[JJ_SO]

This is the flight part.

 

After the apple shot I put the lens and the D810 in a small LowePro bag and that bag into my bicycle bags and tightened the flaps.

 

After such a sentence you can imagine what happens?  :wacko:  Right. 100 m later I wanted to take other close ups, but the bag with the camera was not in the cycle bag anymore. Could have chosen the grass around the path, but the stones were clearly more attractive to this party of heavy camera, thin bag and solid gravity.

 

The camera was fine, not so fine the lens.

 



 

The shift "mechanism" is k.i.s.s. (keep it simple, stupid) and the swallow-tail rails (1) on both sides are hold in place by two screws M 1.6 (2). Those chinese screws are new in business to withstand Swiss stones with millennium old experience in cracking things, even if they are in a bag. It was an unfair game.

 

Somehow I managed to bring the body home without body cap and the lens without some parts plus lens cap. In earlier times I would have started to grief for a couple of weeks. But here i felt a challenge and went on from the flight part to the pride part. Long story short, altough I'm tempted to tell in full detail the adventures of poor Venus lens: I fixed it. Made an attempt to get genuine parts from China and Kevin from é•¿åºšå…‰å­¦ whatever that means told me to send it in, but this takes time. The shipping costs are pricey and since I was called by "keep it simple, stupid" I felt the urge to improve things a little bit.

 

So, the shift action is a bit less sticky than it was before.  B)​ The rest of the lens is doing it's lens business as before, therefore I gained some experience (had Roger Cigala in mind...) and got some insights into, hrrrmmm, less sophisticated mechanical design. The optical design is really not bad. I see it as a kind of better lensbaby although I've no first hand impression of those.

 



 

This battered flowers were less than 5 cm away from the lens.

 



 

​Yes, the borders are nothing to write home about, but the inspection the middle is alright. There was some movement on the surface of the river in the right part of the picture, so the poor border could just be motion blur.

 



 

Finally, some more details:

 

• yes, the shift functions is more for DX bodies - but it's possible to use FF and crop afterwards, the dark corners are usually no big loss.
  
• On ay DX body, it needs to be one which can handle manual focus lenses. Nikon D5100 doesn't recognize a lens at all...
  
• D750 is a pretty good machine behind the Venus: Tilt display and decent liveview makes it easie to get handheld pictures. Canon also has some tilt screens, I found that a big plus to get a better LV.
  
• Will I take this instead of the Nikkor 14-24? No, of course not. Both serve a different purpose. This Venus lens will add  one pound to a bag's content (and I could always throw it to the ground as I know how to fix it...). For some photo strolls I have some ideas in mind...