperture. This not only helps with VR (the camera knows the proper focal length), but also helps images to be sorted properly in your editing software because that name transfers in the EXIF data. Note the information given to my image in Lightroom:

The good news there is that I can search for images with that name designation rather than them all falling under the “unknown” category. I can even sort them by the proper focal length. What won’t always be properly reported, however, is the aperture. It will always be F2.8, which means that sometimes that will be right and in other cases very wrong.

On the negative side of the equation, the lack of electronic means that A) you will get no automatic magnification of the focus area when you start to manually focus and B) Nikon’s innovative focus guide won’t work. I don’t love Nikon’s manual zoom function, so I don’t love the manual focus process quite as much here.

On a positive note, the manual focus ring on the T/S 55mm is a treat, with a good amount of focus throw (I estimate about 165° of rotation). I also found that there was a reasonable amount of focus room from one meter to infinity (about 35°), which allowed for some precision there, too. That may not seem like a lot, but I’ve also been reviewing the Pergear 100mm F2.8 2x Macro at the same time, and it has less than 15° of rotation from one meter to infinity, and I find it very difficult to nail focus with because even the smallest rotation is the difference between being completely in or out of focus. The T/S 55mm is much easier to nail focus with, and I’ve had a lot of well focused results at a variety of focus distances.

It is worth noting that the beautiful focus ring makes doing focus pulls during video a treat. There’s nothing quite like a well calibrated true manual focus ring for smooth pulls.

Image Quality Breakdown

The Laowa Tilt/Shift 55mm F2.8 Macro has an optical design of 14 elements in 11 groups, and while this doesn’t have the designation of being an Apochromatic design, the performance feels very similar to one of their Apochromatic designs. I’ve shot a lot of my product photos with the T/S 55mm over the past two months, and those shots tend to be very demanding because the depth of field is shallow and there is either shiny surfaces or white lettering on black lenses…all of which is very susceptible to fringing. You can see that this lens produces none of that.

But beyond macro performance, there is a decided quality to the optical performance that feels very much like a Zeiss Otus performance. Something about the quality of the optical glass and the combination of sharpness, contrast, color, and defocused region that feels very rich and defined.

Images just had a sparkle to them that lesser lenses can’t match. I also shot the Sirui Aurora 85mm F1.4 lens at the same time during this portrait shoot, and you can see that there is a very different richness to the image from the Laowa.

I actually went away from this session wishing that Laowa would package these optics in a smaller, more conventional lens, as they are exceptional.

We’ll start our detailed examination with a look at vignette and distortion.

There’s nothing to be concerned about here at all. I see no distortion that requires correction, and while Laowa’s wide angle lenses often exhibit heavy vignette, there’s not much here. I used a +42 to correct, which is under two stops in the corner. Remember that this is a lens that also covers a much larger medium format sensor, so I would expect a lot of the vignette-affected area is actually cropped off on full frame. I never found a need to correct the vignette in real world images.

As noted, the control of chromatic aberrations (color fringing) is exceptional. There is no visible fringing before or after the plane of focus whether in my chart tests:

You can see no fringing in standard text, either.

There’s nothing on shiny surfaces, either.

I see no lateral chromatic aberrations near the edges of the frame, either.

In short, all of this is exceptionally good. This feels like an Apochromatic design in the way that colors are all accurately focused, which is a big part of of the overall “look” of images.

So far, so good. What about sharpness? These tests are done on the 45MP Nikon Z8 body, and crops and comparisons will be shown at 200%. Here’s the test chart:

And here are F2.8 crops from across the frame, including the center, mid-frame, and lower right corner.

Those results are, put simply, fantastic. Extremely strong center and mid-frame, and the corners aren’t far behind. Real world results are very crisp, with great microcontrast and fine detail.

Here’s another real world example, and you can see just how crisp the details are even at F2.8 in the crop.

