The FE 35mm f/1.4 GM, of course. And here’s what it does:

Yummy. Lens, too. 🙂

ps. Some actual photography:

I found so much obsession with sharpness on the photographic forums on the Internet that I feel I have to add my two cents to the bunch.

I thought I would start by defining sharpness of a photograph, but that’s actually not as easy as I initially thought, and I will rather list all the factors that detract from image sharpness.

A photograph is not sharp when there is camera movement during exposure, subject movement during exposure relative to the film/sensor, when the desired point of interest is not in focus, when depth of field is insufficient to encompass the subject of the image, when diffraction reduces the optical resolution, when film is not perfectly flat, when the lens doesn’t project image of sufficient resolution, or when film/sensor has resolution insufficient for the desired enlargement.

Those causes can be further summarised into technical errors, equpment defficiencies, and subjective assessments.

So, if you caused camera shake during exposure, that’s a technical error. If you have subject movement during exposure because you failed to set short exposure to compensate for it (because, at whatever speed something is moving, that movement will be twice as short in half the time, until at some point movement falls beneath pixel size of your sensor, or at least beneath the pixel size on the print of the size you are happy with), that’s a technical error. So, if your failure to keep the camera steady or keep exposure short enough or focus on the right place or set the depth of field properly or you stopped the lens down to the point where diffraction degraded image sharpness, is the cause of the perceived lack of sharpness, those are technical errors, or, in other words, user errors, because it’s the user’s technique that is at fault. Removing those errors will remove causes of the perceived lack of sharpness. Those errors make up the vast majority of all issues with sharpness, and the only way to resolve them is by developing a good, meticulous photographic technique – basically, user training.

The second cause of the lack of sharpness are the equipment defficiencies. This means that the equipment itself caused the lack of sharpness even though the photographer made no technical errors. For instance, if a camera sensor introduces strong banding and noise, this will degrade image sharpness; if a lens produces an image whose sharpness falls strongly toward the corners, and you want the image corners sharp, that’s also a problem. If a lens produces strong coma in the corners wide open, and you want to use it for astrophotography, that’s also an equipment defficiency. Anything that makes a lens or a camera unsuitable for the task at hand can be considered an equipment defficiency. This is a very popular subject that is incredibly amplified on the forums, because it makes people think they can solve their photographic problems with money. However, this was always a less important cause of overall issues than people thought, and today it is even more so, to the point of being practically negligible, except in few areas of photography where you can literally spend your way out of the problem, such as photographing insects and birds in flight, where quality of autofocus is critical, and the role of equipment in the overall picture taking ability is remarkably high.

The third cause of the perceived lack of sharpness is subjective assessment. This means that for some people an image is “sharp” if it can be enlarged to the desired print size and the details that are in focus are perceived as sharp enough. For others, who inspect image files, an image is sharp if everything is sharp on the 100% magnification. Also, for some an image is sharp if absolutely everything on the image is so sharp that circle of confusion across the image falls below the pixel size of the output medium, while for others an image is sharp if the point of focus is sharp, and enough of the motive is within the depth of field, and the rest of image is blurred out. For instance, those two images are sharp:

On the first image, the motive is critically sharp and the rest is blurred out, while on the second image everything is sharp. This makes sharpness a function of subjective assessment and photographic genre, and not an absolute category.

So, essentially, with sharpness, a proper answer to “how sharp do you want it” can be either “just the right parts”, or “yes”. If the motive is the whole scene, then the whole scene has to be reproduced in crisp detail. However, if the motive is a person, a detail or atmosphere, the answers will be all over the place. In fact, if a camera cannot reduce the depth of field enough to allow for the subject isolation, the way early digicams with small sensors used to, I will reject it as inadequate, because excessive sharpness, of things that should be blurred out, can very much detract from the quality of the image, and in fact often requires expensive equipment to remedy.

