I had the opportunity recently to use four of the new Leica M mount "ZM" lenses from Carl Zeiss, Oberkochen. The guy who made the oppportunity possible had his Zeiss dealership yanked out from under him and is no longer associated with the brand, even after he'd gone to considerable trouble to skilfully promote that brand and its products, so I'm going to have to figure out some other way to repay him. (By the bye, this was neither a kind nor a smart move on Zeiss's part, given my friend's expertise and influence. I might even go so far as to assume it was a bit of a nasty business, or at least had a bit of that feel to it; but then, we all know that hidebound, centuries-old companies—would it be hideously xenophobic to say "especially German ones"? My experience is limited—can be as cantankerous to deal with as superannuated battle-axe maiden aunts. Watch yer topknot, fellow travelers.)
Of the four lenses, the 50mm ƒ/2—its official title is "Zeiss Planar T* 2/50 ZM"—was not the glamor lens, so I used it the least and it's taken me a while to catch up to it. It is indeed somewhat un-flashy in nature. I do think it's permissable—or at least not wholly self-indulgent—to write about it, because it is a digital lens now too: it fits on the Epson RD-1 with the same angle of view as a 75mm on 35mm, and also on the hot new Leica M8, where it assumes the angle of view of a 65mm on 35mm—short teles in both cases. It can also be used on a variety of film cameras, including all M-mount Leicas; several Voigtländers, including the R3A and R3M, which are the ones that have 1:1 finders; and also on its own companion "Zeiss Ikon" [sic], the ill-named new super-RF that is the result of a collaboration between Zeiss and Cosina. (This lens is also fabricated by Cosina, for Zeiss, under license.)
It sometimes happens in the world of high-end audio—another locus of unremitting and even counter-productive connoisseurship—that stereo systems most valued by "deep" connoisseurs aren't immediately terribly impressive to neophytes. The reason is that they aren't designed to go for cheap thrills and superficial appeal. To satisfy the high-strung "golden ears" of the expert, they need to achieve hyper-competence within a framework of carefully adjudged balance, with no particular property spotlit or disguised. That description also applies to what I've come to like in lenses.
I mentioned earlier that I have distinct tastes and preferences. To name just a few of these: I tend to like lenses that are optimized for sharpness across the entire frame, as opposed to concentrating their best sharpness in the center of the field; that are optimized for a taking distance of less than infinity (the traditional value is 50•ƒ, which is fine); that do not distort more than, say, 1%; that tend to equalize their performance up and down the aperture range, as opposed to having a more distinct optimum aperture at the expense of the extremes; that have a marginal amount of low-level veiling glare (why? It can serve to, in effect, "pre-expose" the lowest shadow values with black-and-white film) but as little ghosting as possible; that "masks" micro-resolution with robust large-structure contrast, which I think looks a little more natural than lenses with the ultimate in resolution (anyway, it goes better with my favorite films, none of which are high-resolution). Those are a few of the major ones.
And then there's
bokeh. The term is a general Japanese word that roughly translates to "fuzzy," and that has a number of different connotations in Japanese. Applied to lenses it merely means optical blur, or the blur of imaged objects away from the plane of best focus (as opposed, of course, to blur caused by either the subject or the camera moving). Technically, there is no "good" or "bad" bokeh. Subjectively, there is, but it's a matter of taste as to which is what. Some people don't care about bokeh; I do. Some people don't take pictures with appreciable amounts of bokeh in them; I do. Some people just don't look at it; I do. Some people have catholic tastes and are accepting of various types of blur rendering; I'm not one of them.
You also can't really generalize about the bokeh of any one lens. Well, you can, but only in the way that one or two MTF charts describe a lens's behavior—pretty well as far as it goes, but in no way is it a
complete description. Bokeh changes with aperture, focus distance, which side of the plane of focus the imaged object is on, and how far the imaged object is from the plane of best focus, and what the imaged object looks like (mainly, but not exclusively, in terms of tonal values and contrast). This describes an effectively infinite range of possible conditions, meaning that all tests are representative and all descriptions are shorthand approximations.
The kind of blur rendering I like in a lens can be vaguely described as the soft "bright-core" type, but soft in the sense of cloudlike rather than fuzzy, resembling lenses from before, say, the 1960s or early '70s, or whenever it was that overcorrected spherical aberration became the norm.