There must be some degree of focus shift, as I found that results as I stopped the lens down weren’t focused as well even though with a manual focus lens there was no focus changes in between captures on my test chart. I can see some minor contrast increase at F4 and F5.6, however.

The truth of the matter is that no further sharpness or contrast is needed, as the lens is already intensely sharp from wide open. Real world focus results should be accurate, as you mostly will focus at the aperture you want to take the photo at.

I found it fairly easy to nail focus and get very sharp results, even when focusing at medium distances, like in this shot.

Minimum aperture is F22. I found that the camera didn’t quite meter correctly when the aperture was set to F22, with a mild underexposure. You can see that diffraction will significantly soften the image after F11:

Because this is an APO lens in everything but name, it does tend to deal with the same common issue for APO lenses, namely that you can’t just turn off that sharpness and contrast in the defocused region. We can see that geometry isn’t too bad, though you will definitely get some lemon shaped specular highlights near the edge of the frame.

In this shot, for example, the bokeh is just okay, with more definition to defocused textures than what is optimal.

In this shot you can see the absolutely amazing contrast, but also that the background isn’t particularly creamy.

That being said, I liked the overall look of portrait type images, as the rich colors made up for a bit of bokeh.

Bokeh is subjective, of course, so I’ll let you decide for yourself. Here are a few more samples:

Sharpness, contrast, and bokeh are all excellent at macro distances. Depth of field is tiny at 1:1 macro distances, and so backgrounds are going to be strongly blurred anyway. Sharpness and contrast up close is excellent.

The value of a tilt/shift lens for macro is the different ways you can approach a scene. In the first example, I’ve used some subtle tilting and shifting to make the coin on the right be completely out of focus, while the plane of focus runs diagonally across the coins on the right side of the image, including some of the top pile. In the second example, I’ve changed focus to where now the the left side of the image is in the plane of focus while the top coin on the right is no longer in focus at all. It also makes more of the “Dollar” imprint in focus.

Flare resistance is nice and strong with the T/S 55mm. I did a comparison shot with a cheaper Pergear Macro that I was also reviewing of a scene with intense sun coming through a window. You can see that the Laowa is pretty much impervious (on the left) while the Pergear image on the right is absolutely flooded with veiling and prismatic haze.

In short, this is a very, very strong performer optically. The Laowa Tilt/Shift 55mm F2.8 Macro is one of the very best optical instruments that I’ve seen from Laowa. I suspect that the performance of the 100mm will be similar. If you want to see more images, check out the image gallery here.

Conclusion

The Laowa Tilt/Shift 55mm F2.8 Macro is going to be a very interesting addition to the various platforms that it comes for. This is an extremely versatile lens, able to produce standard images, macro images, along with tilt, shift, or some combination of the two…all with stunningly good image quality.

I found the T/S 55mm a lovely portrait lens as well, though obviously shooting with a manual focus lens that won’t get focus confirmation does take a little more work and patience.

If you’ve never used a tilt/shift before, there will be a learning curve, as there is a lot of different ways you can position the lens, each of which will produce either subtly or obviously different results. The lens is also quite expensive ($1300 USD), large, and heavy, so there are a few other prices to pay as well. A manual everything lens isn’t going to be for everyone, and this is a lens for those who don’t mind (or even prefer) moving at a slower pace with their photography. I do think that it will be quite rewarding for those that do so, however.

Pros:

• High level of build quality
• Knobs and levers feel well made
• Good mechanical movement of tilt and shift functions
• Manual focus ring very well executed
• No distortion
• Low vignette
• No fringing
• Very sharp even at F2.8
• Great contrast
• Gorgeous color
• Good flare resistance
• Extremely versatile lens

Cons:

• Large and heavy
• Expensive
• Very complex
• No electronics
• Bokeh isn’t particularly soft

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Laowa Tilt/Shift 55mm F2.8 Macro @ B&H | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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Purchase the Nikon Z8 @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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