I guess the point I was trying to make in this morning's post was that lens design and, more importantly, lens implementation, just hasn't come so far that all the old, film era lenses have been horribly obsoleted. Not just yet.
I shoot a lot with the Voightlander 50mm APO Lanthar lens which is reputed to be one of the finest 50mm lenses yet brought to market for use on M mount cameras. I've owned lenses like the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens and the Panasonic S-Pro 50mm f1.4. Shot with the 50mm f2.0 APO Summicron (might be the absolute best 50mm ever....) and the Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm f1.4. Those are all great lenses. They are all great examples of just how far lens makers can go in tweaking things all the way out at the margins. The very edge of the frame. At the very widest aperture.
But...for day to day work are they really, really that much better than lenses we had at our disposal say...45 or 50 years ago? After all, we were able to put a man on the moon back in 1968 but we seem to have fallen back a bit since then. Could the same be true for the actuality of 50mm lenses? Not the theory of modern lenses? Can consumer lenses designed to cover 35mm and provide enough resolution for what many suppose is a lower target perform adequately on a high resolution, digital sensor?
I thought it might be fun to find out. If I used a 50mm Canon FD lens from the early 1970s could I get reasonably good photographs on a current camera? Could I get great detail? Could I get good enough correction to obviate effects of vignetting? Would an ancient lens have the snap and contrast of the much more expensive --- latest and great contemporary lenses? The lenses designed to show their value on 50 and 60 megapixel sensors....
Um. Yeah. The 50mm lenses from the 1970s and 1980s are standouts. The Canon 50mm f1.4 SSC. The Nikon 50mm f1.4 Ais. The Contax 50mm f1.4. And even the smaller Olympus OM 50mm f1.4. These were and are great lenses, capable of great things. You just have to use them well.
I think a lot of assumptions about the maximum quality older film lenses were capable of was tainted by operator error. And the limitations of the support gear. We used them on cameras with more primitive finders. We couldn't punch in and fine focus our images. We often didn't have the latest prescriptions for our glasses; if we had to wear glasses. There was absolutely no image stabilization in cameras or lenses. And I think many photographers handheld their cameras, shot a brick wall with the lens wide open at its maximum aperture and blamed any softness in the frame on the lens. Easier and less painful than admitting you didn't know what the fuck you were doing or you had such hubris that you felt a tripod for a lens test was only for lesser humans. But you could have been wrong on so many counts...
I spent today's sunny afternoon walking down the sidewalks on South Congress Ave. I tried to do this yesterday but it was the last weekend of SXSW and I think everyone was bored by the meager offerings of this year's show and headed out on Sunday afternoon to shop on our defacto shopping street. I couldn't find a parking place yesterday within a mile of the place. But, today? All clear. Easy/Peasy.
I used the Canon 50mm lens on a Leica SL2 body running the latest firmware. I engaged the in-body image stabilization. I set the Auto-ISO so the lowest shutter speed was 1/250th of a second. When shooting in full sun my shutter speeds ranged from 1/1,000th of a second to 1/8,000th of a second. Fast enough to freeze most motion. I shot Jpegs so I wouldn't be tempted to let the A.I. DeNoise features clean up any file messes I might have made. And I walked around and shot stuff that would show the lens's potential for high detail, fine detail, bright colors, great tonalities and perkiness.
All the files were shot at f4.0 or f5.6. You can punch in a bit in the gallery but the images here are limited to 3200 pixels wide. Bigger than that and Blogger gets bitchy.
I can't speak for your standards but to my mind the ancient 50mm Canon is as relevant today as ever. And even with an FD to L mount adapter the package is smaller and lighter than just about any of the super 50mm lenses we have available to use today. I also mentioned this morning that my cost of the lens was about $75. All in all, a great deal. I need to use it more and more often.
Be sure to click on the images to see them 3200 pixels wide. You owe it to yourself to become a believer in the stellar performance of ancient tech. It's real.
Being the jerk I am, just ask anyone, I have enjoyed making better images with shitty gear than those made by the gear elitists. A cool expressive eye catching image is worth way more to me than an ultra sharp gee wiz doesn't say anything image any day. As far as cameras are concerned I have almost always been 1 to 2 generations behind the bleeding edge. While I have really well thought of lenses, I love using my old Nikkor, FD and Pentax ST lenses for day to day image making. Many of these old lenses, as you have shown, preform very well and in many cases just as good as the latest whiz bang gear. Of course when you are client facing, having the best gear is a must. Maybe not so much for the performance, but for your "image". Not having been in that world for some time, I get to be the crazy old grandpa of photography. I try REALLY hard to keep my zipper up.
ReplyDeleteKirk, your images are as usual fun to look at. All technical stuff aside, they are just what they are suppose to be. Entertaining, well constructed, great colour and when you want it, sharp.
It's funny, my Panasonic FF S5MkIIx is my least used camera. It's fancy glass suffers from depression and feelings of inadequacy since I like to use old, obsolete manual focus crap from the 70's and 80's. The odd Russian lens finds it's way into the mix as well.
The current play toy is an Olympus OMD-1 Mk1 I think. One of the most frustrating cameras I have ever had the displeasure of using. But the images that come out of it! I see my Leica M 240 is winking at me. The seductive little tramp!! I think I will have to take her out for a bit next week.
Eric