Look Harder. Sony 55mm f1.8 versus and old, cheap lens.

No matter what system I'm shooting I'm always looking for the one 50mm lens that will work with the system and just blow me away. I want something sharp, contrasty and a little punchy. And I want something that's still decent when I use it wide open. 

A few months ago I took a small chance and bought a Contax/Zeiss 50mm f1.7 lens. It's manual focus only and, when used with an adapter on any of my Sony cameras it refuses to give me exif info or even tell me what aperture it's chosen to use. But it is crispy and bright and all those things I mentioned I like in the paragraph just above. 

But rationally we are talking about a lens that is well over 20 years old. Certainly the optical magicians that work in the biz have made incredible improvements since then. Right? Well, that's certainly what I thought. My plan was to get by with the old, used Contax lens until I sorted out the right path with a "real" modern lens. My candidates were the Sony 55mm f1.8 (which gets uniformly rave reviews) along with the Zeiss Loxia and the Rokinon 50mm f1.5 (or Cine t - 1.5). The best way to get this all figured out is to play with the options. Put them on the camera you expect to use them with and shoot some images. I immediately discounted the Rokinon because of its size. Too big and too heavy for a fun, walking around town lens. The Loxia is in short supply and while it's the right size and all Zeiss-magicky the designers seem to have taken a traditional planar design and put it in a new package for a new generation. The specs seem to indicated to me that this is pretty much the exact same formulation that was used in the Contax lens I have in house. At any rate I balked at paying $1,000 for a lens that might not be quite as sharp as the Sony 55mm and might just have exactly the same performance as the lens I'm dragging around right now. 

I narrowed my choices down and decided to try the Sony 55mm and to gauge it against the ancient, Contax 50mm f1.7. I should never have done this. The comparison burst my bubble. Here I thought all those optical engineers were making vast and exciting technical progress but all the while they are trying to design lenses that are cheaper to make and can be brought up to 1980's performance levels by adding an almost lethal dose of in-camera and in-processing digital lens corrections. Shoot raw and turn off the lens correction in Lightroom and you'll see that the Sony 55mm vignettes like a mad bastard and also has some burly distortion. All of this is corrected in post processing (either in camera or in computer) but it does take a toll on the corners. You've probably noticed nearly every lens review lately talks about the "high center sharpness and soft corners."  The current lens makers get to cut corners on the actual construction of the new lenses while leaning on their computer programmers to kinda fix the stuff that might bother you. It's a compromise between ultimate performance and dollars charged. 

When I compared raw files with the borrowed Sony and the in-house Contax 50mm f1.7 I was pretty amazed to find that the older lens is much better corrected before hitting the computer enhancement routine. Less work has to be done. The older lens is at least as sharp and has smoother tonal gradients  to boot. The corners are actually better. 

There is a lot of exhilarating lens inventory out in the wild and all you need in order to get the value from it is an inexpensive adapter for a mirrorless camera. After having made this hands on comparison I was cured of my intention to spend more money to buy the latest and greatest. Instead, I went to KEH.com and looked for more old lenses. I love the Contax 50mm lens I have right now but the focusing ring is a just a bit underdamped for me and you already know of my love for the idea of identical back-ups. I found a "like new" copy of the Contax 50mm f1.7 lens and I ordered it right away. I learned my lesson the hard way a few years ago. I wrote a column about some piece of gear I was getting ready to buy and the markets went nuts before I could get my order in. It cost me actual money. My second copy of the Contax 50mm f1.7 is already on its way here.....

I was out shooting today. I needed it after a full week of shooting for clients. Here's what I got with the $150 dollar Contax lens and a $19 adapter. All taken with my favorite camera of the moment, the Sony A7ii...

Photographing small products at high magnification with the Rokinon (Samyang) 100mm f2.8 Macro lens. Tight on White.

The Old State Capitol Building in Baton Rouge, La.

The photo above is just for decoration. It was taken with an iPhone. It really has nothing to do with this blog post. Just thought I'd provide a disclaimer for the painfully literal...

It's been a raucous week for me. We spent the first three days in what ultimately turned out to be a successful photographic assignment in Baton Rouge. We hightailed it back home on Weds., by rental car, and hit the Austin airport in the middle of the night to pick up my car. I needed to get back so I could do pre-production for the job we did in Georgetown, Texas today. That and needing to be home to instruct the tree service that was scheduled to come by and thin out the jungle surrounding our place...

Today was spent photographing tiny ampoules for a subsidiary of Merck. It's a follow on to a shoot we did nearly two years ago and much has changed since then. On the first go-round I was using an early Fiilex LED unit and a Sony a900 camera, along with a Sony 50mm macro lens to do the work of shooting these tiny glass bottles against white. This time I used a Sony A7ii and my newest acquisition, a Rokinon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens. The (much brighter and equally well color corrected lighting came from two of my CooLED lighting units used in Photoflex soft boxes. The EVF enabled camera made shooting tight on white less of a challenge and much more of a pleasure.