I haven't used every 50mm that exists, but I've tried about 50 of them now and have owned more than 15...and that's more than most people have tried, you've got to admit. What follows is only a provisional decision, and I don't want to be held to it absolutely. Neither, for reasons enummerated earlier, do I want to have to defend my thesis in a court of opinion or hold verbal prizefights with other self-appointed experts. However, I think that (for me, personally, subjectively, given my tastes and values in terms of connoisseurship...you've got all that already, right?), the Zeiss ZM 50mm ƒ/2 is the new winner. It takes pride of place as the best 50mm I know of. I'd have to use it more to be sure, but it looks that way.
I was suprised by this. In construction, it is simple, and resembles (but is not identical to) another of my very favorite 50s, the Konica Hexanon-M 50/2. But its design also resembles some lenses I don't like very much. Also, I must say I'm surprised to like a
Zeiss 50 quite as much as I like this one...I don't normally care for Zeisses (in fact, a couple of the weak points of the Contax Planars were too glaring for me to live with, and were what drove me to Pentax, years ago).
I can tell you that if I shot with the Epson RD-1 or the Leica M8, this would be my short tele (in my world, the shorter your short tele, the cooler you are). And if you care about a) great lenses in general and 50s in particular, b) film cameras, and c) rangefinders, you are three, three, three times a minority amongst photographers. But in case you care, this Zeiss is a very pleasant surprise—a bit of a hidden treasure, I think.
If you own this lens and have pictures taken with it posted online, please leave links in the comments—I'd be interested to see some of what you're doing with it.
This is the third of three related posts, in descending order (anti-blog style)—continuing from the two posted directly above.Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON
Daguerreotype of the Hudson River School painter Asher Durand
I'm just curious as to whether anyone within the sound of my voice is actually shooting with this new lens, or knows of any online info. The only real review I've seen is this one.
So, finally, I've gotten what I always asked for. I think the people in charge of such things are little elves with wicked senses of humor, though, because, of course, now, I'm shooting with reduced-sensor-size cameras, and what I'd really like is the same lens in a 35mm equivalent (there is one, but we're back to ƒ/2.8 again), and which covers 22x16mm instead of 35mm. And, while my argument was always that ƒ/2 makes a good size and weight compromise for this focal length, wouldn't you know that the new ZF version is, er, bloody huge: it's 100g heavier than even the Leica R version (which is built like a tank and was the previous size outlier for the specification) and only 69g lighter than the old Contax 35mm ƒ/1.4, which was an enormous lens. You know what they say: oh well.
Window/Light
Sally Mann, Jessie Bites, 1985
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Baker boy in Urfa, 2004
Short Take: Turkish film director, from Istanbul, who shot an extensive series of panoramic photographs all over Turkey during the past four or five years, mostly while scouting locations for his latest film. The dramatic, beautiful photographs have been exhibited in important venues and have earned extensive and intense praise from both critics and the viewing public. He calls the series "Turkey Cinemascope."
What about his films? We haven't seen one, but his latest—the one he was shooting when he took these pictures—is called Iklimler (in English, Climates) (2006). Also Distant
(2002), Clouds of May (1999), The Small Town (1998), and Koza (1995).
The Village, 2004
You probably haven't heard this, because it's hardly been mentioned on the web at all, but Canon has come out with a successor to its top pro camera. It's called the EOS-1D Mark III. It appears to be a careful and thorough top-to-bottom revising of the Mark II, with no major changes or new design directions but lots of refinements and detail changes. The best summary of what the new camera offers can be found at Rob Galbraith's site, which is also hosting a .PDF download of Canon's excellent 63-page white paper on the camera's design and function.
Carl Weese, Huston Smith
'Kay, I'm being kinda snarky again. (If you haven't noticed, "snarky" has replaced "curmudgeonly" as my favorite self-description. I don't even really know what it means, but it reminds me of a "Muttley snigger." I got that from Cotty.)
As fas as I'm concerned—just looking at Canon v. Nikon here, not considering outside contenders (which have much narrower slices of the pie chart anyway)—Nikon dominates the lower reaches of the DSLR market. The D40/D80/D200 trio provide the consumer with the best range of choices and the best cameras in each of their respective price ranges. True, the Canon XTi is a great little camera, for people down on that end of the market who prefer, for whatever reason, to shoot Canon. It falls between the D40 and the D80. Translation: you want cheaper than the XTi? Nikon's got it (the D40). You want better than the XTi? Nikon's got it (the D80). And the D200 is der Übercamera in its price segment. Why does Canon have to have a model to compete against the D200? So it can continue losing to it?
