I recently wrote about my use of 21mm, a lens I had used some years ago and returned to out of necessity when, while working a specific situation, my standard wide angle was not wide enough to include everything I was trying to in my frame. As that situation occurs within a specific event, I was able to work the same scene again, this time equipped with the lens I had hoped would be ideal.
As I mentioned in that article I had looked through an 18mm lens, but not used it, but since writing that I did end up borrowing it for about half an hour during a Ukrainian cultural gathering near Hyde Park Corner. At one point, framing through the viewfinder and seeing directly what the lens sees, I noticed some lumps appear at the bottom of my frame when tilting for a downward angle – and it took me a second to realise it was my own feet! That’s a much wider field of view than I’m used to.
I was encouraged by these results and looked into my options for going a step down from 21mm, for that extra wideness and depth of field factor and workflow the lens seemed to offer. 18mm in Leica is an uncommon focal length, the Leica Super Elmar 18mm f/3.4 and Zeiss 18 f/4 being the only two options I can see (although perhaps there are obscure options I wasn’t able to find but these seem to be the mainstream ones). A step down from this and you find the potential for 16mm on the WATE, as well as the 16mm Zeiss Hologon lens for Contax G which can also be adapted to Leica M mount.
At 15mm there are options from Voigtlander for M with their Super Heliar 15mm f/4.5, from Zeiss with their 15mm f/4 Distagon, and some recent releases from Laowa, in their 15mm f/2 Zero-D and their 15mm f/5 “Cookie”. Again there may be offerings from other brands, but these are the ones I think are most common and commonly known.
For F mount I could have gone for the same 18mm f/4 as Aarnav but I thought I may as well go as wide as feasible, with 18mm feeling too close to 21mm. The Nikon 15mm 3.5 seems fantastic, but I don’t use my F mount body enough to justify it; a rangefinder extreme-wide-angle would fit much better into my current approach. The SLR wides are much physically larger than the rangefinder options I was considering for M, and I just wouldn’t use them as much as something on my M.
I’m a firm believer that you actively have to be trying to make some kind of “special effect” lens for it to be anything other than very usable in most situations, so as far as image quality from what I’ve seen from the results from these lenses I wasn’t seeing much difference – nothing stood out to me as especially awful. A few factors, such as availability, size, weight, price, maximum aperture went towards my eventual decision: the Laowa 15mm f/5 “Cookie”.
Although this felt like the best balance of factors, a few hurdles appear almost immediately. There is no included viewfinder, and the maximum aperture of f/5 is the slowest of options I had looked at outside of the Zeiss 16mm f/8, which I discounted without much hesitation due to that f/8 limitation. f/5 is in between the f/4 and f/4.5 seen in those other Zeiss and Voigtlander options, and in daylight I thought it would be a fair compromise against other positives; given the size and weight are truly fractional compared with the other lenses we start to see some balance on the scales.
Close focus of 12cm is another eyebrow raised for me, from what I can see this is one of the closest focusing lenses available for Leica M, with a slight tactile stop at 0.7m to let the user know they have gone past the minimum limitation of the rangefinder coupling.
The field of view of this lens is roughly the same as the ultra-wide lens on my smartphone, so I’m not unfamiliar with such an expansive frame, although I rarely use my phone for anything other than snapshots. With no viewfinder supplied my options were to either use one of the 21mm ones I have, purchase a 15mm specific one, or simply do without. I have so far chosen to do without, and haven’t yet regretted that decision.
With the extreme field of view and depth of field even at the widest aperture this lens really lends itself to a certain approach: point and shoot, with focus set to 1m, moving through a close-quarters crowd and metering as carefully as possible. No framing through a viewfinder for precision around the edges, and no need to precisely focus in these conditions means the camera rarely comes to my eye, instead I can simply move it into approximate position, usually looking for some foreground interest to place it roughly near, and then press the shutter. The majority of my example images here were made this way, excluding the close-focus examples.
This is of course very different from the way I tend to work, but if I only ever approached the world the same way with all of my lenses it would become very boring very quickly. It’s actually been quite freeing, just manoeuvring my camera into position and gauging at an arms length what the result may actually turn out to be. I’ve found that metering is preferable with an external unit rather than a TTL, as the wide “net” includes too much for me to really get a sense of what is being measured.
Flare on this particular lens feels well controlled, although in bright sunlight a few streaks manage to make their way onto my frames here and there. It makes more sense to use this lens with the sun to my back, working with what it illuminates, but I don’t always have the luxury of choice as far as where things happen to be happening at any given moment. I’l have to be sure to be tilting downwards somewhat in order to reduce risk of flare ruining an image when facing towards a bright light source.
