What lens makes your eye happy? What's your "desert island" lens?

Count me in as a 150mm user on a medium format camera or an 85-90mm user on 35mm format or a 60mm user on a APS-C camera. When I have one of those optics on the camera everything just falls right into place. Stick an ultra-wide angle on my camera and I just kind of fall apart. But I know that everyone is different. I am curious to know exactly which focal length gets your motor running......and why. Can someone explain to me the charm of the 14mm (on full frame) focal length? What's the deal with the 28mm? Personally hate that focal length more than any other.

Can you please leave a comment and tell me what lens makes your photography tick? Today, zoom lenses don't count. Let's see if you can commit to single focal length...

I like this lens because it's good and crappy at the same time.

For a couple thousand bucks you can get a pretty good zoom lens from Canon, Nikon, Sony and most of the other camera makers. For five to ten thousand dollars you can get a really good lens from Leica. And when I say really good I'm using the most common criteria = painfully sharp. But legions of Holga and Lomo shooters, as well as generations of photographic artists, continually show us that sharp only really counts in razor blades and show-off-tography. No one really cares about ultimate sharpness if the content of a photograph is compelling or thought provoking. We're mostly interested in sharp if we're trying to make a catalog style image of a product.  I have my carefully chosen product lenses but they're not always my first choice. In fact, if I'm not trying to make a faithful image to sell something I could really care less about absolute, nut-crunching sharpness.

Maybe that's why I now have a bit of a soft spot in the camera bag of my heart for a disturbing little lens that Sony stole from Minolta, rebadged and then abandoned, like an unwanted pet. I thought about it when a recent, churlish commenter took me to task for doing what I do best....buying lenses. I had a rationale when I bought the Sony orphaned lens and I gave it but I didn't know someone would expect me to defend my choices in detail. 

But here goes. I bought the Sony 24-105mm f3.5 to f4.5 lens a couple of weeks ago for a small amount of money. The lens was new at the store but had been there for about four years. That's how long ago it had been discontinued by Sony. It's a little gem. About the size of a typical 50mm 1.8 but much weightier. It came with the typical, wide angle capable, petal shaped lens hood. And a box. And a warranty card.

I bet you think this is pretty outrageous vignetting for a lens that's supposed to be designed for full frame, right? But wrap your head around this, all three images in this article were done with the Sony a57 which is an APS-C (or "cropped frame") camera. So the vignetting at f4 and 24mm is astoundingly bad. Really miserable. Yes, it clears up as you stop down a bit but who stops down anymore?

Another attribute of this marvelous optical system is it's blasé effort at being sharp.  If you do everything right and the winds are blowing from the northeast you can see vestiges of sharpness scattered through the frame....just.  But most of the sharpness is obscured by the flatness inherent in the product. And by flat I don't mean it's a lens from the pancake family of lenses. I mean that it's pretty lackadaisical about showing up with much in the way of contrast.

So, to recap: Vignettes like a bastard. Sharp as jello. Snappy as the worn elastic in the waistband of a fat man's underwear. But small and gem-like.  What's not to like?

So I tossed it on the front of my cheapest Sony camera and tooled around downtown. Truth be told I was so casual about shooting with that camera and lens combination that I didn't realize that the camera was set to manual focus for the first half of my walk. But I learned a fun fact. Every time you turn your Sony off and then turn it back on again the camera resets the lens to infinity. Cool. No lost shots for me.

I'm being a bit flip but I guess my point is that for my fun work the lens isn't really a big "make it or break it" thing. And I'm kidding when I say it's no sharper than kleenex. Like almost every modern lens, stopping down two stops from maximum sharpens it up enough.

I guess after having owned Zeiss and Leica glass for decades part of the appeal of the Sony 24/105 is that my expectations are lowered. So I'm constantly being surprised when the lens turns out to be better than I thought it was. When it hits above its weight class.

On another level I'm having fun figuring out how to incorporate the "weaknesses" of the lens into some sort of art. The vignetting doesn't bother me at all when I shoot portraits with the lens. It's kinda fun. And the more pedestrian level of sharpness is actually rather nice for some kinds of portraits.

Over the course of the infiltration and overwhelming conquest of film by digital imaging we've become so f***ing binary in our assessment of images that it makes me tired. We apply manufacturing metrics instead of looking (as we should) through the lens of "art." The dumbing down of image making brought with it a simplification of the appreciation of our art. Now instead of relating to content and concept the vast majority of new adherents analyze images based on flatness of field, sensor noise and the appearance of sharpness to the exclusion of all other parameters.

To dissect a joke is to kill it. 