So my question for Canon shooters is, what the heck do you think you want in a "40D"? A better camera than the 30D? You've already got it, folks: it's called the XTi. A luscious, higher-MP, full-frame sensor and a great, big, beautiful finder in a tough, solid box? You've got that too: it's called the 5D. True, a lineup without a 30D creates a "price gap." Who cares? Either save your money, or spend less and stop kvetching about all the dough you didn't spend. If the XTi is too cheap to soil your soft pale fingers with, buy two.
“A View From an Apartment” (2004–5) blends two scenes, those of the domestic
The print on the left is a good print for my Epson R 800 printer.
According to the teaser on olympus-europa.com's Digital SLR page (above), two new DSLRs will be announced on 5 March 2007.
The Charlie Rose interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson has made its way online.
Still, the master is the master, and if you listen to M. Cartier-Bresson very carefully, all sorts of little gems flit by like sparrows past an open window. For instance, when he says "You mustn't want. You must be receptive." Throughout the interview I got the sense that Cartier-Bresson would have liked to raise bigger and deeper issues, but he just wasn't being led to them; he tried to wedge some of them in anyway.
).
Peter Krogh is the author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers
. Recently I've had a chance to watch The DAM Book Workflow Videos, and picked up some great tips and techniques.
Bill Sullivan, More Turns
Speaking of lenses for DSLRs, Pentax has just announced a new series of top-of-the-line, premium digital-only lenses called DA* (say "dee-ay-star"). The first two DA* lenses are constant-aperture ƒ/2.8 zooms with focal lengths of 16–50mm (above) (roughly 25–75mm equivalent) and 50–135mm (left) (roughly 75–210 equivalent). They bring together aspherical elements, special optical-glass elements, and original lens coatings, and are designed to cover just the area of a digital sensor. Both lenses have 9-blade apertures and impressively short close-focus distances (.3 and 1 meters respectively). Pentax promises the new DA* lenses will be "superior to any existing lens series in terms of contrast, clarity and edge-to-edge sharpness."
Liz and Ray, Wigilia, 2006—My current main digital lens is a Konica-Minolta 28–75mm ƒ/2.8 made for Konica-Minolta by Tamron. Despite being uncool [see below], it's a great performer, in part because it's been coated specifically to work well on digital SLRs. 30mm, ƒ/2.8, ISO 1600, 1/50th sec.
Apropos of yesterday, I hate to say this, y'all, but whether you shoot with this lens for $2,795 or with this one for $25 [the link is broken now, but it was an old screwmount Super-Takumar —MJ] really doesn't matter. In this game it's pictures that count, and what you do with those pictures, and how you publicize and market them. You get very little extra credit for which lens you happen to choose.
A lot of people who read it aren't going to like this, but in many cases, nobody can tell the difference. I wish I had the funding to do a double-blind experimental study along these lines (well, okay, not really), but I've tested the proposition pretty rigorously, and I can tell you that even many photographers can't reliably distinguish good expensive lenses from good inexpensive lenses just from looking at pictures (although a lot of them think they can). And when it comes down to the general public, fuggedaboutit—people just don't see.
When it comes to an enthusiasm for lenses, it is something we do for ourselves, for fun, for status, for personal satisfaction...not because it matters to the work.
Cheers, and a bit of parting advice—if any of this makes you feel hot under the collar, get out your favorite camera and go out and shoot a bit. You'll feel better. I promise.
ADDENDUM: Mike Prevette's Leica M8. Black tape is cool.
Photographer Andrew Smith has a style that is quiet, reflective, even philosophical. He's a musician by trade, a middle school music teacher, from a family of musicians. His photographs echo the quiet contemplation and focus required of his profession. His photoblog, Visual Realia, is a journey through the mind and world of this thoughtful artist. Recently I had the pleasure to talk with Andy about his life and his work:
CS: What styles of photography are you attracted to?
CS: Explain the role of music in your life.
CS: Your 'music' images seem to have a sensual feel to them...is that something intentional on your part?