I got a new lens yesterday. The Fedex driver pulled up, walked up the driveway and left the box by the front door of the house. I was reading a fun novel at the time. I got to the end of a chapter and headed down the long hall to the front door. It was the Voigtlander 40mm f2.0 Ultron lens (with a Nikon F mount) that I ordered from B&H a few days earlier. It was just what I expected and just what I thought I wanted.
I put it on an adapter and then on the Leica SL2 and drove over to downtown to take a walk and make a few photographs. It's always a good idea to try out new gear and make sure it's in good working order. I hate to send stuff back but it's still worse to put off trying a new lens or camera until it's too late for a conventional "return for refund." That generally means you have to default to warranty service and that's time consuming...
Anyway, as I was walking around with the photography machine swinging from a strap on my left shoulder I started thinking about the episodes of futility that tend to strike us as photographers. Some of us read a lot and get sucked into the magnetic attraction of constantly addressing "need" in our craft. Only to find that most of the things we thought we needed turn out just to be either a waste of time or not nearly as important as we were led to believe.
Here's my list of stuff I thought would be important but which never rose to the level of "need." This is my own list and probably not exactly transferrable to photographers whose specialties are different. For example, I don't do long adventures in remote areas to shoot landscapes. So, even though I have tried to "love" photographic backpacks --- and currently own three or four --- I've just never gotten along with them. Don't need them. And was surprised at how much I hated using them when I got around to buying several. For anything urban I just find them a waste of time and space. For work a wheeled case is so much better. For casual work the most I really ever need is a small shoulder bag. So, the thousand dollars spent on photo backpacks has mostly been a waste. Maybe if I was routinely hiking up 14,000 foot mountains to shoot spectacular landscapes I'd feel differently. But no. Not for me.
The obsessive need to fill every millimeter between your widest focal length and your longest focal length. Often referred to a "coverage." Way back in the mists of time photographers made photographs with film camera and when they did they found that most zoom lenses sucked. They depended on prime lenses with fixed focal lengths to get the quality they needed. While some of the superstars of photography, working at the highest levels, ended up relying on only one or two focal lengths the vast majority of photographers felt the "need" to be able to cover everything from something like 18mm all way up to 300mm. But rather than figure out the real range in which the vast majority of their images were made they decided that they needed the potential to cover anything. To be as prepared as a Boy Scout.
These photographers carried around huge bags filled with heavy inventories of metal and glass prime lenses, spaced in angles of view as close to each other as possible. For those who really, really did work/photo-commerce with the full range of options this meant near continuous lens changes. For others, like photojournalists who needed to respond quickly to breaking situations it meant putting a range of lenses on three or four different camera bodies and wearing them all on straps at the same time. Each lens mated with its own body and ready for its specific mission. Little wonder that so many photographers from the mid-century film days were sidelined with bad backs and ruined shoulders.
The current manifestation of this need to cover everything obsession is the idea that we need to cover the same kind of range with high quality zoom lenses. In every mid-level photographers bag I have had the opportunity to look into I find what has come to be referred to as "the holy trinity of zoom lenses." Which is becoming, these days, the "quad or trinity+1 of lenses." And since most photographers of a certain age remember the days when high ISOs sucked almost all of them reflexively opt for the fastest aperture zoom lenses possible. So a current, overloaded, camera bag usually features something like: a 12-24mm, a 16-35mm, a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm zoom. All with maximum apertures of f2.8. An amazing load of stuff to port around; especially if your goal is...fun.
It was always revelatory for me when photo magazines and websites used to publish the distribution of focal lengths used to make "award-winning" photos. The distribution was nearly a perfect Bell Curve with 28mm lenses anchoring one end, 135mm focal lengths anchoring the other end and a huge spike between 35mm and 85mm. Those exotic focal lengths we all craved? The ones at the far ends of the curve? Mostly "no shows."
With very high resolution cameras at our disposal today the need to cover every millimeter is mostly pointless. We'd all mostly be well served with maybe a 24mm, a 35mm and a 90mm lens combo and we'd crop to meet the middle grounds. Even better? One standard zoom that covered 24-105. Or 24-120mm. That's pretty much it. We'd save our money, our backs and our time spent trying to choose what to use next. But I guess that would take the fun out of it all for some.
