Carpathian Castles with the Zeiss Touit 12mm

More than 300 castles and ruins dot the Little Carpathian mountain range in Slovakia. This East-European country stood at the crossroads of cultures and religions and was invaded many times by the Tatars, Turks and even Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 19th century.

An ideal subject for the extreme wide angle Zeiss Touit 12mm, I thought. After my LAEA4 had refused to convert the Zeiss 24-70 A-mount yet again, I used it extensively with the Sony A7r body besides my A6000.

Working with a wide angle is always tricky, it’s important to keep it level as much as possible in order not to have too much of a warped perspective. I do use DXO viewpoint two if I feel I’ve gone over the top, but the disadvantage is often that you’ll lose some of that wide angle effect. Or at least need to re-crop, and I feel I lose too much quality with an APS-C lens.

An APS-C E-mount lens on the Sony A7r works well and can make a very compact travel/hiking kit. I don’t see the advantage over using an APS-C camera like the A6000 though, as they perform equally well when comparing images.

I captured all these images in RAW format and used OnOne’s Perfect Effects landscape filters with some tweaks afterwards in Lightroom, without using any Zeiss Touit lens corrections.