Back to Square One. Continuing exercises with the square format in a rectangular camera. Also, a few thoughts on a lens.

Before yesterday I was embarking on an experiment to starting shooting the Panasonic S1R set to the 1:1 aspect ratio and also with the camera set to record both a black and white, jpeg file as well as a raw file. I shared some of the black and white images with you on Tuesday because I was able to use them, mostly, straight out of camera. But I did go back to the same photographs and work through a few of the raw files to see how the images looked in color. It's always an interesting exercise because half the time, when shooting black and white Jpegs, I wish I was shooting in color --- and vice versa.

To be more clear, I've been looking at the combination of lens, camera and aspect ratio as a complete system rather than a disparate set of thrown together, working considerations. And it seems to be working out well. 

I'm shooting with the S1R because even when cropped to 1:1 the files are about 31 megapixels and there's enough detail (and dynamic range) in them to overcome any sloppiness in my technique. And, of course, the camera is comfortable to handle as well as a most stable shooting platform. 

If you've read the VSL blog for a while you'll get why my camera is set to 1:1. I "grew up" shooting with Rolleis, Hasselblads and Rolleiflexes and that set my early preference for squares. A preference that's continued through my career. When the camera is set to raw+jpeg fine the Jpeg shows up exactly as I have it set in the parameters. If I've selected to shooting in L. Monochrome and have added some menu tweaks that's exactly what ends up in the final Jpeg frame. But the raw frame shows up as a full raw file, in color. 

I know some cameras that do this show the full 3:2 frame when the raw files are brought into image processing programs but when using the Panasonic S1 series raw files in Adobe's Lightroom the program writes the preview as a square; if you've set a square aspect ratio. I really like that because I'm able to keep my preferred frame geometry exactly as I want it throughout the process. If I want to change my mind and go for a 3:2 from a raw file that I shot in 1:1 format I need only go to the crop controls and extend the crop to include the entire frame. The raw files maintain all the pixels from the sensor.

I selected the 50mm S-Pro f1.4 from Panasonic to complete the system because I see best with a slightly longer than normal lens (the square crop changes angle of view slightly). This lens is my first choice because it's the sharpest one I own; just right for the times when I want to use a lens at a wide open aperture. Or when stopped down just slightly. It's not enough to have narrow depth of field if what's in focus isn't all that sharp. The limited focus plane technique works best if what's in focus is really sharp and detailed. Then, the difference between in and out of focus is that much more dramatic. 

It's the same reason I bought the original Sigma Art lenses. They were very sharp wide open and that made the soft backgrounds seem more special. If you have to stop down a couple of stops to make sure the in focus parts of your frames are adequately sharp it's just not as much fun; or as visually interesting. 

When I add in the good image stabilization provided by the S1R body, and also its high ISO performance, which is quite good, the combination, along with the fast apertures of the lens makes for a great low light shooting experience. 

I've got the camera set so that auto-ISO goes all the way up to 12,800 and I'm shooting with the lens mostly at f1.4 or f2.0 so I can shoot with good results in very low light. I should also mention that the auto-ISO is set up for a low end shutter speed of 1/60th but I notice that when I hit the top of the ISO range the camera progressively lowers the shutter speed rather than underexposing. If I don't want that to happen I set the ISO to a fixed value.

Taking as many decisions out of the mix is a nice way to work because it's easier not to get side-tracked. Here are some images from the same excursion. Most shot at f2.0. A couple at f2.8. 

 

The next day rolls around and we're still here. Mostly saying, "What the F#%k Just Happened?"

 

If you aren't incensed and enraged by what happened yesterday in Washington D.C., and by the flagrant fanning of the flames of hatred and division by our "president", then you aren't paying attention. Write to your congressional representatives, then call them, and demand both impeachment and the application of the 25th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

I can't blame the people walking around in their MAGA hats, they don't understand much, but I can sure blame the right wing media, the right wing senators, the right wing congress-persons and a big bucket full of talk show hosts who worked together to try to destroy our country. 