Here's one I am especially guilty of. The endless search for the perfect "high speed" standard lens. In the 1940s and 1950s when fast black and white film was generally locked at a maximum of ASA 200 (maximum!) many professionals and photo artists who wanted to photograph in low light, at night, in subways, etc. were constantly searching for a 50mm lens that let in more light. In a time when a well corrected 50mm lens was usually delivered with an f2.8 maximum aperture the guys on the cutting edge were searching out the f2.0 lenses at first and then moved on to a search for the ultimate 50mm f1.4 lenses that were just hitting the market. They paid a premium for these lenses because they could get images the likes of which their audiences had never seen before.
In the 1960s and 1970s the race for lens speed continued partially for light gathering but also because a faster lens yielded a narrower depth of field when used wide open and that more limited depth of field was an aid to more accurate focusing with SLR cameras that had come to dominate the markets. Focusing screens in the cameras could be optimized to take advantage of fast lenses and the fast lenses in concert with a good focusing screen meant a much higher accuracy when nailing focus.
Those were the reasons to look for fast lenses back then and the camera makers delivered. But mostly they only delivered the speed in the widely accepted 50mm range. The current obsession with super fast 28s, 20s and even faster wider lenses wasn't yet "a thing."
Now our camera sensors can see in the dark, our camera's AF systems can work in light so low our eyes have trouble parsing subjects at all and the ability to get a lens focused no longer depends on our eyes being able to discriminate between sharp and unsharp on the focusing screens. Most screens now are optimized for bright viewing and not for actual focusing acuity. But we photographers are still on the hunt of "the fast glass." From a cost, handling and results point of view it makes no sense at all. Even if you are a fan of narrow depth of field the difference between an f1.4 or even f1.2 lens and an f2.0 lens is not that big of a deal in 99% of shooting situations.
Last year I bought the Sigma Art Series 85mm f1.4 DN DG lens. There's really no need, from an image quality perspective, to stop the lens down. It's sharp and usable at f1.4 but therein lies the real problem. It's usable, sure, but you'll have a hard time getting enough distribution of sharpness in the frame to make really good photographs. The fast aperture isn't appropriate for most of what you'll be photographing with the lens. I find myself stopping down to f4.0 or f5.6 in order to keep enough of a person in focus to make an acceptable portrait. I'd be just as well off with an 85mm lens that "featured" a maximum aperture of f2.8 or f4.0. And an 85 with an aperture of 4.0 could be made nearly as small and light as a nifty-fifty. With no real loss of usability. None.
Fast 50s? The huge majority of us don't need em. We don't use them at their widest apertures except when desirous of bragging rights. I've been buying slower lenses lately --- with glee. Most of them make really good images. But...the search continues. (Bravo for Sigma for having the "courage" to make a "slow" new 50mm lens. Imagine, it just an f2.0).
The "need" to travel to all the tourist spots on earth to get "great" photographs (which, incidentally, look like everyone else's photographs...). I get some push back from visitors to the blog about how "boring" Austin looks. The architecture is so "bland." The people so "generic." According to them I should be out on safari or sitting in a café in Paris or climbing the Himalayas or wind surfing a lava flow with my cameras. And I guess, if you are a landscape photographer there is a lot of validity to this point of view. But it's based on the idea that photography is strictly about documenting what is in front of the camera instead of interpreting what is in front of one's camera. I see plenty of pleasant but boring photos from Iceland, and the edges of glaciers from Alaska to Norway, and Antartica which are so cliché now that they are as boring to me as some stranger's wedding photographs. I think the new goal of photographers should be to use their craft to reveal things about their lives and their environments that are unique; or at least different. After all, one's own life is the one area of true expertise that most people have.
When people look through my images they mostly respond to the portraits. Photographs of people I've taken in the studio, or on locations that are so anonymous that they could be anywhere. I bring that "look" with me. If I travel to exotic places I find that I'm mostly captivated by the people I meet. Those are the subjects I'd like to photograph. If there is a famous building or a famous mountain range behind them it serves me only as a nice, slightly out of focus background. I love Rome, but it's the look of the people who live there that captivates me, not another chance to make an image of the Coliseum. I like London but only because the people act and look different from the people in Austin. Not because of the big buildings or the giant Ferris Wheel. But there are lots and lots of people that look interesting to me within a mile of my own home...
