The Viltrox 35mm f/1.2 is built for portraits and low light, but Mads Peter Iversen took it into the forest for landscape work to see how far it can stretch. That tension between a wide-open prime and a genre that typically demands stopped-down sharpness makes for a genuinely interesting test.
Coming to you from Mads Peter Iversen, this candid field video follows Iversen through a Danish forest thick with wild garlic as he works out whether a fast prime has any real place in landscape photography. He's upfront that he's not a fan of being locked to a single focal length, and that f/1.2 is basically the opposite of how he usually shoots. Still, the 35mm field of view turns out to work better than expected in a dense forest environment, letting him frame tight compositions without pulling in the canopy overhead. He leans into the shallow depth of field rather than fighting it, using background light filtering through the trees to create soft bokeh balls behind individual flowers.
One of the more practical discoveries is the lens's sun star performance. Iversen starts seeing it as early as f/8, and at f/16, the minimum aperture on this lens, the wild garlic in the foreground still holds up with solid sharpness across the frame. That's a useful data point if you're wondering whether a lens like this can pull double duty. He also briefly considers it for night photography, specifically auroras, noctilucent clouds, and Milky Way work, where the f/1.2 aperture is an obvious advantage and 35mm gives decent coverage of the night sky.
What Iversen keeps returning to is how much of this lens is about playing with depth of field rather than working around it. Shooting a single snail, a lone wild garlic flower against a dark trunk, a small cluster lit by filtered backlight — these are subjects that reward a wide aperture rather than suffer from it. Without zoom, you're constantly repositioning to change perspective, and finding the right distance for a subject at f/1.2 takes more patience than dialing in a focal length on a zoom. He's also honest that this is a specialized lens, similar to his other wide angle primes, meaning it stays in the bag until the scene actually calls for it. Unlike those lenses, though, the 35mm focal length avoids the distortion issues that make wide angle glass difficult for portraits, giving it a slightly broader range of use cases.
Check out the video above for the full rundown from Iversen, including his actual shots from the session and how he handles the light as it moves through the trees.
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