We went for a late evening walk yesterday; I took the A7CR with the FE 50mm f/2.5 G with me, the light setup, just in case light happened, which didn’t look likely considering how late it was in the day. Well, ten points to Gryffindor for being prepared, I guess. 🙂

Today there’s lots of smoke in the air, because there’s a very nasty wildfire burning in Herzegovina and the wind is bringing it all the way here. This means the sunset will be spectacular today, but I might not go out and take pictures if the smoke is too much. We’ll see.

Edit:

Nothing too spectacular, I’m afraid, but still worth catching. The smoke was too low in the atmosphere to catch the glow.

I was just thinking about what kind of equipment I like.

After all, I had all kinds of cameras, lenses and other gear, and I do have my preferences. It’s just hard to put in a single statement, but if I had to, I’d say I love it when the gear isn’t fragile.

That doesn’t mean I bang my stuff up. In fact, I have a lens from 1984 that, according to my son, is in the best condition he ever saw for something anywhere near as old. By fragility, I don’t necessarily mean resistance to physical abuse, although I certainly prefer lenses and cameras not to damage easily with normal use. I mean the ability to use them within their full spectrum of nominal functionality with excellent results. This means that I can open the aperture and still get excellent sharpness and no stupid artefacts. It means being able to use the lens or camera in the rain, not because I would deliberately do so, but because I might get rained on by accident when I’m on a hike somewhere.

Guess how much water I had on both lens and camera here 🙂

It also means being able to shoot into the sun with the lens without flare ruining the shot. That’s what I mean by fragility, or lack thereof. A fragile lens will work great when everything is perfect, and fall apart when conditions are not ideal. I like working in non-ideal conditions; that’s usually where the best pictures are. If I have to baby the camera or the lens and use them only where they are comfortable, I will get rid of them in short order. Sometimes I will walk in strong sunlight and the camera will get very hot; or I will shoot in frosty conditions, or I’ll get caught by persistent rain. I’ll have sunlight that causes flare, chromatic aberrations and all kinds of nonsense in lesser optics. I’ll take pictures hand-held in deep dark, with stars visible in the sky. I want the equipment to follow me there and not crack under pressure. When I need to crank up the ISO, I want the image to still look great after I process it. When I need to open the aperture, I want the corners to still be sharp. If the lens is f/1.4, I want it to be great at f/1.4. I hate having to have mental markers, such as “don’t use this lens at these settings because it’s shit wide open and it’s shit at the longer end”. Thanks, but no thanks. A lens that has those caveats is fragile. A tripod or a tripod head that loses rigidity with my heaviest lens on my heaviest camera is fragile. A camera that can’t do really long exposures because the image falls apart from noise, or I can’t shoot in strong sunlight because it doesn’t have a viewfinder and I don’t see anything on the LCD in those conditions – thanks, but no thanks. If I want some function that I rarely use, I want the camera to have it, if it’s something reasonable like long exposure noise reduction (in other words, dark frame subtraction). Entry-level cameras are notorious for omitting such features, which is why I don’t like entry level cameras. It’s not snobbery; it’s the fact that some things will be omitted from those models because it’s expected that the expected user base won’t need them. It’s not that I think that those cameras can’t make great pictures.

Olympus E-PL1

I made great pictures with Olympus E-PL1, which is the entriest-level of all the entry-level plasticky thingies. That’s how I learned that I don’t like fragile cameras, because that one was fragile. I would need something, and it wouldn’t have it. I would use some function like ISO 1600, and it would fall apart. There was no viewfinder, and I challenge anyone to try taking pictures without one at noon on the southern side of Hvar in broad daylight. If you can’t compose the image because you see nothing on the screen, let alone focus precisely, then what is the point? Aim in the general direction of the island and hope it works? I swore I’ll never buy such a camera again, and I didn’t. It annoyed me so much that I almost gave up photography. That’s why I roll my eyes when people show that entry level cameras can make great photos. I know. Been there, done that. The problem is, they make great photos when all the stars align just right – you can see on the screen, you can use base ISO, there’s enough light but not too much, or you can use a tripod… how about making great photos when I want to make them, not when the camera is happy?

Hand-held at blue hour, wide open.

Fragility means a macro lens that’s soft and terrible when focused on infinity, and a landscape lens that has terrible minimum focusing distance, and it’s terrible at those conditions. It’s the opposite of robustness. Robustness doesn’t mean the lens will be able to do everything, but if it’s rated as f/4, you can shoot it at f/4 and get good results, not blurry mess. If it’s 24-105mm, you can shoot at both ends and get good results. I don’t expect it to be as good at closeup as a macro lens, but it needs to do well enough for me to pull off a shot in a pinch and not throw it away in frustration at home, when I see what it actually looks like.

Shot with what I had, wide open.

I expect a landscape lens to pull off a portrait when my wife steps into the frame. I know it won’t match the 85mm f/1.4, but it needs to do well enough. If it’s rated at a certain aperture and a certain focal length range, and if it focuses from 30cm to infinity, you can bet I will use it at all those extremes, and I expect it to do a good job. That’s the kind of lens I like.

Last night we went out for a walk and it was still so hot and humid that we ended up drenched in sweat even though we walked very slowly and took pictures. This summer is one of the worst I remember in the last decade, honestly; mostly because the heat was just relentless for such a long period of time. Also, the people are pests. We took pictures of a hedgehog who was minding its own business, and a pack of feral children crowded us while making such amounts of noise that the poor critter jumped from the meter high wall rather than to have anything to do with them. I hope they didn’t tear it apart and eat it raw after we left.

The only normal persons we encountered during that walk were that hedgehog and a few cats who were minding their own business and looked conscious. The humans looked like the night of the living dead.