I know photographers who are constantly on the go, getting ready to go on the "trip of a lifetime" or coming back from a trip of a lifetime, ready to spend weeks or months cataloging their images, applying metadata, working and re-working an image we've all seen thousands of times before from thousands of sources. What makes the photograph their own? What makes a sunset shot of mountains so special that we can tag it directly back to the source? To the artist? But it takes a "real" artist to develop a style (one that usually stems from a deep interest in a certain subject) which can make even the most boring and quiet home base seem mysterious and captivating.
Documentary photography always seems to me to be a very external view of the world while portraits, found art and still life, at least the good ones, are very much about human interaction, human habitation and collaboration. The world outside is static. The portrait is alive. And interpretive photograph is less dependent on location; on the sites. How many images of the Eiffel Tower can you really digest without becoming immune to the charm? How many Metro signs can you see before they become invisible to you?
I think travel, and travel workshops, are things we thought we needed in order to make good photographs but it turns out that what we really need a lot more is just a deep interest in a subject. Something we want to show the world in a way that we don't think anyone has done before. It can be a scene from a local highway intersection, a high school dance, a diner, a truck stop, or a carnival. A beautiful face, a mysterious room, or even a worn pair of tennis shoes. But the documentary landscape photograph captures only a slice of "what was there" while our tourist's eye takes in so much more. Better perhaps to be a camera-less tourist soaking up the experience than a travel photographer constantly trying to decide on the right lens, the right composition and the right moment to photograph a gelato stand --- instead of just ordering (and enjoying) some undocumented pistachio ice cream...
Do we need to have an almost demonic focus on archiving/saving/hoarding every shot we've ever taken? To tag it, metadata it, label it, catalog it and then archive it across a wide range of storage options? Really? Really?
You'd think we were building a skyscraper. A one hundred story building. And that brick after brick had to be geo-located, mapped and readily available at all times. Most of the stuff I shoot is crap. It's either technically boring or worse, it's of a boring subject handled in a boring way. All of that stuff is best dissolved back into the energy buckets of the universe. Except for a handful of super-star photographers most of us have maybe 100, if we're luckier, 200 great photographs to show after years of trying. Not great photos we shot today but the culmination of years of shooting. At least they are great to us. The rest could go away and no one would notice.
So much as been written about sorting, cataloging and archiving photos that you'd think we were back in 1985 selling stock photography into an endless market filled with big money. That train has sailed. That ship left the station years ago. And yet we tend to soldier on as if client YYY is going to call tomorrow and demand a copy of Bob Smith's 1993 headshot on a gray background. And that they might have a $10,000 purchase order to go along with the demand. Really?.... REALLY?
If your clients are paying for rights in perpetuity you might as well pack up their photos and send them along to the client for safe keeping. 95% of the stuff shot on assignment will never, ever be used again. Not by you and certainly not by anyone else. Exceptions? Famous actors, famous politicians and famous criminals (and in some cases you can "archive" the last two categories into one!). Those photos of have legs of their own. And, of course your personal portraits of family and friends are exempt from my general scorn. They probably have deep value to you and your loved ones.
Where did we get the (wretched) idea that all of our devices need to be connected to the internet? And why is sharing so vital that it has to be done immediately? Right now?
Thom Hogan has told us over and over and over again that the reason camera sales have fallen is that camera makers have done a poor job getting our cameras instantly connected to the web. I want to take a moment to thank the camera makers for NOT subjecting me to more internet exposure. My day is full enough without feeling as though I have to endlessly upload and share everything that comes whistling through my digital cameras. If Thom truly cared about your success in photography as opposed to his need to make his own workflow more "efficient" he would encourage all of us to slow down, re-visit work we've been shooting, take time to digest what we've done, consider how to improve it, develop a good strategy for post processing and then give some thought to both how to best show off the work but also how to preserve your rights to the images. Your control over your work.
It's wonderful that cellphones can post your half naked, fully drunk vacation photos on Instagram before you sober up enough to consider the future damage you may be doing to your "brand" in the process. That's the nature of the "always on" cellphone. But expecting your camera to be your new "junior computer" and communication hub is like expecting your lawn mower to do double duty mixing cocktails. It just isn't what cameras are particularly and intentionally designed for.