This image, for instance, would be completely ruined if depth of field was increased to the point where everything in the background is sharp, because it’s exactly the reduced depth of field, or selective sharpness (great where you want it and not at all where you don’t want it), that makes the image. On the other hand, with landscapes you often want the whole scene to be sharp:

However, notice how even here, where the image is critically sharp from corner to corner, and from front to back, the water was intentionally blurred out by long exposure, because that adds to the calm atmosphere of the image, where crisp appearance of water movement stopped by short exposure would look nasty and amateurish. This means that sharpness is merely an aspect of photography that needs to be controlled, so that you get it when you want it, and selectively remove it when you don’t, and the problem arises only when you can’t do something due to either equipment deficiencies or flawed photographic technique, or you inspect a photograph in ways that defeat its purpose.

There’s also the matter of lens sharpness and sensor resolution, that causes unending debate. Yes, there are sensors that have insufficient resolution and lenses that have insufficient sharpness. With sensors, it’s merely a function of magnification – how far can you enlarge it on screen and in print, and still retain subjectively crisp detail on the desired viewing distance. This was a big problem when resolutions were 3-5 megapixels, less of a problem at 8-12 megapixels, and ceased to be a problem for almost all purposes at 24 megapixels. With lenses, it’s a more complicated matter, because a very bad lens can create all sorts of optical mischief even at quite modest magnifications. This is mostly the case in low end smartphone cameras today, but historically speaking, lenses that had poor sharpness and produced inadequate resolution and color at any aperture did in fact exist. Old Soviet cameras such as Smena or Lubitel, or toy cameras such as Holga or Diana, and also lenses such as “Lensbaby”, are created or sought for that “artistic effect”. However, with modern lenses it is mostly a problem at wide apertures, where even the point of focus isn’t “crisp”, or the lens doesn’t produce enough resolution, measurable in line pairs per inch/centimeter, to resolve fine detail on desired levels of magnification. This means that a certain lens will be sharp on an A3 sized print, and unsharp at an A1 sized print. Also, a lens might be critically sharp at f/8, and lacking wide open, at whatever its maximal aperture. Depending on what you intend to do with it, this may or may not be a problem. If you are shooting sharp landscapes at f/11, a certain lens will be perfectly adequate. If you want to get crisp detail in a sea of blur, you will often need to purchase a specialty lens that is designed for extreme sharpness and resolution wide open.

So, as I said in the beginning, sharpness is what happens when the user doesn’t mess up, when equipment is up to the task, and the result is evaluated as intended. Fortunately, for most types of photography, 20 year old digital cameras and lenses are capable of producing perfect sharpness on very large enlargements, such as A2/B2 print size, which are as large as a normal wall would bear. Anything even barely modern, with resolutions around 20 megapixels, will enlarge so well, one should not worry about it. Also, any reasonably modern lens, such as the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L, will project sharp enough image on such a sensor as to allow for meter-wide enlargements. This means you can get sharp images on huge enlargements with inexpensive gear, if you’re shooting landscapes, portraits or details. Wildlife, birds and bugs in flight and sports are a different matter and quite a money pit, so I’ll leave those out for now, but for most of the things people want to shoot, a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM macro, EF 85mm f/1.8, EF 50mm f/1.8 STM, EF 70-200mm f/4L, EF 17-40mm f/4L and EF 24-105mm f/4L will produce images of extreme sharpness and clarity on the modern sensors, if you know what you’re doing, technically. Most people don’t, and then they blame the equipment. The lenses I mentioned are mostly quite inexpensive today, so it’s not a pay-to-win sport. However, any amount of user error will reduce the image quality of a 24 megapixel camera to something far below what a 5 megapixel camera can do, if used with perfect technique. Essentially, cameras and lenses can fuck up, but compared to how much photographers can fuck up, that’s nothing.

(The newest of the cameras used to produce the illustrations in this article is 11 years old. The oldest lens used is a 38 years old design, and it’s also the sharpest lens used.)

Why do I use the equipment I use, and not something else, for instance Olympus or Canon, which I used before? Was something wrong with them so I “upgraded”?

The answer is in fact quite prosaic – I use Sony almost completely by accident, or, if you want, because of circumstances over the decades.