Other than the zombies, we took some OK pictures; I took the 50mm f/1.2, Biljana took the 85mm f/1.8, and the motives were good for both. I wished I had the 135mm for the hedgehog, but it was such a rare encounter I couldn’t plan for it, and the 50mm was good for everything else. I processed some of them in b&w, and some in strong colour; both seems to work.

I love that big 50mm. It’s a heavy brick, but boy does it make great pictures in the dark.

The fact that I bought the FE 50mm f/2.5 G is kind of surprising even to me, because I originally contemplated the 40mm; in fact, Sony made the set of 24mm, 40mm and 50mm with almost the same look and dimensions, and out of the three, I chose Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN rather than the 24mm f/2.8 G, and 50mm G rather than the 40mm. So, what’s with that?

Well, it’s not like I’m collecting the Pokemon so that I’d want to have a matching set or something. I watched the reviews and the Sigma 24mm appealed to me more because it has better corner sharpness wide open, in fact it’s great from wide open onwards. Both lenses are great, but for my needs the Sigma felt better, it’s much better uncorrected than the Sony, and I don’t care about aperture at 24mm.

Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN

As for the 40mm, I initially liked the idea but then I figured out I like it mostly because I’ve had my brain flooded with all sorts of reviews that are hyping it to an incredible degree, almost as if Sony was paying them to do it… Oh wait. 🙂 Also, I was narrowing my choice of a light walkaround prime between the Sigma 65mm f/2 DG DN, and the Sony 50mm f/2.5 G, because both were at bargain prices used. The 40mm G, however, was kind of overpriced used, likely because of the hype, and the fact that I was looking at the longer focal length alternative meant that a 40mm would be a step in the wrong direction. After all, if I want a wider walkaround lens, the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 zoom is actually preferable, and when I actually want everything sharp and wide, the Sigma 24mm is much more to my liking.

FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6

The 40mm is hyped as the best of both 35mm and 50mm, but I already see the 35mm as the middle ground between a 24mm and a 50mm, so I kind of don’t see the point. I use the 24mm for things people would use a 35mm for, and 35mm for what people would use a 50mm for, and I’m actually trying to learn 50mm properly since it’s been neglected in my arsenal for… well, since I started doing photography. I would always go either wider or narrower. So, going with the 40mm doesn’t actually fit the nature of the exercise. Likewise for the 65mm Sigma; it tries to be a 85mm while pretending to still be a 50mm. The closeup shots made with it look much smoother than the 40mm and 50mm Sony, but guess what – so do the shots with all the other lenses that I already own, so it would be merely fitting into a focal length gap between the 50mm f/1.2 GM and the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art, and that’s a gap that I don’t actually need to be filled, since the 85mm is already something that fills a gap between the 135mm and 50mm. If I wanted every transitional focal length filled, I would have bought a 70-200mm zoom. What I want are distinct perspectives from “primary” focal lengths – ultrawide, wide, mid-range, light telephoto and telephoto.

Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art

So, I basically wanted a replacement for the 50mm f/1.8 “nifty fifty” that annoys me with its hazy closeup performance when I want crispness, and with a deluge of CA whenever I point it toward anything contrasty. Also, I wanted something with the aperture ring and AF/MF switch on the lens. Also, I wanted something that is very small and light, so that I can put the camera with it in the beach backpack with the towels and it would fit. I scratched the Sigma 45mm from the list because it had unsharp closeup performance even worse than the lens I was trying to replace, and I scratched the Sony 40mm G off the list because I don’t like riding hype trains. It’s probably a great lens, but the 50mm was optically very similar and I got it used for a pittance, because all the hype followers went for the 40mm.

FE 50mm f/2.5 G

What do I think about it, now that I went out with it three times? I like when something does exactly what I expected and bought it for. There are zero surprises; the reviews were accurate. It’s crisp, the colours are clean and great, there are no optical defects worth talking about, and it creates pictures that very much resemble the “Four Thirds” look – you can blur out the background, but not completely, so there’s a structure and texture to it, rather than the sea of toffee that I get with the wide aperture glass.

FE 50mm f/2.5 G

Minolta MD 35-70mm f/3.5

It also reminds me of the old Minolta glass, because those lenses had similar bokeh; somewhat textured and gritty, but guess what: sometimes texture is what actually works for a picture, and sometimes smoothness fails. For me, a walkaround lens must be able to blur out the background well enough, and this one does; most shots I see when walking to the beach or similar places where I would take this lens are details that caught the ray of light, or a piece of dry wood in the tall grass, or something of that sort. This is what I tested the lens on, and I’m very happy with the results.

FE 50mm f/2.5 G

Does it have any drawbacks? Not really. Ergonomically, it’s tiny so everything is kind of crowded together, so I have to get used to it; the Sigma 24mm has better ergonomics, such as manual focus ring not competing for space with the aperture ring, but the complaint is minor. Also, the de-click switch is a waste of space and I could do without it; sure, the video people would want that. The lens shade is ugly and I took it off, to no ill effect because the lens is very flare resistant as it is.

I like it when things just work.

I took a few more pictures with FE 50mm f/2.5 G and A7CR;

Betting on poor odds.

Lightsails

As I already said, the background blur is harsh compared to the wide aperture lenses, but is in fact quite similar to what I used to get on the Four Thirds format, or with Minolta MD 35-70mm f/3.5 on film; somewhere between harsh and smooth. It has a particular aesthetics that I like for such shots, where the contrast is high and the shadows are harsh. But when you’re trying to catch the feeling of the long August heat wave, I think it’s just right. It would also be great for depicting the crispness of fresh snow, but I’m kinda out of that at the moment. 🙂