And an embarrassing reality for all the people of a certain "advanced age" about endlessly posting everything breathlessly on social media is that this kind of impulse to turn every tool into a bad "Swiss Army Knife" is like embracing CB Radio. Or wearing a dickie under your shirt. Shunning CDs for LPs. It's a bit absurd and misguided. Thom is super smart so I'm sure he has a clever rationale for wanting to post or transfer images right now! In the moment! But I'm equally sure that while he preaches it he's not the sort to throw stuff up willy-nilly on the web. It's like that offhand comment you made to your CEO which you instantly regretted. Once those photos are out there is hard to take them back.
I was part of a beta test team for the camera that caused Samsung to surrender and completely leave the camera market. It was called the Galaxy NX. It had a five inch rear screen. It "featured" bluetooth, wi-fi and cellular data capabilities. It ran on Android Jelly Bean OS. You could share images instantly on three different wireless protocols. It was a fucking disaster to shoot with. Just a train wreck of a camera. But sadly, one blessed with a really nice collection of lenses. It was so bad that it overwhelmed the next camera in the chute with it's wretchedness and convinced all the marketing/data people in the Samsung camera organization to run screaming out of the marketplace for interchangeable lens cameras for good.
The over-riding compulsion to make a camera that had as its lead feature the ability to share right now from anywhere was the very feature that brought their whole line of photographic tools to its knees. They never publicized their reason for leaving the market. I guess they hoped that Sony, Canon and Nikon would try to follow in their footsteps and it would bring them down too. Sharing the pain of a misguided product with their competitors. Misery loves company.
I have thoughts of taking apart my Leica SL2 camera and cutting out the parts that enable bluetooth. Kind of like all the disgruntled camera buyers out there that want to excise video from their DSLRs and mirrorless cameras.... I don't want communications gear planted in my camera whose biggest effect is to suck a battery dry in no time. I can wait till I get home to transfer images. Maybe, if I wait to post, good taste or self-preservation will prevail in the meantime. You can rationalize the idea of immediate back up to the cloud but really, isn't that what you all fought so hard to get two memory card slots in your cameras for? Back up?
You'll never hate communications tools in your camera as much as I do until you've brought a Samsung Galaxy NX up to your eye to shoot a once in a life time shot only to have the camera lock up while it downloads the latest update to Candy Crush. Which, YES, came preloaded on that camera. Which summed the utility of the "feature" succinctly.
It's all very chic to embrace film photography in 2023 but mostly because it's just a bit different. Kinda like platform shoes and Dingo boots making a comeback. Or black light posters. Or George Wallace (Oh wait....). Or Jello salads. Or Whoppers. Or rotary phones. Or carburetors. Or eyeglasses without anti-reflective coatings. Or Twinkies. Or Space Food sticks. Or big daisy decals for your car. Or over the counter stomach ulcer medicines. Or polyester shirts. Or Hawaiian shirts with graphics of giant plants on them.
We didn't shoot film in the golden age because we thought it was great. We used it because that's all we had. And as we were standing in line at the store to buy more and more film and then standing in line at the lab to drop the film off and pay more and more money to make it "work" we dreamed of a time in the future when cameras could make even better photographs for free. But I guess in an age where people are actually making coal burning pick up trucks I shouldn't be surprised that a small but loud percentage of people are making a point of "going retro" and using film cameras once again. Only, back when we did it we were paying a couple bucks a roll and now the cool kids are paying upwards of $15 bucks a roll for mediocre re-spooled Russian surplus movie film. And salivating over artifacts they'd never tolerate from a digital camera. Embarrassing? Yes.
I think of all this the same way I do about LPs. Those are big, flat, 12 inch diameter records which we used to listen to as they spun around on a record player or, in fancy terminology: turntables. As needles gouged into the grooves and progressively wore them down until the "artifacts" made these vinyl dinosaurs unlistenable. I can hardly wait to see the final step in the misguided embrace of "vinyl" and that would be the creation of a turntable which can be used to play records in a moving car. Maybe they can use the same image stabilization tech found in cameras to stabilize the record players in some really cool, old car. Like your dad's old Pontiac. Or something chic from AMC.
Using film when you can spend a lot less and get a better and more reliable image making machine is like using rough bark instead of toilet paper... Just sayin. Older doesn't make it better.
Reverting to film is one of those things that seems interesting in the first few moments of consideration and then, when you sober up you realize it's a stupid idea. Unless you never come to your senses but that would also be sad.