Initially, I used Minolta MC/MD system on film, with the Minolta Dimage IV scanner. Then digital became both good and affordable enough and I bought the Olympus E-1 with the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens, which happened to be on discount. I liked it very much, but I wasn’t really convinced by the propositions of the four thirds system which advocated for the smaller sensor but the lenses happened to be as big as the 35mm counterparts and I thought, as long as I’m having lenses this big, I might as well have the 35mm format that I had on film. So, when Canon 5d came out, I decided against investing more into the four thirds system and instead bought Canon 5d with several good but reasonably priced lenses. At some point soon thereafter, I had a serious financial crisis and sold the Olympus gear as well as the Canon EF 70-200 f/4L lens, and the crisis persisted on and off for multiple years, so I had more pressing concerns than photography. At some point, as things improved, and as I realised that taking the 5d with all the glass is impractical when riding a bicycle, and as I became annoyed with some people thinking that my photography is good only because I have the 5d and great glass, I bought the Olympus E-PL1 pocketable micro four thirds mirrorless camera with its 14-42mm collapsible kit lens, and a Minolta MD lens adapter and macro extension tubes, and started taking pictures with that combo, where of course the pictures looked the same as on the 5d. About that time, Biljana started taking interest in photography and taking out either the Canon film gear or the 5d to take pictures, and over the years it basically became her camera, while I made due with the E-PL1 and the adapted Minolta glass, only occasionally taking the 5d when I needed the lenses that I didn’t have on the Olympus.

I really liked the live view concept of the E-PL1, especially the ability to get 100% magnified feed from the sensor for manual focus, and I thought, if only I had a camera like that but with an electronic viewfinder and a 35mm sensor. Also, I really liked the in-body image stabilisation, basically the gyro-stabilised sensor that worked with any lens, which was great because I didn’t own any stabilised lenses; they were always more expensive and I had money problems practically at all times. Then Sony made first the A7 mirrorless camera, and then the A7II with the in-body image stabilisation, because they saved Olympus from financial problems and in return acquired right to use their patents, and so Olympus IBIS found its way into a 35mm mirrorless camera. I immediately loved that one, but I still couldn’t afford it, so I shrugged it off. At some point when the money situation improved, and it was already an outgoing model on heavy discount, I bought it and the FE 28-70mm kit lens, bought the Canon EF adapter to Sony FE mount, and the Minolta MD adapter to Sony FE mount, as Sony was the best platform for adapting other stuff, since it had the shortest flange distance and you could make a tube to put anything else on it easily. Then I proceeded to shoot with it for a while, but finally decided to buy a proper macro lens since most of what I shot over the years was macro and closeups, and I never got around to buying a proper macro lens, mostly for the money reasons. Then money improved even more, but I started putting it all into gold, and buying stuff only to replace stuff that fell apart, because I was saving for real estate, having been in a perpetual renting situation for decades at that point. Since I had other priorities, photography got swept to the sidelines, and I never got around to buying all the lenses I wanted, and the Canon system was what Biljana used for years at that point. Last year, I finally decided to get the Sony version of the 50mm f/1.8, since it was very cheap. Then I decided to finally get the native Sony wide angle zoom, and soon after that I decided to stop treating my photography with neglect and contempt and finally get all the equipment I wanted/needed.

