An Unfashionable Lens

Tags

Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS DO USM, Fresnel, lens, review, sharpness, utility

For every lens that gets rave reviews from the photographic community and intimate examination by the pixel peepers, there are many others that get shunted aside or ignored. Not because they are intrinsically awful, at least in most cases, but simply because they don’t rival the greatest. Most often they fail in the sharpness category, but other factors such a distortion, color fringing, vignetting and basic build quality also play a part.

Sharpness, however, is the main differentiating factor, and, judging by the amount of space devoted both to articles about lens sharpness and to the comments that tag onto these articles, an issue that is uppermost in many (maybe most) photographer’s minds.

Because sharpness is so highly valued, lenses that fall short in that department are swiftly rejected by many. One of these is the recently discontinued Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS DO USM lens.

I, too, reading negative reviews such as Bryan Carnathan’s in the The Digital Picture dismissed this lens as a potential purchase and bought instead a number of large, heavy but beautifully built and sharp Canon ‘L’ lenses that covered the long telephoto range.

But I’m getting older and prefer to slim down my equipment for travel. I also like less ostentatious equipment that does not draw attention to itself. Those large white ‘L’ lenses always stand out, intimidating subjects and raising my fears of camera theft.

So when an opportunity arose to buy a used 70-300mm DO lens for about one fourth of the retail price arose, I decided to get it for travel purposes.

I didn’t have a lot of high hopes for this lens. I was intrigued by its Fresnel lens elements that help reduce size and weight, but as long as it was serviceable it would do.

Well, now that I have it, I find it to be a lot more than simply serviceable. Firstly, the image quality, so widely disparaged, is more than adequate. True, wide open and at 300mm, there is some softness and loss of contrast but stopping down no more than a single stop improves the image considerably. It may not rival in absolute pixel peeping sharpness the latest generation of ‘L’ lenses but it compares well with the prior (2000-2010 era) lenses. Not better but not significantly inferior. And I have felt no need to replace those older ‘L’s with newer models; the upgrade in quality wasn’t worth the extra cost in my opinion.

This is salutatory lesson. I spent a lot of time researching and way too much money in the past chasing and buying the latest and greatest lenses when, in reality, they did little to improve my photography and have often found themselves underused. I would have been better off spending more time using what I had, such as consumer grade kit lenses, making actual photographs rather than dreaming about making better photographs.

So I fell slap into the trap, carefully cultivated by camera manufacturers, that better equipment means better photography. It’s taken much longer than it should to get out.

At last, though, I find myself able to look beyond what is fashionable or critically popular highly rated and look for myself at what I really need. The Canon DO zoom is relatively small and compact, unobtrusive and lightweight in comparison to many of its competitors and will do me very well as my long telephoto zoom for future trips.

(Photograph take with the DO lens)

Diffraction and the real world

Tags

aperture, camera, conventional wisdom, depth of field, diffraction, lens, light, photography, pixel density, real world, theory

Photography is full of myths and conventional wisdom. Astonishingly, they occupy the attention of far too many for far too long.

Not a new phenomenon by any means, reams and reams of verbiage were devoted to the intricacies of film photography, it, nonetheless, seems to have exploded in the age of digital cameras and the internet. Anyone with a computer and an image processing program can examine an image right down to the pixel level and share his or her opinions with the online community. Never has it been a better time for the technically obsessed.

One of the common pieces of accepted wisdom in this digital age is the destructive influence of diffraction on your photograph. As long as there have been lenses, the physics of very small apertures leading to highly diffracted and thus soft images has been understood. These days, the pixel density of sensors also plays into this softness; as pixel density increases and pixel area decreases, the ability of each pixel to differentiate – and thus resolve – the light from a lens falls relative to the diffraction level produced by the lens. Images from high density sensors will, given the same lens and f-stop position, be softer.

Thus has been born the diffraction limited aperture (DLA) specification that indicates the minimum aperture size that any given sensor can resolve – a typical set of values can be found in this review of the Canon 5D Mark IV.

Once upon a time I paid attention to this. I even convinced myself the images from my old Canon 40D were somehow softer at an equivalent f-stop setting than those from my older 30D with its larger pixel size.

That was nonsense as far as the real world is concerned.

The simple truth is that any softness in an image due to diffraction issues of either the lens or the sensor or both is insignificant compared to the softness brought about by lack of focus, camera shake, subject shake, other limitations in the lens and falling outside the depth of field.

And of all those factors, camera and subject shake are by far the most important. Focus too, although most modern autofocus systems work well provided the correct focal point is selected. Depth of field – well, that works in opposition to the effect of diffraction within a lens. A smaller f-stop (more diffraction) provides a deeper depth of field (more elements before and behind the point of focus that can resolve as being distinct and not blurred).

This was brought home to me today by the above image of a columbine plant. The aperture used on the Nikkor 55m macro lens is incredibly small for a 35mm camera lens – f/32. It was necessary to get the depth of field you see. But the diffraction involved is largely imperceptible. The image is sharp and crisp. I didn’t expect this – everything I understood about both the lens and high density sensor on the Nikon D750 camera convinced me that I should be getting an image that looked as if it had passed through a softening filter.

Once again I was reminded that the only true element in photography is the photograph you actually end up with. The more time spent experimenting the better. That is how you really learn.