What this lens reminds me is that getting to the heart of something is much more important than struggling to get to a sterile sort of perfection. It's okay to have faults. Both for humans and for lenses.

Never before have so many boring photographs been so damn sharp.

I'm learning to turn up the "vivid" control in my jpegs and then yank in some "detail" control in post processing. The lens will take care of itself.

Funny, I wrote about this nearly a year ago, but I did a comparison between some modern m4:3 lenses and their counterparts (Olympus Pen half frame lenses) from forty+ years ago and I found that, with the exception of contrast (easily correctible, or should I say, "changeable"), the older lenses were just as proficient as the "cult" lenses of right now. But they were more subtle and layered. Nothing's really changed. Only our perception that somehow perfection might be accessible.  Suckers.

Lamb Pops.

This is another dish from our shoot at Garrido's Restaurant several weeks ago. Rear lit by LED panels through a diffusion scrim and filled in the front by large, pop up reflector panels. Three lamb chops served as an appetizer.

Camera: Sony a99. Lens: 70-200mm 2.8G.

Food presentation is really an art. I'm not thinking just in terms of how we photograph various dishes but also how the presentation of food in fine dining adds to the perception of value and the enjoyment of the moment.

Plating food is part of every restaurant kitchen's performance art. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the quality (and quantity) of food, how it's provisioned on a plate, and the price of the dish. At an inexpensive restaurant I often find that the emphasis is on quantity with little regard for the disposition of the food. I recently ate a #1 combination plate at a local, blue collar, Tex Mex restaurant and the least expensive ingredients, rice and refried beans, were piled high. The enchiladas threatened to come over the edge of the plate and a massive, crisp taco sat, gargoyle-like in the intersection of the ingredients, with yellow cheese spilling out and melting into the hot rojas sauce that drenched the enchiladas. Don't get me wrong, everything tasted great and there was way too much food to finish, but the plate was over-stocked chaos. A Jackson Pollock painting of food.

Last night I had dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel's Treo Restaurant and the contrast with the local Tex-Mex presentation was vivid. My Caesar salad was linear and compact, spare and elegant and fitted to a plate that seemed to have been created just for this heightened expression of.....long leaves of lettuce. Demure and perfectly sized long leaves of lettuce.

The two cheese and beef enchiladas from the Tex-Mex restaurant would have dwarfed the spare fillet of beef that came out on its own plate at the Four Seasons, topped with a designed sprinkling of savory herbs, elegant and lonely. One spotting drizzle of reduction making a counterpoint on the stark, white plate.

When I post processed the Lamb Pops, above, it struck me that the plate design was in the middle of "no man's land." Somewhere between the two extremes.  It wasn't spare and ephemeral like our new century redux of nouvelle cuisine but it wasn't forward and ample like our popular regional dishes. The salad said, "maybe." While the drizzle of sauce in front of the lamb looks disproportionally generous. No middle ground. Or resolutely only middle ground.

There's no right or wrong way but each plate sent me a different message. One said we'll totally feed you. One said we'll whet your appetite and massage your taste buds. And the most elegant presentation said, "you can afford to stop by someplace and grab a burger on the way home. We're not going to insult you by putting much on your plate. It might monkey around with our design integrity."

The fewest elements are easiest to shoot. The ample plates tend to be tougher. But when I'm really hungry I know where I'm pointing the car. Can we have more tortilla chips please?

Just a note: As Ian Fleming's character says about his fictional life in one of the famous books, "This life reads better than it lives." I would say the Lamb Pops taste even better than they shoot. Yes. I ate all three of them as soon as the art director approved the shot. Yum.

Portrait.

Belinda looks up from sketching something on her sketch pad. I take the photograph. She goes back to sketching. I go back to the book I was reading. That's it. That was photography. A muse. Amuse. 

The value of photography is in being able to look back in time. My photography records the arc of my existence and of those around me.

I shot this image 34 years ago in a little house on Longview Ave. It's a portrait of my then girlfriend. Five years later we decided to get married. A number of years after that we decided to become parents. Now we've decided to grow old together.

All along the way I've taken photographs of this woman. I can see in the images that she's grown older but to me, no less beautiful than the day that I took this photograph. I suspect that I'll feel that way twenty years from now and, if the fates allow, even longer.

Over the course of the 34 years I've taken hundreds of thousands of photographs of other beautiful women, products, scenes, food and exotic locations. None of them has been an improvement either in seeing or in the technical process of recording compared with this image and other contemporaneous images.

In many ways this image belies the myth that we all continue to grow and learn as photographers. In my mind clear and unobstructed seeing is the thing that allows us to like or dislike an image, not the degree of sharpness or the breadth of tonal range.