So, that’s more-less the whole story of my photography from 2004 to 2025 in abbreviated form, leaving out only the experiment with early digital when I bought the Fuji S602 camera in 2002, tried using it, decided it’s not giving me the results I wanted and returned to film, and the phase before that when I didn’t really know what I was doing on film and my “technique” of getting digital files was to scan 15x10cm prints on a flatbed scanner. So, in essence, if I had to count all the camera brands I used over the decades, I started by shooting a roll of Kodak Gold 100 from a 1940-s Leica using the sunny 16 rule because it didn’t have a light meter, then borrowed my father’s Minolta X-300 occasionally to take a picture or two, then he gave it to me as a gift in 1999 or so if I remember correctly, then I got the Fuji digital, went back to Minolta and film, then switched to Olympus E-1, used it almost exclusively until late 2006 when I bought the Canon 5d and five lenses, then got the Olympus E-PL1, shot that for a few years, got the Mamiya 645 to experiment with the medium format film, bought the very cheap used Sony R1 that my son eventually got, then got the Sony A7II with kit and later the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro lens, and that was it until last autumn. Obviously, with Leica, Minolta, Fuji, Olympus, Canon and Sony on the list, it’s obvious that I’m not really brand loyal and will use whatever suits me at the moment, but for the most part I used what I could financially afford or get my hands on, because for the most part I wasn’t in a position to choose. Since Sony happened to be the camera that I used most recently, and I was very satisfied with both the camera and the glass, I just expanded the system that I was already in, and it just happened to be quite popular at the moment which caught me by surprise when I started catching up with the new developments in photography since I was out of it. This meant that all the glass that I wanted was already made for the system and there was no “if only they made that lens that I want” thing. So, I don’t really see it as transitioning from Canon to Sony, because of the extremely convoluted and protracted way it came around; if anything, I saw it as switching from the micro four thirds Olympus to Sony 35mm, and then upgrading from there and sharing the Canon lenses with Biljana. As things stand now, the old 5d finally got replaced and both she and I now have separate 35mm mirrorless systems. If you expected me to say that I moved to Sony because it’s super awesome and so much better than what I had before, you’ll be disappointed; sure, it’s better than the Olympus, but I really liked the Canon lenses and the 5d, the image quality was excellent and I had no issues with it whatsoever, other than the weight when I wanted to pack light. My ending up with two Sony bodies and seven (I think) of their lenses was merely a continuation of the organic flow of events. In the end, since they acquired assets from both Minolta and Olympus, it actually feels like I never really left anything since I’m still within the same system, and all Canon lenses are adaptable to it.

The topic of photographic nostalgia seems to crop up with some regularity, especially among the people too young to possibly be nostalgic about it, since they weren’t even born when it was a thing. So, if you consider shooting film, I have some opinions on the matter.

First of all, when I used to shoot film, I didn’t do it because it was a “retro” or “nostalgic” medium. It also didn’t look the way most people today think it looks – basically, like faded-out, color-shifted crap. It wasn’t any of those things when it was current. What you have today are faded-out photo albums, and digital simulations that emulate this look. This isn’t what film used to be, it’s some kind of a nostalgia market that obviously has customers. If you want to see what film used to be, watch some of the high-production Hollywood movies from the 1990s, before they switched to digital; I recently watched “You’ve got mail” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, that’s a great example of peak film.

I don’t know what emulsion they used, but it looks like Kodak, based on the color palette. It’s less sharp and clear than digital, but the colors are not faded, shifted or messed up in any way, and it’s still quite sharp and clear, thank you very much.

So, that’s what film used to look like, and if you’re nostalgic for film, and not the faded-out stuff the nostalgia-merchants are peddling, good luck with that because the best emulsions from that era are basically gone now and you can no longer shoot them. Kodachrome? Gone. Ektachrome E6? Gone; nobody is processing it anymore. C41? You’re in luck, some of the best emulsions are still available, although very expensive, and processing is also reasonably available. Black and white? You’re also in luck, there are plenty of emulsions and chemicals available. But, let’s assume you want the low contrast and yet still colorful stuff weddings were shot with in the 1980s and 1990s; that’s Kodak Portra, and it still exists and can be processed, since it’s a C41 negative.

If you want your pictures to look good, and not just fucked-up nostalgic, you will need to use the equipment that people used in the 1990s if they wanted their photos to look good. Forget old beaters, you’ll need something with good optics, that’s easy enough to use so that you get the impression of what film was actually like when it was good. I would recommend the Canon EOS system, which is essentially the most modern 35mm system that encompasses both film and digital eras, and why, because if you decide that film is not for you, you can use those lenses on a modern Canon or Sony mirrorless camera with an adapter, instead of selling everything at a loss or being stuck with something nobody wants anymore.

