7artisans 18

[Lourdes Horace]

The7artisans 75mm f/1.25 is a portrait-length prime designed for Leica M-mount rangefinder cameras. What drew me to this lens was the excitement I experienced while using 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 lens - a cheap $400-lens that I regard as a really fun lens with many 'flaws' that made the light sparkle and the out-of-focus backgrounds explode. The shortcuts are what makes it fun because they result in the unexpected.

But is it fair to expect that the 7artisans lens performs the same as the Leica version for 1/20th of the price? No, and I didn't expect so. But I did have high hopes that it would be as fun and unpredictable as the 50mm 7artisans.

I didn't have the 75mm Noctilux to throw into in this comparison photo, but you get the point. For what it is, it is a remarkable compact and light-weight lens. If you want to "Always Wear a Camera", you need a compact lens you can stand to carry. The 7artisans is that.

Any 75mm f/1.25 will behave the same way, it is just matter of how well-controlled the glass is. But the depth-of-field and extreme bokeh is given. It's in the physics of a wide open 75mm, no matter the design.

Then the optical design - the art of optics performed by the lens designers - dictates the clarity, sharpness, color accuracy, contrast, flare and overflow of light (overflow results in milky/washed-out colors and tones) versus no overflow of light (clarity of colors, tones and crisp micro-details such as skin texture and wetness).

Well, even if the optical design maintained the same excellence in idea, the glass used, the grinding of it, and the assembling just can't be done in an economical lens to the same degree as in a no-nonsense Leica lens which has no limits on what will be done to reach the top performance on all possible points.

The 7artisans lenses are - all of the ones I have had in my hands - surprisingly well-built. The mechanical feel of the lens, the focusing, the aperture clicks and all ... well, it just surprises anybody, I think, that a cheap lens like that doesn't feel like it will fall apart in a week or two.

It is also true that light is what makes a photograph. Your ability to write with light, to capture the exact amount of it, work with the reflections and all. You can make an iPhone photo look amazing, and you can trash a photo made with a $50,000 Phase One in 150MP resolution.

It's a fact that with light and chemistry, you can grow plants, flowers and vegetables that feed the vertical evolution (the vertical evolution, also known as the food chain, is that plants support life forms which support larger life forms which again support humans. Some times with food, at other times with materials to build and produce).

You can make many things with the 7artisans, and posted online on Instagram and Facebook, you may be able to convince both yourself and others that it performs pretty damn well. And it's true. It does.

In this easy to read and apply eBook, Thorsten Overgaard takes you on a journey to see, understand and simply use light.

"One of the most important ways to get an aesthetic and pleasant picture is to find the good light."

This is the voice of a snob, because I am. The same snob that will tell you that I don't use the iPhone because that if I want to take a photo, I want to preserve the moment in the optimum quality for the future. While the iPhone can take great photos, it cannot take photos that stand to be printed large. Yes, you can fake them to look 'professional' even for magazine use. But it isn't really the feeling of a completed quality job; you know that you faked it.

When I photographed music mogul Clive Davis, I was determined to use this 7artisans lens because I had just gotten it and I wanted to use it. It worked out, but I feel I would have made a different choice, had I examined my photographs the way I have now. But that day, I didn't know yet what I was getting into. I hadn't worked much with the lens.

It is totally possible to decide that the 7artisans 75mm f/1.25 is your lens and to just go ahead with it. Once you have a lens under your skin and can feel what it does, the photographs also become equally tuned to what the lens does to the image.

The 75mm f/1.25 can perform a tiny bit of the magic that I saw in the 50mm f/1.1 lens. But it's one in 500 photos where I get some of the dreamy and funky look, and only when I try really hard. The 75mm is just a tighter design than a 50mm.

It's not often I have had the strange experience that a photograph didn't glow and didn't look quite as clear and colorful as I expected. But when going through the photos made with the 75mm f/1.25, it's obvious that the clarity is missing.

If you photograph with a Leica 90mm APO-Summicron ASPH f/2.0, the colors are clearer (brighter and cleaner) than what the eye sees. the Leica 90/2 APO has the perfect optical precision match of red, green and blue light rays, which is what optics are about. The Leica 50mm APO-Summicron has the same, and the Leica 50mm Summilux M ASPH f/1.4 is also a master in that.