We used to think we were part of a big tent and that people could hold different opinions and beliefs without being bad people. Now I think that's akin to hearing the other side say, "Yes, we knew the new baby sitter was an avowed cannibal with a sweet tooth for small children but we thought it would be fine to leave our children with him...just for a little while. How were we to know....?"  "And he was so cheap!!!"

So Sad. What we're seeing in Washington D.C. is the saddest thing for our country. Now is the time to rush through the 25th Amendment. Trump must be stopped now.

It should be obvious to everyone that this is not about politics this is about one man's attempt to take over the government and turn our country into a criminal enterprise run solely for his benefit. 

I am shocked by all of this. Especially the "president's" reticence to try to stop this lawlessness. Instead he is bent on fueling hatred and terror.

No reason to talk about photography today. We should all be calling our representatives and demand a stop to all this insanity. No time to waltz around with rules of thirds. 

Just insane.

Trump needs to be marched out of the White House in handcuffs.  Now.

Gone Square and Black and White. A twilight swing through the nearly empty downtown here in Austin.

Camera: Panasonic S1R

Lens: 50mm f1.4 S-Pro

Camera profile:  L. Monochrome

Shoes: Yes.

 

 

Urban-scape photography at f2.0. The twilight hour opens up a different palette of f-stops and shutter speeds.

 Winter look. 

Panasonic S1R camera

Panasonic S-Pro 50mm f1.4 lens

@f2.0.

Lightly toned in PhotoShop

Panasonic S1R does black and white camera "porn."

 I'm having fun working with my new, square, black and white camera. It's one I already owned; I just needed to reconfigure the system and re-adjust my brain. I'm photographing with the camera set to 1:1 aspect ratio and L. Monochrome profile. The capper is the selection of the S-Pro 50mm f1.4 lens. It's an endearing combination. 

More to follow. 

Doesn't the chrome version of the Fuji X-100 V look swell? 

A different way of looking at aspect ratios points me at a different use for my Lumix S1R.

 People who grew up in photography in the film days continue to hold onto some of the "rules" and ideas they learned working with the constraints of film technology. To start with, most users of 35mm film were limited in the sizes they could print by both their tolerance for graininess and the lower resolution of both film and the design of lenses made for shooting film. 

A lot of us cut our teeth shooting with "faster" films such as Kodak's Tri-X which is a 400 ISO film that generated ample grain at the labeled ISO and especially so when the film was "pushed" to higher ISOs in processing. Because grain limits resolution it became a suggestion or "rule" that good practitioners always shoot with an eye to filling the entire frame with their compositions. The idea was that any part of the frame that needed to be cropped would reduce the overall sharpness and resolution of the final image. It's a sound practice for people for whom image quality is the primary consideration in a photo. "Fill the frame!" was the mantra of every photo instructor or workshop leader in the film days. 

In the early days of digital the same basic ideas still held. With 4 and 6 megapixel files any sort of cropping led to less overall resolution and that was a time when our cameras still had to reach hard to match the "standard" of filling a printed page at 300 dpi. 

Now we have more pixels that most of us know what do do with and it makes a lot more sense to start re-thinking the arbitrary format limitations we've lived with for so long. There are many images that seem to be more natural in longer, higher aspect ratios and just as many other images that could be made more powerful when cropped closer to a square format or some other lower aspect ratio. 

While I am hardly a wide, panorama photographer I could tell even when shooting the mural above that the photo really needed to be a wide, skinny frame to work well. All of the visual material above and below the crop here was just distracting stuff that would take attention away from the part of the image I wanted viewers to see. With a few moments of trial and error I think I came across the best crop for this. It's a wide frame reality in the first place. 

With a 47.5 megapixel camera like the S1R it's easy enough to make "radical" crop like the one above and still have lots of detail in the remainder of the picture to use it for just about any medium. Print or electronic. 