The cameras I recommend are the EOS 3 and EOS 30 (also known as Elan 7). You can get the body on ebay for the ballpark value of 250 EUR, and you can probably sell it for as much when you’re done with it. Those are excellent cameras that behave not that much different from the digital cameras; the autofocus is great (in case of EOS 3, unsurpassed), film loading and unloading is automatic, ISO value detection is automatic, and the ergonomics are great. This is what EOS 3 did with the EF 85mm f/1.8 lens:

This is Fuji Velvia 100 emulsion, so you’re out of luck, since it’s no longer in production and you probably can’t develop it properly even if you try to do it yourself. The technology that produced this photo is lost in the sands of time, like the Saturn V rocket. However, you’re still in luck, since the digital at that time produced this:

This is Olympus E-1 with the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens, and believe it or not people are starting to get nostalgic about that, too, projecting all kinds of stuff on it the way they do on film. Don’t. It’s great, but it’s not better, and in fact not even that much different than the current high-end digital cameras, except by having much lower resolution which limits your ability to enlarge. However, 35mm film is limited in similar ways, so if you don’t mind film, you would mind older digital cameras even less. There’s all kinds of nonsense around about Olympus colors, E-1 colors, or Kodak CCD sensor colors from that camera. It’s all nonsense. Olympus E-1 has colors that are almost completely identical to the Canon 10d, which was very popular at the time, and so Olympus seemingly adjusted their color profile to match it. Yes, it has great colors, but that’s because high end digital cameras with big sensors have great colors in general. Canon has great colors, Olympus has great colors, Nikon has great colors and Sony has great colors. What doesn’t have great colors is Fuji, because they made profiles to emulate what people think is film, and is in fact the faded remnant of film they figured people are nostalgic for. So, Fuji colors look like aged dog shit, and Olympus, Canon, Nikon and Sony look so much like film, that the only actual difference is in the improved clarity, sharpness and dynamic range. If you reduce those slightly, they will look exactly like the best film emulsions that I remember.

Also, film doesn’t deserve the nostalgia it’s getting. It’s a chemical process that is environmentally unfriendly, creates toxic waste from all the hazardous chemicals involved, and takes almost all control out of your hands, since you don’t produce the film, you don’t control the chemicals, someone else has to do all of that for you, all so that you could do the artistic hipster thing. The problems film introduced were significant even when film was at its best, and I had a huge qualitative leap in technical quality when digital cameras became a mature technology. I occasionally tried it again, but even at its best it wasn’t as good as 35mm digital, and it soon degraded way below its best due to abandonment of essential technological components necessary for it all to work, such as huge factories producing film and toxic waste, and Kodak pro labs processing the exposed film in toxic waste.

The reason why I’m immune to this kind of nostalgia is because I have good memory. I was there when film was at its best, I was there as digital looked like dog shit, I was there when digital became good but expensive, when digital surpassed film in every way, and film rapidly declined and fell out of favour. Interestingly, film started declining even when digital was still worse, because all those hipsters who now want to shoot film used to hype up the inferior digital cameras because it was the new thing, while I said “nope”, and produced digital files by scanning film, which was far superior and cheaper. However, at some point digital became so good that I could produce colors, DoF transitions, background blur and fine detail very much comparable with the best film emulsions, and that was at the times of Olympus E-1 and Canon 10d. When the 35mm Canon 5d came out, it was all over. That thing resolved the detail of 645 medium format, with colors and dynamic range that exceeded the best film emulsions. It was so much better it wasn’t even funny, and without all the nasty mess with chemicals, scanning, delays and limited availability. Yes, film looked great, but digital looks better. My son made an excellent comment: that the only film that really looks “digital” is the 4×5″ large format. That kind of says it all – the main difference between film and digital, when film is used properly, is the superior clarity and detail of digital, and when the large format film allows you to get the colors of film without the blur and scanned imperfections of the film surface typical for the smaller formats, it looks exactly like digital.

So, sure, if you want to play with film, be my guest; God knows I did my share of that. If anything, you’ll learn to appreciate the modern digital cameras, which are incredibly amazing. I would know, since I was there throughout the process that produced them, so I don’t think that’s normal or common. It’s absolutely amazing.