I was excited to try the 12cm minimum focus, but struggled in practice as it is difficult for me to estimate such a short distance when I am used to thinking in terms of meters. I ended up measuring my fingers and placing my palm under my camera in a certain way, knowing that when my fingertips were almost touching the subject they would be in focus. Even so, I’ve had more misses than catches, but it’s something I’ll be working on moving forward.
12cm is one of my closest focusing lenses, certainly my closest focusing non macro option, and having to do that by eye or guesstimation is simply not ideal. Composition without looking through any kind of viewfinder means being able to imagine what my result will look like, which for a complex scene can be more about hope and luck than effort. As I said, for foregrounds I am more or less putting the lens on top of it and hoping it comes out how I’d like. For a person to feature in my frame in a meaningful way they need to be at least a meter or two from me, any further and they diminish to irrelevancy.
It’s surprisingly easy to make images that look how I want, but a key contributor here is that I am playing to certain strengths, working in very busy crowds where the chaos benefits from this wider perspective. I don’t see this as a practical street photography lens, the distance requirement would make it difficult to make anything I’m happy with without being quite invasive in terms of personal space. The same goes for indoor use, but that depends on the light. I wouldn’t want to use it with flash because of coverage/vignetting, and I think I would struggle with producing competent interior images without a tripod, making it less ideal for documentary style work.
There are a few photographs I’ve made with this lens that actually feel like a “standard” lens, where if I said it had been made with a 21mm or a 28mm you may be hard pressed to actually tell otherwise. The extreme exaggerations are when you can really spot the ultra-wide characteristics, whether that’s because far more is included in the frame from a perspective where a standard lens wouldn’t have achieved it, or when the proximity or composition reveals those stretched distorted features.
In a crowd, and I mean a real crowd, where you can pass through people with people pressing in on all sides, snap the shutter and move on, not needing to see an exact frame but intuiting the edges, this lens is an absolute gem. On the friendly rangefinder, tiny form factor makes it so easy to move into position, the small lens mechanism makes it easy to feel where the focus is resting, and the zone scale on the outside, which luckily for me is in meters rather than feet, makes this an intuitive piece of kit to apply to these situations.
Those extra 6mm between 21mm and 15mm might not sound like much on paper, but in practice they fundamentally change how the lens (and the photographer along with it) interacts with space, and with the subject. The difference isn’t in millimeters, it’s in the mentality. At 21mm, you’re already working with an expansive field of view, but one that still feels tethered to a conventional photographic perspective. You can isolate elements with careful framing, and people remain recognisable at moderate distances. There’s room to breathe in the compositions.
The 15mm, by contrast, doesn’t frame space so much as absorb it entirely. That additional width amplifies distortion at the edges, although in this lens not as much as I initially expected; I’d go as far to say as this lens feels like it has the distortion of an average 21mm, while my Zeiss 21mm has as little distortion as a 28mm. As I said, you have to be deliberately trying to make a bad lens for there to be such a thing in today’s marketplace.
Foreground elements gain exaggerated prominence, while backgrounds stretch and recede in ways that 21mm only hints at. Where the 21mm allows some detachment the 15mm demands immersion; you can’t just observe the scene, you more or less have to be inside it for it to make sense. This makes it far less forgiving for traditional humanist documentary or street work, where precise framing and subject isolation often matter. Distracting distortion aside the look still stretches somewhat, in a way that does leave a fingerprint of the lens’s presence in the final image. Certain angles will reflect this worse than others, and it’s necessary to be careful if distortion is something that may ruin an image for you.
Those characteristics are transformative, and deeply immersive in chaos. In a packed crowd, where bodies and motion fill every inch of the frame the 15mm’s sprawl turns disorder into rhythm. The depth of field at f/5 is so vast that focus becomes almost irrelevant: what matters instead is proximity and timing. I’m rarely composing – as I described before I sort of can’t – instead the lens has to be trusted along with my reactions to bring together fragments of emotion and gesture into something cohesive. Often there is an accidental/incidental geometry in the forms and shapes of limbs which I can pretend was intentional. A 21mm could document that same crowd, but the 15mm helps the viewer feel the pressing mass of people.
It is only worth sacrificing the 21mm’s versatility if you’re willing to surrender control. The 15mm rewards a kind of photographic impulsiveness, a willingness to let the focal length dictate terms. For methodical work, it’s a bit of a liability, but for moments where energy matters more than precision I think it’s something quite special.
Thank you for reading, I hope this has been helpful if you’re considering using this lens, or the same focal length in your work! If you enjoyed the images I used for my examples consider following me on Instagram. I buy much of my film from Analogue Wonderland.
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