These lenses are all different creatures, and much more expensive. I just mention them to give an idea about what type of clarity I'm talking about. What is obtainable if - as we discussed just before - money is not a barrier to getting what you want.

It's a fun lens to use, and it's compact and cheap too. No reason not to love it, except that other lenses can do a better job. If you have $14,000 to spend on perfection, step up from the 7artisans 50mm f/1.25 to the real deal, the Leica 75mm Noctilux-M ASPH f/1.25. But until then, enjoy the almost free ride with a fun lens.

What would make you want to upgrade, is what the 7artisans doesn't get. In this simple black-and-white-scenario below from JJ Hat Center in New York, the Leica just captures the texture of the steam better. The first one is the 7artisans 75mm f/1.25, the second one is the Leica 28mm Summilux-M ASPH f/1.4:

Mainly, this lens is a "short tele" lens, or a portrait lens. Fundamentally, you want a portrait lens to isolate the subject, show features with a glow of life, but not with too many details. After all, nobody wants their skin captured in every detail for the world to examine.

The 7artisans 75mm f/1.25 does all this. It can create beautiful portraits. Sometimes with a distinct special look only a lens like this can produce. Mostly without the glow of details that a better designed lens would capture as well. I'm talking about the glow of the eyes.

I hope you enjoyed this article on the low light lens, 7artisans 75mm f/1.25 for Leica M. More to come. Sign up for my free newsletter below here to stay in the know on new articles on lenses, photography and cameras. As always, feel free to e-mail me with ideas, comments, querstions and advice.

Thorsten von Overgaard is a Danish-American multiple award-winning photographer, known for his writings about photography and Leica cameras. He travels to more than 25 countries a year, photographing and teaching workshops to photographers. Some photos are available as signed editions via galleries or online. For specific photography needs, contact Thorsten Overgaard via email.

The most obvious competitor is the Viltrox AF 85mm F1.8 STM II, which I reviewed back in 2020. That lens was also very good optically, though it has fewer features and yet still weighs about 60g more. That, combined with the age of the Viltrox, might make the 7artisans lens a more compelling buy in 2024.The lens barrel is made of metal, and it has a nice, anodized black satin finish. The lens design is very clean and elegant.

The 7Artisans AF 50mm F1.8 has an optical design of 10 elements in 7 groups, and this includes some ED (low dispersion) and HRI (high refractive index) elements. Like the AF 50mm F1.8, this is a very impressive optical instrument for the money.

Despite having excellent sharpness, the 7artisans 85mm manages to deliver really gorgeous bokeh as well.A shot of the early morning dew shows some geometric deformation, but the look of it is pretty pleasing to me.

Look at how softly blurred the background is on this shot of unripe blackberries.Colors were also good for such an inexpensive lens. Images just look great, period.I did notice a bit of flashing with the sun right out of the frame.

Pros:Nice looking lens with nice buildIncludes aperture ring, function button, and AF/MF switchUSB-C port for firmware updatesGood manual focus ring and experienceHigh aperture blade countAutofocus motor is quiet and accurateExcellent sharpness wide openVery low vignette and distortionGood control of fringingNice bokehGood colorsExcellent price to performance ratio

There was a time when owning a fisheye lens carried a certain amount of kudos. Stepping back to the early 1990s, I well remember my very first fisheye encounters with a lovely, curvaceous and mildly eccentric Canon 14mm version.

As I began spending as much time behind as in front of a camera, the fisheye was my first high-end EF lens and was quite the investment at the time; for around 15 years that straddled the film and early digital eras I shot the heck out of my fisheye lenses (I broke three).

Apart from the 14mm prime there was no wide angle Fujinon lens in the early days and I do have to say that I really missed that option, especially when shooting action sports (my main thing). This was one of several reasons that I still travelled with my Canon DSLR system if I was shooting any real action, as I always had my 17-40mm to cover that broad and wide-eyed base.

It took some time for Fujifilm to release the XF10-24mmF4 (as used in the cycling images). I was banging at the door to get hold of one of the prized first copies as soon as they came on sale and to this day that lens is my go-to for close action work.

When the pandemic came around, I invested in a few things with the idea of shooting and stitching 360 images. Somewhere around about that time I started looking into fisheye options for the project but as no lover of computer and post-processing time, as well as knowing that I would potentially never get around to it (which was the case), I opted for the 7artisans 7.5mm (f/2.8) fisheye, which dropped the scales a not too shabby $139 or so.

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