I find myself using the 16:9 crop more often than not when I head outside to make images of street scenes because there are often times when wider shows more information and taller only serves to minimize what I think is important by adding extraneous detail top and bottom. I'm never happy with radical vertical aspect ratios so I rarely use a skinny crop if I'm shooting that way.

But the thing that brought me back to playing with various aspect ratios was a friend's recent offer to loan me a Fuji GFX 50R and the nice, little 50mm lens. He casually mentioned that the camera, when, cropped to a square and used with the 50mm basically mimicked the frame size and angle of view that I used to get with my medium format Hasselblad cameras when using a 120mm roll film holder. This tweaked by interest and I started thinking more about shooting in the square with my existing cameras. 

The obvious choice was to start experimenting with the highest resolution sensor in order to keep at bay my prejudices about cropping too much. The camera shoots files that are 8368 x 5584 pixels in its highest res, native 3:2 aspect ratio but it shoots a healthy 31.5 megapixels and 5584 x 5584 pixels which is an ample file size for everything EVERYTHING that I need to send, print or post. 

Once I decided to try that avenue I started thinking about appropriate lenses to mate with the high res camera. I would want to use a lens that was about two stops faster than the lens on my old Hasselblad just to get me a wide enough aperture to mimic the fall off in focus I would have gotten from the lens for the much larger format. 

The Hasselblad 80mm Zeiss lens opened up to f2.8. So I was considering a 35mm format lens that opens up to f1.4. But I wanted the lens to be critically sharp, or at least as sharp as possible at that f-stop so I narrowed my search down and decided that the Lumix 50mm f1.4 S-Pro lens would be the best choice. It's the "reference" lens for the system and one of the few 50's on the market that's very high performing at its maximum aperture.

I rarely used the Hasselblad lens wide open and a more usual f-stop was f5.6. With the S-Pro lens that would equal an f-stop of 2.8 which is an aperture at which the lens is, for all intents, perfect. 

The combination of the lens performance and the 31 megapixel file size is pretty wonderful. My first tests were done using Raw+Fine Jpeg using the Monochrome "L. Mono" profile, along with a few sub-menu tweaks (plus contrast, minus sharpness, minus noise reduction) and I'm happy enough with the files I'm getting. 

I find getting great monochrome results straight out of camera is a lot tougher than just getting pleasing colors so I'm still working on fine tuning the output. I liked the DXO Film Pack for black and white but I think I can make my own custom profiles that are an even closer tweak to my current preferences. 

The detail though is superb. And seeing the images in the finder in black and white is wonderful. 

The way I use the system most is as a portrait camera and regardless of whether I'm shooting in studio or on location I love working with the camera on a tripod. I guess that's why, even in this age of downsizing, I still have four or five tripods scattered around the studio...

Shooting this way is one of the few times that I actually prefer to use the rear screen of the camera (or better yet, an Atomos Ninja monitor). For some reason seeing that beautiful gray tone square floating in a field of black is very satisfying. 

I find that in the past I would have preferred a longer lens for portraits but that I am loosening up now and the 50mm is fine when cropped to the square. I think the best lens for this combination might be something in the 65-70mm range but I guess I should get more frames under my belt with the current set up, just to be more informed. 

I like cameras that offer a wide range of aspect ratio choices in camera. The Panasonic S1 series is exemplary in that regard. The S1R offers me my favorites while the S1H seems to offer every choice under the sun. 

Hope you just came in from taking some amazing photographs of 2021 and you're enjoying a good, hot cup of coffee. Or the beverage of your choice. We're going to have a great year!

-Kirk

Summer and Winter Street Shooting Looks. Camera brands optional.

 

OT: I have just finished reading Benjamin Graham's, "The Intelligent Investor" (most current edition, with recent commentaries added) and now I'm totally informed and confused.