The best reason to collect old film cameras might be to rent them out as props for "period" movies about the last century.
I know I'll hear push back on this particular point...
How incredibly vital is it to print a Zone System enhanced black and white print on "archival" paper if you want to be considered a "serious photographer"?
This one just won't die. Imagine an older guy who grew up marveling at the works of Ansel Adams, Brett and Cole Weston, John Sexton and any of the legion of photographers championed by John Szarkowski who printed and showed in black and white, as he putters around his comfortable home in his pressed Dockers, wearing his Bass Weejun boat shoes, an LL Bean dress shirt under a nifty cardigan sweater. He glances about at all the books about photographers from the last century. He stops to pet his dog and then pours a nice hot cup of Sanka with a splash of Coffee Mate before easing himself into his mid-century, padded desk chair and muses about his ability to stop time. He's chosen to stop it, as far as photography goes, at the moment when he enjoyed the art of camera work the most. Maybe around 1970. Or maybe it's around 1980. To his mind nothing of consequence has happened in the world of "Fine Art Photography" since then. He knows this to be a "fact" because he hasn't seen (or wanted to see) any large monographs of black and white landscapes by any contemporary (current) photographers and, more importantly, he isn't aware of any gallery showings of contemporary artists dedicated solely to the upper middle class ideal of the immortal and majestic American landscape since, well, a long time. And especially not presented as large black and white prints.
This man is getting better and better at stopping time. He can do it with writing or music or photography. Even food. Or anything having to do with new technology. He's stopping time as a photographer at the point which big printed portfolios of black and white images were what galleries most cherished; at least what they cherished getting from photographers. He and his cohorts feel threatened by the progress of art. Their comfort lies in their surety that the work made during their period of relevance will stand as the marker for the "high point" of photography. If one can't produce a series of "monochrome" prints then, in their view, you have not done ART. This point of view, of course, does two things: It devalues any photographs that deviate from his litmus test out of hand. Color work, digital presentations, and even non-landscapes are suspect and rejected. And secondly, if the person is influential he helps to enforce a rigid and institutional (read: academy) adherence to a set of aesthetic measures that are passé and which lock out contemporary creative artists. But then again --- it's so comforting to be so firmly anchored in one's formative beliefs.
So, do you have to have a portfolio of majestic black and white prints on thick and luxurious double weight paper in order to be an "authentic" fine art photographer? I'm not buying it. Photograph has evolved. It continues to evolve. Most of it gets presented on screens. The issue of how to sell a photograph to a collector is a different issue altogether. Maybe the conservative gallery market still demands a physical product to sell but that doesn't mean any other kind of imaged photograph is cancelled or diminished.
Change is hard to accept. But giving up is a disservice to the art. If you are writing a book on the work of Andreas Fenninger I think it's valid to concentrate on his experiences, references and the period in which he worked. If your goal is to be conversant about photography as a living, growing medium I think it behooves one to aim a bit wider. A lot wider. An example I can think of would be our appreciation for work made by current fashion photographers. We (the general public) see this work in three (or more) ways. It's in industry focused magazines (both printed and electronic), it's shown in its commercial guise as poster and point of purchase graphics and, if the artist is significant enough or has a wide enough audience, it also exists in book form. We needn't collect the work as prints only to appreciate it and enjoy it and the artist doesn't need to make prints to sell in order to profit from their work.
Don't get me wrong. I'm taking a whole generation of photography "experts" to task, not one or two individuals. I am as guilty as anyone else in my reflexive appreciation of a nice black and white print. I have them scattered all over my office. But it's more a sign of my position in history than a demonstration of the power of the traditional print. And, I think you'll admit that the enjoyment of all kinds of current works underlays why we're scrolling through the image resources of the internet to begin with.
No, you don't need to work exclusively in the land of the big (or small) black and white print in order to be a serious photographer. You can go that way if you want to. We'll wave at your Buick Electra as you drive by. Wave "Hi!" to Fred Picker if you see him. Maybe we should all take a break from worshipping at the altar of the Zone System. Like a reset maybe.
Do I need a flash meter or light meter to be a real photographer?
