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. 🙂

I took A7CR with the new lens to the beach today just to see what I can get, and initially I wasn’t very pleased since the pictures looked like summery postcards. But then I thought: well it’s summer in Dalmatia, what else are they supposed to look like?

Also, it’s quite obvious why we had so many fires.

Everything is dried up like gunpowder from the prolonged heat wave and no rain whatsoever. In fact it’s a miracle we had so few fires. Hopefully we get a rainy period soon because the vegetation is on its last legs. The dried-up ikebana stuff does lend itself well to photography, though. 🙂

Edit: BTW this is a good example of what I was saying about needing small but high quality 50mm lens for shots that don’t require extreme depth of field, or night vision. If I’m going to shoot a detail that needs to be sharp, or separation of the planes needs to be slight and subtle, the small lens will do fine. But what’s the big lens for, then?

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

It’s for making magic out of chaos.

The FE 50mm f/2.5 G lens arrived this morning:

My set of small lenses is now complete; the Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN, Sony FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 collapsible kit zoom, and Sony FE 50mm f/2.5 G.

You may ask what’s the point. Well, I do already have bigger and optically stellar lenses, but the thing with those is that they are occasionally too big for me to just carry around when I’m out for a walk without any particular photographic aim in mind, but I still want to have a good camera in order to catch something that caught my eye unexpectedly.

FE 50mm f/1.8

The thing is, despite the fact that I love the effect they produce, I don’t always need the extreme optics. When I’m using the FE 50mm f/1.2 GM at f/8, and I do, there’s not much difference between that and a much lighter lens; they would both do excellently. Sometimes, I don’t need anything more extreme than my old Zuiko Digital 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 did for me, and that’s a Four Thirds sensor at f/3.5. It did many things brilliantly. It would be silly to get a whole different camera system just so that I could have a light walkaround setup, but it’s quite possible to have such a setup on 35mm Sony; you just have to sacrifice aperture. So, essentially, I have the smaller A7CR camera, three small lenses with brilliant but “slow” optics, and the whole system is not really pocketable, but the lenses are. The camera itself with one lens on it would probably fit in my winter jacket, but I haven’t tried it. 🙂

So, what can this new 50mm do in closeup photography? I did a quick test:

That’s wide open at minimum focusing distance. Bokeh is good in non-backlit conditions, and actually better than I feared it would be in harsh, backlit conditions. There is some spherochromatism but barely noticeable, and although the lens doesn’t render the background out of toffee the way GM lenses do, I am quite pleased with what it does, if I consider it from a Four Thirds perspective. Also, it can get quite close for a 50mm, which helps to blur out the background. The colours are modern, which means excellent and neutral. Contrast is great, sharpness is excellent, I haven’t had the opportunity to test it against flare yet, and CA seem to be minimal. We’ll see how it does when I actually take it for a spin. But so far, so good.

Edit: I did the first shoot.

The images are extremely detailed corner to corner. It outresolves the 61MP sensor and is probably designed for a 100MP sensor. The colours are excellent, as I expected. GM level of image quality.

Flare with sun in the frame. There isn’t any.

The ability to blur out the background for such shots is excellent. Also, notice spherochromatism on the blurred-out grass. It’s slight, but it’s there.

Extreme sharpness and nice separation of the planes wide open.

All in all, the image quality is stellar, from wide open to diffraction limit. I highly recommend the lens.

Every now and then I watch a review of some lens and then the reviewer says it has “that something”, “the look”, “soul” or some other stupid bullshit that people use when they can’t define what they are talking about but still want to be taken seriously.

At some point I started interpreting such statements as “the lens is shit”, and that usually turns out to be exactly right. When someone can’t define why something is good, it probably means it’s shit in a way that reminds them of their faded-out family photos taken with a similar camera, that was also shit.

Also, there are terms like “micro-contrast”. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

“Micro-contrast is the ability of a lens to capture subtle tonal variations and details within an image, enhancing the richness and vibrancy of colours and transitions between light and dark areas.”

Yeah, that’s also known as “resolution”, defined as the ability to distinguish between pairs of black and white lines. Subtle tonal variations and details… What is that supposed to mean? The colours aren’t muddy because the lens is sharp and apochromatic, meaning the photons of different wavelengths go where they’re supposed to. Lenses are physics, not bullshit. In physics, when something happens, there’s an actual phenomenon causing it.

I hear that shit regularly whenever something from Zeiss or Leica is reviewed. Oh, it has “that something”, it has the “3d pop”, it has “micro-contrast”. Then you put the image from a Zeiss lens next to some other lens and they look the same and then you think “what the hell are those guys smoking”. I don’t know, but it’s not doing them a great deal of good. “3d pop” is a combination of sharpness, contrast and depth of field. Contrast is usually a function of resolution and anti-glare coating. In case of Zeiss, I think the coating might actually suppress the dark tones, boosting contrast at the expense of tonal gradient, which is, interestingly, the only actual characteristic that I can attribute to Zeiss lenses that isn’t complete fiction. Other than that, yeah, they are sharp. So is almost everything else today. They are contrasty and have good coating. So does almost everything else. I actually prefer the coating on the Sony GM lenses because it doesn’t suppress tonality in deep shadows as much as T* coating seems to, and for some reason the images from the Zeiss lenses feel “cooler”, while the Sony lenses feel “warmer”, and it’s not a white balance thing or a colour cast. I’d say it has to be caused by the way T* coating deals with wavelengths; what is reflected, what is transmitted. It’s a very subtle thing, and that’s how you get the impression of micro-contrast; if you have a bush with light and dark parts of the leaves, and the dark parts are suppressed, you get the impression of increased contrast in the details, which can create the impression of three-dimensionality in the image. However, that might be the last thing you want if you’re shooting portraits, and it actually seems to boost extreme colours at the expense of gradient, which is also not something you might want in portraits.

Sony A7II, FE 16-35mm f/4 Zeiss Vario-Tessar

Sony A7RV, FE 24-105mm f/4 G

So, basically, “that something” the Zeiss lenses have is the Zeiss badge, which makes the reviewers go ape shit with hyperbole. The coating suppresses the shadows, giving you contrast and cooler tone at the expense of tonal gradient. That’s great if you want it and shit if you don’t, but it’s not some mystical, magical property.

The reason I love the GM lenses so much is partially because the coating seems to do the exact opposite from T*; it doesn’t suppress, the way a polarizing filter would. The tonal gradient across the spectrum is preserved, and when you combine that with extreme sharpness, apochromatic design and incredibly smooth rolloff into bokeh, you get a combination properties that “clicks” with me so much that I basically went out and bought all of them.

Sony A7CR, FE 35mm f/1.4 GM

But it’s not a GM feature. Sigma Art lenses are doing the same thing, for the most part. It’s a function of extreme sharpness, modern coating and excellent bokeh. Put those properties together and the result appears magical, but it’s just good optics; more than just good, in fact. You can say they have “that something”. Yeah. Something is somethingating into quite a bit of somethinglings that somethingiggulate.