 

Making money has very little to do at all with photography. In fact, it's proven for most people to be a very efficient way of loosing money, over time. As a former ASMP chapter co-president, a reader of professional forums, and an adviser for a large community college commercial arts program, I can say that the number one cause of failure I've seen for nearly every imaging business, over time, is not the inability of the photographer who owns it to make salable photographs, and it's not the photographer's inability to charge for their work, rather it is what the photographer does with the money they make which becomes the critical factor in their financial failure or success.

Sadly, a spot where even the most savvy photography business owner usually comes up short is in saving for a rainy day; and even more important, saving for retirement. Or saving for the point at which he or she becomes fed up or discouraged and wants to leave the "field of battle" for nicer surroundings. 

I have a number of friends and plenty of acquaintances who maintained "successful" careers for twenty or so years only to come to the realization, near the end, that there would be no real continuing income from stock photography sales, that it's incredibly difficult to get profitable gallery representation, and that they've mostly invested every cent back into their businesses instead of into sound, financial investments. Their lifestyles take a dive and their outlook becomes a bit grim. It's especially hard to value and sell a single proprietor business based on one person's craft knowledge.

Some, who worked and lived in Markets like Boston, Austin, Seattle and various spots around the country to which new industry flocked, have built up enormous equity in the homes they live in. Not by rigorous planning but sheer, dumb luck. But many more have had the opposite experience of watching a lifetime worth of mortgage payments result in property ownership, the value of which is just treading water. At least the photographers in the growing markets can sell their homes and harvest the equity but they'll also have to consider moving somewhere cheaper...

Every once in a while I'll meet a photographer who was quite disciplined and took the advice of the person who wrote, "The Automatic Millionaire" ( David Bach) and invested month by month and year by year into an investment account and ended up taking advantage of compound interest. These few generally end up with more than enough money to allow them to travel and pursue what had been drudgery but is now a fun hobby - photography. 

I know several Austin photographers who decided early on in their careers that they wanted to own the studios they worked in, own the houses they lived in and also own rental properties in town. They made a bet on the housing and real estate markets here and ended up doing well through good economic times and bad. Most will retire well just on the sale or long term lease of their studio properties. The additional rental properties are icing on the cake. 

By way of disclaimer, I know just enough about investing to be a danger to myself and others. I seem to have the reverse "Midas Touch" when it comes to picking individual stocks. But I am smart enough to listen to good advice and not dabble in things I don't understand. Anything I discuss here is just residual fallout from having read Benjamin Graham's book. 

First off let me say who it was that recommended the book to me in the first place. It was none other than Ultra-billionaire, Warren Buffett. If Buffett had a mentor in his early years it was certainly Mr. Graham. Buffett suggests this book in order to provide the reader with a foundational understanding of the history and mechanisms of not just the stock markets but also bonds of all kinds and other, more obscure instruments of investment. 

Graham does a great job of laying out a history of financial market booms and busts, and growth and decay. The first take away of the book for me is that I would have lost everything I ever earned if I had convinced myself that I could make a fortune as a day trader.... Or that "everything is different this time." 

After having read the book I'll probably recommend it to my friends who: Read fast with good comprehension. Have the stamina to get through 623 pages of financial/economic history and the discussion of investment theory. Understand basic math. Want to be financially secure. Obdurately still believe in the Easter Bunny, and the "hot stock tip." 

As a photographer I've made every financial mistake I can think of. I've done jobs without getting a written agreement and been burned almost every time, in one way or another. I've taken big, unexpected profits and rather than putting all, or even some, of the money into an investment or retirement account I've blown it on "re-investing in the business" which is mostly photographer code for: I bought a really cool camera system that I've convinced myself will make me money somehow, somewhere down the road. I've routinely fallen into the Dunning-Krueger trap of believing I know "better" than the rest of the investing market. I've bought stocks and then sold them quickly, sometimes after loosing a bit of money but usually for just a bit more than the friction of trade minus the regular tax that triggers when holding a stock for less than a year. Only to watch the stock revive and rocket up just after I've sold it. I've sold too soon and bought too late.