You sure don't need to buy a separate one as the ones in your cameras are just fine. I spent about $600 on my last light meter. I pull it out a couple times a year in order to measure flash when I'm feeling overwhelmed by the speed, complexity and stress of a shoot. It's comforting since I come from a time when a meter was crucial and our 4x5 inch view cameras didn't have them. Now? You can click a frame and review it along with a histogram (and in really cool cameras you could look at the resulting image with a waveform graph overlaid). You'll get the information you need. Especially if you aren't trying to match a white background to a subject exposure in a studio with five or six lights.
Most of us are shooting available light or with some sort of simple lighting set up. We're hitting a time when getting a white background evenly lit is more or less meaningless. We can "select subject" in Lightroom or Photoshop and knock a background out to white with the click of a mouse. Gone are the days when tight exposure matching was absolutely critical in day to day work.
My favorite meter for simple stuff like stage lighting is an app on my iPhone. It gives me a waveform and a histogram and it's also a color meter. About $29. But truthfully? I rarely use it either. The EVFs and LCDs on my cameras are more than adequate for judging good exposure. Why buy and carry around more stuff?
No. You don't need a light meter to be a "real" photographer. Unless none of your cameras has a built in light meter or the capability of an instant image review. And unless you left your iPhone at home. But even with large format cameras we depended on Polaroid test shots far more than on what our meters told us.
I remember three or four photographers who got together for lunch back when we had time to get together for lunch. We were all shooting either non-metered Hasselblads or non-metered large format cameras. We started talking about meter accuracy. Everyone stopped and pulled their favorite meter out of their always with them camera bag and we all put them in the center of the table and metered. Not one of the fancy, top of the line meters agreed with any other meter. That was eye-opening. That's when Polaroid became my go to "preview."
Is image stabilization vital for photographic success?
This always makes me laugh. And I assume it brings a chuckle to owners of Leica M series rangefinders, large format photographers, Fuji X100V users, film users of medium format cameras, working professionals, etc. Cameras have been used effectively without built in image stabilization for about 170 years. Handheld cameras have made wonderful photos while bereft of (nanny) features like IBIS for as long as people have been shooting with handheld cameras. It can be a nice feature to have if you like to use long lenses handheld as the stabilization reduces movement in the viewfinder and makes composing easier. But vital? Hardly.
Use a faster shutter speed. Use a tripod. Learn better hand holding techniques. Or just accept that most images don't really need the extra stabilization. You don't need to give up IBIS to be successful but in most cases not having it isn't holding you back either. It's easy to experiment and see how well you can hold a camera and lens steady. And isn't the inexorable rush toward better and better high ISO performance as good argument against the "need" for IBIS. After all, a clean high res file allows for the use of a good shutter speed.
And most importantly, you understand the IBIS does nothing to stop subject movement/motion. Right?
Turn it off and try it for yourself. A fun experiment for people who are starting to feel they might benefit from more challenges in their own photography. It's the friction of process that actually makes this all so fun.
Do we really need voluminous forums and review sites in order to succeed at photography?
Well, you can enjoy making photographs and you can enjoy reading other people's opinions about making photographs (and which gear to do it with) but you can't do both at the same time. I think a ton of energy and time gets wasted on the silliest of arguments at male dominated photo sites. And silly theories arise (have you heard the one about the fashion model and "equivalence"?) which don't move the craft forward, they just provide dry fuel for raging fires of argument.
All the sites (except this one) are created and fanned for one purpose. That's to make money by selling opinions of advice and working as conduits for products being sold by camera makers, light makers and assorted gear makers. The forums exist to act like glue and keep potential (and highly targeted) customers coming back time and time again. It's all about building desire.
You say you've met and made some good friends online, at the forums. Really? When was the last time you had coffee with them? Did they help you move? Did you do a photo walk with them?
Everyone seems crestfallen by the sudden eradication of the world's largest argument site, DP Review. Maybe the universe is trying to tell a big group of highly contentious people to get off their ever growing behinds and be active participants in the craft they profess to enjoy so much instead of just "talking" about it over and over again.
And finally, Raw versus Jpeg.
They both work well. Use the one you are most comfortable with. If you have super sloppy technical skills you might prefer Raw. If you can actually expose correctly and can eyeball general WB (is it cloudy outside? Is the sun shining?) then enjoy the leisure and comfort of Jpeg. It doesn't really matter. Unless you want it to.
That's all I have for this morning. I made the images below by way of making sure the Voigtlander 40mm lens I got from B&H this week works well. It does. I like it. No arguments here.