Let's first talk about selecting the right background. When you shoot in tight any type of seamless paper is to ungainly to set up and too prone to deformation from humidity, etc. I prefer to use a stout gauge of Bristol board because the surface is very smooth and the (less UV brightened) quality of the white surface is visually superior while being physically stable. I'm using the #700 pound version. You could buy a large tablet of good Bristol stock from Bienfang or Strathmore and it would be more than big enough for your shots. I prefer the 30 by 40 inch sheets because they are easier to hand from a cross stand at table height. Before every white background macro shoot I head to Michael's Art Supply store and stock up. I bring multiple sheets in case we need to substitute in a clean sheet. 

The lighting is largely from a 24 by 36 inch Photoflex softbox illuminated by one of my big LED lights. Used close in we were able to stay at ISO 100 and use f16.5 at something like 1/15th of a second. The hell with diffraction, we needed the depth of field...

But the real story today is about the new lens. It's from Rokinon which is one of the nameplates used by Samyang for lenses marketed in the U.S.A. I bought it about a week ago and today was my first opportunity to put it through its paces. I brought along a Nikon 55mm f2.8 Micro lens as a back-up but the Rokinon was so easy to use and so sharp that the Nikon never came out of the bag. 

We weren't shooting at 1:1. It was more in the range of 1:2 to 1:4. The lens feels great and is a polished piece of manufacturing. People complain about Rokinon lens hoods but I was able to attach and use mine with no difficulties and it held in place well. 

I had the lens attached to the Sony A7ii and I've come to the conclusion that the A7ii is as sharp a camera as anyone, even the owner of an A7r2, could ever want. The AA filter is weak and the sensor is pretty darn capable. I am still thinking that the 24 megapixel sensor size in a full frame camera is more or less the optimum choice for most people, myself included. The icing on the cake is that the dynamic range is very comparable to what I get from the A7R2, which is one of the highest rated DR cameras around. Considering that I picked up a used A7ii for under $1200 I am amazed at the level of performance the camera delivers. Even more impressed when using it in a macro, studio setting. 

With the Nikon D810 I could use the live view mode but the refresh rate made it sub-optimal in available light situations. With the A7ii I was able today to shoot down to a quarter second and see a great electronic viewfinder image. The A7 series cameras are the perfect tools for shooting in macro settings. 

I was shooting on white and wanted the white to still have a tiny bit of detail. In this way I could assure myself of preserving the highest of the highlights in the images. I set the zebra function to give me the wacky zebra lines right at 100% (or 255) this meant I could easily make perfect exposures by lowering the shutter speeds until the zebras appeared and then back off by one third of a stop; just enough for the zebras to disappear. Then I knew that my white background was 1/3 of stop under 255 (or "blow-out"). Can't imagine an easier way to keep tabs on exposure!

I was using a manual focus lens for today's job because it just makes sense when shooting non-moving macro images. I enabled the focus peaking (I prefer yellow) and here's how I would proceed: I'd compose the shot using the finder and then using the two axis level on the back finder. Once I had the comp roughed I would hit the trash button which, in shooting mode, I have configured as the zoom/magnification control. Once I zoomed in on the image at 11x I'd rock the focus ring to get the focus peaking indications exactly right. No more Canon/Nikon back focusing adventures!

The combination of the right lens with the right focal length, the practicality and efficiency of the EVF, the quick confirmation of exposure via zebras and the ability to be sure you got what you wanted in focus, made this particular shoot much more efficient than the same basic shoot done with an old school, mirrored camera. 

I was going to say that the star of the day was the Rokinon 100mm f2.8 (which focuses down to 1:1) but in truth it was the blend of the Rokinon with the workaday, mid-brow Sony that made mis smile as I lined up one and a half inch ampoules and photographed them both singly and in small groups. 

The Rokinon 100mm Macro is about $550 while the OSS, AF Sony 90mm G lens is right around $1,000, but I've owned enough macro lenses to know that I'll probably be using them on tripods and also manually focusing them. I've been burned too many times by the slow focus acquisition of autofocus lenses across brands...and image stabilization isn't usually necessary for tripod mounted gear.

In my book, for my money, the third party lens does exactly what it is supposed to do. How do I know? Well, I get paid to do this and I've done it for a long time. When I look at my 27 inch screen, at an image from this system, and I can feel my pulse quicken a bit, I know I'm looking at something that's more than just the ordinary image from an ordinary lens. This one is one of the best bargains around. I'd buy one again in a heartbeat.

Next up...looking with renewed interest at Rokinon's 50mm DS Cine lens. Each successful encounter with the brand just pushes me to want more...