I can only imagine how different the financial outcome for my business, and the businesses of so many other photographers, would have been if we'd read more books like this one in our twenties and put into practice even just some of the things we could have learned. 

If you are interested to read one point of view about markets and investments while cooling your heals during the pandemic I think this one is interesting. Graham certainly goes in depth.

My takeaway? A smart friend's advice many years ago led me to invest in a well known balanced index fund. It's done well enough that I'm entering this phase of life without abject panic and without throwing the mother of all photographic garage sales. 

I do regret all the ways I've wasted money over the years. But on the other hand I'm happy to have been married (and continue to be married) to a fun but frugal partner who did read books like these even back in our early 20's and who has provided a set of guard rails for my occasional, unfounded episodes of irrational extravagance. (I'll never live down buying a 5 series BMW near the end of the 1990's. I can still hear the quiet advice to consider a Honda Accord ringing in my ear...).

I won't give you much advice here. Most of our readers are people who are smart; smart enough to keep their hobbies and their jobs separated. Smart enough to get employer matches to their 401K's, and smart enough not to rush out and buy Hasselblad systems the minute you get your first big job from a major company. 

But here's the advice I would give to Ben, or anyone silly enough to want to be a freelance photographer:

1. Don't buy a single piece of new gear until you have a year's worth of living expenses tucked into the bank and waiting for some sort of disaster. The disaster will come. And probably not just once...

2. Invest in financial instruments that have been demonstrated to have a decent return, are low enough in risk and which have very low costs or fees. 

3. Make investing automatic. Do it every month. At least every quarter. Believe in "dollar cost averaging" and understand that few, if any, people can successfully time the markets with any reliability. Most who try end up losing money. Lots of money.

4. Unless you have lots and lots of time on your hands to research and pore over statistics and annual reports consider making most of your investments in a well regarded index fund administered by a very large and stable investment company. 

5. Consider nice restaurant meals and trendy vacations to be luxury extravagances and not routine purchases. I have an acquaintance who feels that his family "deserves" regular, pricy vacations and he hustles them onto planes and drops upwards of $8K -10K more than once a year. He also buys new cars as if they have the same kinds of sell by dates as eggs and milk. The rest of the time he bemoans how broke he is and how far in debt he's become --- ostensibly through no fault of his own. Learn to cook. Learn to shop. Learn to vacation on the cheap. 

6. And, finally: Never take financial advice from other photographers. Think about it. They are photographers, for God's sake! 

But the book is nothing if not an interesting and deep look at investor psychology. The understanding of which is almost always handy. 

A Production Photo from "Singin' in the Rain." Directed by Abe Reybold for Zach Theatre.

GH5 + Olympus 40-150mm Pro Lens.

 I was looking for this photograph after a friend of mine (once again) said that one couldn't really do professional work with a GH5 camera. I laughed as I made a living one year bouncing back and forth between a Panasonic GH5 and an Olympus EM5 mk2. 

Perhaps I should also send him the photo below for those times when he "instructs" me that no micro four thirds cameras can be shot at any ISO above 800 without horrendous noise and lack of sharpness. 

Leslie Anne Leal as the "Queen" in "Narnia"

A kid's production at Zach Theatre.

GH5 at 3200 ISO.

And so, how is that Panasonic, Lumix 20-60mm f3.5-5.6 "kit" zoom lens? Well, let's look at some photos.

the obligatory self portrait at the start of the year. 

chilly in Austin today.

When we left off from our last bout of gear talk I had just made my last two acquisitions of the year, a black Fuji X-100V, and an unexpected impulse purchase of the lens in the headline here. I've written a few posts about the Fuji, and I'm sure to write more about it, but I have been quiet about the Lumix 20/60. Mostly because the Fuji seemed appropriate for the solemn days at the end of a hard year. After all, it was meant to be a bit of an antidote for the doom and gloom. At least for me. 