We grow and learn as people while we age and we become more sophisticated in our ability to obscure our honest seeing with layers and layers of the mythology we share about image making and we give too much power to stories that celebrate the heroic efforts of image makers when all that is really called for is to either selfishly wish to stop time and embrace a moment forever, or a wish to honestly share something achingly beautiful with the world at large.

We seem to create new ways of doing things just to bolster the idea that we must work hard to do art that means anything. And truthfully, the art that means the most to us on a very human level just requires us to look across the expanse of six or seven feet at a subject that rivets us and holds us captive and to click one button.

Not so hard. Not so heroic. Not so nuanced. But maybe the difficulty comes when we try to make things perfect in every regard. When I am told that a new technique or a new material will bring my images one step closer to perfection I remember the idea of Japanese artists: it is the small imperfection that makes a work complete.

As I've raced toward the ever moving target of perfection I'm created more and more semi-opaque layers that make really seeing the subject in the photos I want to take harder and harder.

Clear seeing endures. Clear feelings make finding the people or things you want to photograph much easier. But it's the need to photograph something that makes the work wonderful. Not perfect, just wonderful.

Do we begin the search for technical perfection when we lose our nascent and direct connection to the things that bring us visual joy? Is it our first, uncritical connection that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing?

I can't remember what camera I used to take this but I can conjecture that it was an old Yashica twin lens camera. I can't remember what light I used but I'm pretty sure it was the one, lone battered, used Novatron flash and a yellowing umbrella that one of my more advanced photographer friends had tossed aside. But I remember looking into Belinda's eyes and needing to make a photograph so that I'd always have that memory preserved in a way that would allow me to go back to it again and again for pleasure and strength.

That's what the value of photography is to me. And that's all. All about the gear? You've got to be kidding...

hyperventilating about photography. don't pass out.

Just a note to refine our understanding about the Visual Science Lab blog site. We write about anything that I'm interested in that has to do with photography, video, art and literature or life in general. The blog is free to read. We currently accept comments but moderate them on an ongoing basis. We do not directly sell products on the site nor are we paid by any manufacturer for mentions of their products within the blog. If we write about a product we are either acknowledging a new product that we think alters the course of the industry (even if only slightly) or it's a product that we've purchased or requested from the maker for testing and we've used it in commercial and personal photographic applications enough to report accurately on the results that we got. Your readership is never contingent on purchasing products represented in links embedded in the articles or supporting any of the manufacturers whose products I choose to write about. You are all grown ups. You get to decide what you want to buy and when.

The links are there to serve a commercial purpose. I receive a small percentage of the sale of products from Amazon where my link initiated a reader's visit to Amazon. The fee that Amazon pays me does not increase the cost of the product to the buyer. The fees I've received so far constitute a negligible percentage of my income.

While we will continue to provide links for people who enjoy what we write here I find it important to mention that the vast majority of articles I write are not product specific and are about the processes or the way we approach making images. A large number of articles are general interest articles that are relevant to both film and digital shooters.

For all the people who protest that we write too much about gear and that their interests would be better served if I only wrote philosophical articles the reality is that the single most popular article, by far, that I've published here was a review of a mid-priced mirrorless camera, the Olympus EPL-2. It has ten times the pageviews of my absolute favorite articles like, Lonely Hunter, Better Hunt. The "gear" articles drive readership. When I resist writing about any gear whatsoever the precipitous decline of readership (within days) is breathtaking. It's truly a case of gear subsidizing non-gear articles.

Similarly, any time I write about microphones or video rigs or video processes the readership numbers dive off the diving board into a largely empty pool. But I am interested in video and motion and I'll continue to explore that.

People are tremendously invested in their idea of what photography is all about. From time to time I get someone writing or commenting that I'm doing it all wrong. But the secret is that there is no "all wrong" in the arts, even the injection moulded "plastic" arts. You've been invited along for a ride in my own introspective and eccentric online journal about photography. There's no hidden agenda. There's no secret handshake. I don't know all the answers. But neither do you.

I like some of the mistakes I've made in creating photographs.

Only one of three flashes fired. The sync speed on the old Pentax 67 was 1/30th of a second and I was hand holding the camera.  One side is over exposed while the other side is wildly underexposed. When I tried to print the negative nothing really worked. And yet, years later I've realized that I really like the image. It has an energy that perfect portraits rarely achieve.

I'm glad I didn't have Polaroid or instant review because in my pursuit of "correct technique" I would surely have thrown away the image and moved on. I have many technically correct images that are much less interesting to me. The camera doesn't have to be an exacting Xerox machine in order to make your own art. Not always.