 Hey everyone, Nico Carver here. Today I have a mini review that I'm really excited about. This is the Venus Optics Lawa Argus 35mm f0.95 full frame lens for Canon RF mount. And it's available starting today, September 10th, with a retail price of 899 US dollars. And it's also available for Sony and Nikon, a mirrorless full frame. I'm going to summarize my impressions up top here and then I'll jump into the details. The reason you get this lens is if you're interested in the f0.95. f0.95 is a very bright aperture and it meant I was able to do some novel things that I've been wanting to try like shooting live video at 24 frames a second of the Milky Way, which I think is pretty wild. Now the video angle is one area where I wish I had a Sony camera as Canon's video low light performance isn't the best compared to say something like a 7s series with the really big pixels. Unfortunately I received it right after the peak of the Perseids as that would have been a great application of shooting video at f0.95. I did get the chance to take a number of photos and I am really quite impressed with the Milky Way performance, with or without a star tracker. Also for anyone like me who gets limited time at dark sites and wants that insane speed, this is great for like constellation shots and things like that. Now the downside of very fast focal ratios on lenses is usually there are some trade-offs in terms of you get more extreme vignetting and the star performance especially away from center you get a lot of sort of weird aberrations that you can only usually get rid of by really stopping down the lens but that sort of then defeats the purpose of the insane speed. So I'm going to talk about all these details but before I do let me just say that if you're interested in purchasing this lens I'd encourage you to purchase it from my friend Noah Buchanan at Hunts Photo and Video and I'll put his email on the description and right here and you can just email him to get set up to buy the lens and this copy is a sample copy that Venus Optics has went to me I'll have to sadly send it back soon here but I really appreciate that they sent me this to check it out for astrophotography. Okay let's jump into the details now. So as I mentioned the the headline feature of this lens is of course that it has a very bright wide open aperture of 0.95 is more than a full stop brighter than f1.4 meaning to achieve the same brightness across the scene at 1.4 you'd have to expose for twice as long that's what a stop means and so it's why we call these lenses faster and I think the Lawa is a pretty unique lens on the market compared to all the other ultra-fast wide lenses we've been seeing because most of those have been limited to an APS-C image circle while this one is a full frame 35 millimeter lens. If you do follow lens news like me you might be wondering why are we seeing suddenly all of these faster than f1 lenses and it has to do with the move to mirrorless camera bodies because the mirrorless cameras have the much shorter flange distance which means we can get faster lenses. Faster lenses did exist back in the day I mean even in the 60s Zeiss made the famous Zeiss plan R f0.7 for NASA's Apollo missions with the idea of using it to shoot the far side of the moon with a modified Hasselblad camera and then a little bit later on one of the 10 copies that Zeiss made for NASA was purchased by director Stanley Kubrick to make his film Barry Linden where he was the first to film scenes completely by candlelight on film stock which is I think it was ISO 100 and so anyways why am I telling you all this? Well I'm a bit of a camera and camera lens nerd and I've always been fascinated by that NASA Kubrick connection and this is why when I got to talking to Venus Optics through my friends at Hunts photo and video I was really interested in these ultra-fast lenses that they're making because I always thought it'd be really cool to do astrophotography video of the night sky that sort of better approximated really being there with a wide angle lens and getting the feeling of the actual stars twinkling from the atmosphere and everything like that and I got to say this lens really delivered. I do wish my camera was a bit less noisy because you can see some noise there but I definitely see the potential for these clips because they're a more immersive way to show off a location and what it really feels like to be there under a dark sky especially in this Milky Way one is that's just how the star clouds and lagoon nebula look like in my opinion from a sort of dark portal three zone and that's where this was shot. In terms of photo performance for astrophotography I think it will mostly appeal to those that shoot a lot of Milky Way or aurora or meteor showers. 35 millimeters is really wide enough on full frame that you can fit in a lot of the sky full constellations like Cygnus here or you know the whole Milky Way core area with Sagittarius or from Cassiopeia to the Andromeda galaxy as I did here and personally this wide you know I look at the whole picture and I don't care so much about zooming in on the corners but if you are a pixel peeper the stars aren't very flattering at f0.95 and they don't really get much better until you're stopping way down to like f4 f5.6 but in terms of just you know taking pictures with it that are there a wide angle and not really worrying about mosaics and things like that I think this lens is going to serve you very well especially if you're short on time and you really want that photographic speed. Okay I'm almost out of time I'm sure so I'll just wrap up by mentioning a few specs here it's very well made in my opinion it seems like a lot of metal it's 755 grams it takes 72 millimeter threaded filters it's all manual manual focus and manual aperture with no communication to the camera it does seem to have a permanently attached metal lens hood there is plenty of room for a lens warmer around the focus ring which does turn very nicely and then lastly the iris can be in de-clicked or clicked mode which I think is pretty cool there's a little switch there well that's it for this five minute Friday I might return to the lens in a future video when I eventually get to a shootout at this focal length of 35 millimeters but I'm still working my way up to that so far I've done a shootout at fish eye 14 millimeters so there are a couple more shootouts to go before I get to 35 this has been Nico Carver nebulaphotos.com clear skies everyone