 

Soft Focus

Tags

blinkers, blur, effects, lens, Lensbaby, Lensbaby Velvet 56 f/1.6, macro, photography, soft focus, Velvet 56, vision

I recently picked up a second hand copy of this lens –

– the Lensbaby Velvet 56mm f/1.6.

It’s a well-built metal manual focus/manual aperture lens that sends no electronic information whatsoever to whatever body it is attached to, so using it relies on how well your camera can meter for the aperture presented to it (stop down metering) unless you augment this with an external exposure meter.

So far, I’ve only used the in-camera metering on my Canon bodies. Results have been variable. Wide open, it tends to overexpose but becomes more reliably on target with smaller apertures. Even when off, the metering is only about 1 stop away from the ideal making this a very easy lens to use with both film and digital bodies.

Unlike most of my other lenses, this lens’ particular property is the introduction of soft focus into your images, radiating in effect from the center and increasing in intensity as the aperture is widened. The effect is most pronounced between f/1.6 (where even the center softens) and f/5.6 where the center is sharp and circular zone of softness inhabits the mid to outer limits of your frame. At f/8 and smaller apertures the edge softness diminishes towards levels associated with normal lenses, become quite sharp at f/11 and f/16. Using the lens in this smaller aperture range is no different from using any normal lens, giving this particular effects lens a usefulness beyond that simply associated with its softness. The lens is also a useful macro lens, not true 1:1 macro but a 1:2 macro, easily good enough for a lot of close-up photography – such as this fern leaf:

But this not why I bought this lens. I bought it for the effect you see as the top of this post, a delicious radial blurring that looks not that dissimilar to that produced by Petzval lenses. Indeed, judging from a look through the lens at the seemingly fairly simple internal optics and mechanism it may not be that different in design. Nonetheless, different it is, and by all accounts has a visual quality that is unattainable in any other currently produced lens, harking (according to Lensbaby’s promotional material) back to mid 2oth century portrait lenses.

It’s a lovely ethereal effect, serving to draw the eye into the center of the image. Tack sharpness becomes irrelevant. All that really matters is relative sharpness, and how you, through your composition, apply that to your image.

This is an enormously refreshing way to photograph. True, it’s possible to generate similar effects with a digital image with Photoshop or some other imaging program, but that, like all Photoshop manipulations, takes you more into the realm of the digital artist and less into the world of lenses and light, the elements that I value most in photography and that remain somewhat (but only somewhat) indifferent as to whether you capture your image digitally or on film.

I, for one, am wholly sick of sharp images. It’s instructive to look back at the great photographs of the past and subject them to the kind of single-pixel defined microscopy that obsesses many current photographers (and serves to sell pricey and ever more optically ‘perfect’ lenses). None of them hold up to such modern digital standards, not least because of all that pesky film grain, but even in situations where grain is greatly diminished (such as large format images) there is nothing approaching the clinically clean effect that now so common and so seemingly desired.

Others can work with that. I think it’s a red herring, an obsession with technical perfection that can work to swamp artistry. The draughtsman’s approach. One leading to precisely the kind of blinkered vision that is the thread running throughout Peter Greenaway’s film masterpiece, “The Draughtsman’s Contract”. Not that most photographers are ever likely to have such a plot woven around them, the point is that they could. It’s a lack of imagination, something I find curiously prevalent in the field.

So here’s a lens that works best with imagination and creative vision. Lots of fun to use and one I keep with me most of the time.

 

 

 

Red on Green

Tags

aesthetics, color, film, individuality, lens, obsolescence, personality

 

Red on Green by Richard Keeling on 500px

I am slowly tiptoeing into the world of color film photography. Slowly because it has taken a while to gather the courage necessary to start home developing color, a necessary prerequisite to keeping costs down. Commercial developing is both rarer and a lot more expensive than it used to be, an unavoidable consequence of the relegation of film photography to a fringe operation.

No matter. Paradoxically, provided you use fresh reagents and keep a tight control on temperature, in some ways color developing is easier than black and white.

The results can show some variation in color balance depending partly on developing conditions and partly on the type of film used. The above photograph is another shot using the very cheap (comparatively) Agfa Vista 200 film and one that upon developing showed a slight magenta tint that I corrected for with Photoshop. The look is quite different from that obtained with a digital camera. It has a much more organic feel and a warmth that undoubtedly results from the particular color balance characteristic of this film, even with slight color corrections. Not as sharp though and discernably film grainy. Completely free though of both the color and luminence noise characteristic of digital images.

It’s a look that I like and one that will keep me persisting with color film photography.

Sometimes I wonder why and how my own personal photographic aesthetic has changed so much over the past year.  I used to be a sharpness-fixed pixel peeper, chasing the highest resolving digital sensors and lenses. No longer. I’m currently shooting with an old and relatively cheap consumer zoom lens, the Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM, that is marginally inferior to my standard go-to lens of old, the 24-105mm f/4L in terms both of sharpness and distortion. No image stabilization either. It’s a lens I stopped using way back in 2006 when I bought the L lens. Yet here it is today in almost constant use on my outmoded and obsolete Canon camera film bodies. Giving me images such as the one above. Images that I currently prize.

It hard to adequately articulate the relief that this turn backwards has brought me. I have stepped off the photographic consumer treadmill. I’ll never step back on. My pictures, good, bad or ugly, have a different feel that is tangible and that rescues even the most cock-eyed effort from the indifference that plagued the hundreds of digital images that I used to collect daily. In doing so, my art has reclaimed a personality, my personality. I don’t need anything else from it.