Nisi 9mm f2.8 lens review
I love shooting wide angle photography, especially seascapes, it allows the viewer to feel like they can step right into the image.
The Nisi 9mmF 2.8 lens is specifically designed for aps-c cameras and is available for Sony e-mount, Canon RF Mount, Nikon z-mount, Fuji x-mount, and micro four thirds cameras. If you're using a full-frame camera you would likely see a fair amount of vignetting.
Nisi 9mm f2.8 lens - build quality
The Nisi 9mm f2.8 is made really well and looks fantastic. Around the bayonet, we've got a yellow rubber seal that seals the lens against the camera body, meaning you won't get any water ingress into your sensor. This is great, especially when you're shooting Seascapes when the sea spray is coming at you, so that's particularly good.
It's a manual lens, so no electronic connections. The focus ring is buttery smooth as is the clickless aperture ring. Photographers may not like the clickless aperture ring as much as perhaps videographers, so I guess it’s a bit of a double-edged sword, but it does feel particularly nice. It also has a metal lens hood.
On my first evening of testing the Nisi 9mm, I shot everything at F11 using the hyperfocal focusing method. This meant that everything from infinity to 0.5 meters would be acceptably sharp. This was great as I didn’t have to worry about my focus during the session as I knew everything would be sharp. I chose this method because the conditions were particularly challenging and I had to keep moving and adjusting my composition whilst trying to keep my gear free of rain and seaspray. Be sure to check out the video to see how I got on that evening
The Clouds were amazing 😀
I enjoyed that session and the morning sunrise shoot too.
This lens does suffer from vignetting, especially when it's wide open at F 2.8. If I stack 2 filters I can then see some severe vignetting in the corners, so when I was using a six-stop and a polarizing filter I ended up cropping the images a little bit to get rid of the dark Corners.
Typically when I'm shooting seascapes I'm using a five-by-seven crop, so generally speaking, the very edges of the frame are cropped out anyway, so it's not such a big deal for me. If you want to use the full width of your image, you're going to have to correct that vignetting in Lightroom or photoshop.
Usually, I avoid using a polariser when using a wide-angle lens as sometimes you can get uneven areas of polarization, so I’m not sure how often I would stack 2 filters but it is something to consider.
The Nisi lens performs particularly well when you shoot toward the sun, flaring is minimal it's pretty incredible really when you're shooting directly at the light.
The lens can capture sun stars all the way through the aperture range from f2.8 up to f16 which is nice.
Typically if you want to shoot a Sunstar you have to stop the aperture down to f16 or f22 . If sun stars are your thing and you like shooting toward the light, I think you probably love this lens.
To conclude, having used this lens for the last couple of days shooting seascapes. I think the Nisi 9mm does particularly well shooting toward the light, I think it handles flare well and the detail when you're shooting toward the sun is fantastic. Image quality is comparable to that of my 10-24mm fuji zoom lens but the Nisi does lack contrast in my side-by-side comparisons.
The lens does suffer with vignetting and also some softness in the corners, to get over this, I just crop my image ever so slightly.
If you like shooting Sun Stars you're going to love this lens because you can shoot sun stars at all apertures which is pretty cool. Build quality is fantastic and the weather sealing definitely held up to everything that was thrown at it during these couple of sessions. It had a couple of waves over it and it got an absolute soaking from the driving wind and rain. I think this is a nice little wide-angle lens that can certainly do a job especially when you're shooting into the light.
f2.8 vignetting
f8 vignette
These images are darker on the right-hand side because my wall has window light coming from the left.
