Zeiss 15mm f/2.8 Distagon: Brilliant
The Zeiss 15mm f/2.8 Distagon offers high brilliance, luscious color saturation and superb flare control. These are the reasons to select it over all others for this kind of shooting.
In sharpness terms it is a strong as anything, but has its limits and behaviors, and these too are shown and discussed, including here in this aperture series a particularly demonstrative crop showing the point spread function behavior.
In Guide to Zeiss:
Aperture Series: Pine Creek Stormy Light (Nikon D810)
Include HD and Ultra HD images and large crops from f/2.8 through f/16 along with both color and black and white images and how converted.
Toggle the image below to see the black and white rendition.
Andrew P writes:
I just wanted to thank you for your recent coverage of the 15mm Distagon. I have seven very nice lenses that I regularly use now, but I keep on going back to the 15mm for those special qualities it has. For a while I avoided it because I felt I had to be very close to a subject to get anything useful, but then those photos were always very interesting to look at.
I recently shot a basketball championship with it and then used it for a model shoot a couple weeks ago. For both shoots I also used my Otus, a 35 mm Summilux ASPH, the ZA 135mm 1.8 and a Nikkor 85mm 1.4G, but the best shots were all made with either the 15mm or the Otus.
DIGLLOYD: a 15mm is hard to use well, but used well it sings.