I wanted to test the new lens (20-60mm) out yesterday but it was freezing, and raining, and sleeting. I even caught some hail when I went out for rigorous afternoon walk, sans camera. But today I woke up to clean, clear skies and buckets of sunshine. It was a perfect day to walk around Austin's ever changing downtown and test out a new lens. Even if I was just considering the little zoom to be a competent but boring replacement for a less comfortable single focal length lens. 

Today's guest star is a lens that launched alongside the Panasonic S5. The S5 camera has been well received by critics and everyday buyers so far. How can I tell? The long waiting lists for future shipments of a new camera model that sold out almost on launch day. With all the excitement surrounding the camera I think most people considered that the new lens would join the ranks of mediocre kits lenses that other makers crank out by the bucket load. But then reviewers started wading in and for the most part they were surprised by just how good the lens was.

The Lumix 20-60mm is full frame lens with a variable aperture. While nearly all other full frame kit lenses only go as wide as 24mm the Lumix stands out first of all because it goes all the way to 20mm. Another feature that stands out is that the lens is weather resistant and even has a rubber gasket around the mount to keep out water and dust. But the real surprise, to me and others who've bought and tested the lens, is just how sharp it is at the kinds of apertures people will mostly be using with a lens like this. 

Two respected (as opposed to hundreds of non-respected) reviewers mentioned that they generally liked the lens but they also mentioned that the far corners were a little soft at the biggest aperture and widest focal length. I was ready to see something awful, or at least mediocre, but I've found that unless you are a specialist in photographing brick walls you will rarely, if ever, encounter the softness of which they speak.

My use of most wide angle lenses, zooms and primes alike, is to get a lot of depth of focus and fine detail in wide scenes, which almost mandates that I work with medium to small apertures when I photograph with them. Since the lens is limited to f5.6 and smaller on the long end of the focal length range I just set f5.6 as my max aperture for all focal lengths on the lens and then I don't have to worry about exposure changes as I zoom. But frankly, most of my work with lenses that go extra wide is shot at f8, f11 and f16. I no longer fear the idea of diffraction because I find any slight decrease in overall sharpness is usually taken care of with the many sharpening controls in Lightroom, PhotoShop and even Luminar. 

The samples I've included in this blog post range from f5.6 upwards but are mostly centered around f8 and f11. The exceptions are when I've leaned way in to get something very close all in focus and in those instances I've reached all the way to f16. A tweak to the sharpening controls and any differences in file details become invisible. 

The lens weighs less than a pound and it's lack of heft is down to a design with fewer and smaller glass elements as well as a mostly plastic exterior construction. Designing the lens with smaller aperture settings, and also making the design a variable aperture one, keep the heft of the finished package on the light side. But the lens itself is big enough to get your hands around and feel comfortably balanced on even the weightiest of my S series cameras, the S1H.

I bought this lens with two regular tasks in mind. First, I can replace my fast (but almost completely unused) 20mm f1.4,  28mm f1.4 and even my 35mm f1.4 with this one lens and cover all the once-in-a-while duties that usually fell to the heavy and cumbersome, but optically very good, trio. That's a huge weight savings. And while we're on the subject of weight and handling the much lower weight means this lens is one of my prime candidates for use with the full frame system on a gimbal. This lens is pretty much a universal lens for video. I just have to remind myself that we start at f5.6 and go to f22 but we can't really go in the other direction. If I need to go even lighter in order to save my wrist, I switch to the Sigma 45mm f2.8 which, after a year of use on four different cameras, is still one of my very favorites. 

The 20-60mm is also very well behaved in terms of vignetting and distortion but I'm assuming these things are corrected in the camera firmware; even in raw. I would have no hesitation using this lens on a tripod for photographing architecture images indoors or outdoors. And, in terms of sharpness, I think it's as good as most of the faster, fatter and heavier (and more expensive) 16-35mm lenses I've tested over the last few years. Give up the notion that you need f2.8 or faster and you can get a lens with good corrections and equally good performance. You just won't get to brag about it as much. 

If you have a Lumix S series camera get this lens. But if you use a Fuji fp or an older Leica SL you'll probably be happier with the first generation Panasonic 24-105mm. Why? Because the 20-60mm doesn't include in-lens image stabilization and neither do the Leica SL or the Sigma fp offer IBIS. Those cameras are dependent on lenses to bring the stabilization and the 24-105 does it really well. If you shoot a lot of multiple camera set ups you might as well get one of each.

If you are on a budget then this lens and the Lumix S5 camera are a great place to start. If you are an all-around, multi-subject shooter you'll probably want to supplement the system as soon as you can with a longer zoom. Something like the 70-200mm f4.0 Lumix S-Pro. You could probably stop there and handle just about anything that comes your way; with the exception of super low light jobs that might require some faster apertures. But I don't find many fee paying clients demanding that kind of imagery nearly as often as I encounter clients who like to see their products or processes actually in focus. 

So, what about the S-Pro 24-70mm? Yeah. It's a great lens. It's a wonderful tool for photo-journalist and documentary shooters who need to be able to rely on working at full aperture and knowing they're going to get very sharp and useable images. You'd have to carefully consider the bulk of your work to choose one over the other. I bought the 24-70mm f2.8 last year and every time I've used it I'm amazed at its optical performance but you have to go into ownership knowing that you get a limited range of focal lengths, a lot of weight and bigger size. And you'll pay well over $2K for the privilege. 

If budget constraints were a pressing part of the decision matrix I think I'd recommend the 20mm-60mm. If you've already paid for all the expensive stuff life throws at you and you don't need to please clients get the 24-70mm. But only if you think you're going to be willing carry it around. And if you are willing to work in what is basically an extended normal lens range point of view. 

So, on to the rest of the samples. All shot as Jpegs. Tiny exposure tweaks and an occasional light touch on the saturation levels, otherwise SOOC. I must say again, the color out of the S1H is the absolute best from all three of the S1x cameras. I haven't compared it to the S5 but I'm very happy with what I shot today.

If you look carefully you'll see some leaves blurred and some sharp. 

There were wind gusts and I shot to catch the branches when they hit their

slowest point. The shutter speed was 1/125th. Interesting effect to 

see sharp and blurred leaves right next to each other and random through

the frame. 

the three images just above are shot at about the same time but 

at 20, 40 and 60 mm. I should also mention that the lens appears to have

been designed to be nearly par focal. If you are shooting at f8 you won't 

notice any focus shift as you zoom. In either zoom direction.

60mm. 

Dying to try this carry out only pizza place but it's in the middle of downtown and 

by the time I get a pie all the way home to share with the family I'm worried it 

will have settled and gotten too cold. But dang, the pizza ovens are imported from 

Italy, as are most of the ingredients. The menu looks great. 

I tossed a PhotoShop LUT on this one but I can't remember off the top of my head which LUT it was...

My opinion? 20mm is wide enough for anything. 

Also, notice that the tree branches and leaves in the bottom corners 

are nicely sharp. More than sharp enough for client work.

f16 and be there. 

Again. Look at the branches and leaves in the corners.....

double fisted, masked coffee drinker. Love it. 

Top one is full frame while the one just above is a crop of the upper image. 

If you are going to buy an S5 go ahead and get the lens. It will cost you $300 more (USA) but you'll be able to re-sell it for between $400 and $450. It's a smart play. Just make sure you have a market for. But I'm going to suggest that if you test it first you probably won't want to sell it. It's a nice, workman-like tool. 

I'm happy my impulsive nature won out on this one. Happy New Year. 

P.S. Just remember, it was a 2020 purchase. It doesn't count in any gear churn for 2021.