I recently took some very nice landscape photos with my new lens:
Before that, I used the same lens to take pictures of some night scenes in the town:
I also took pictures of some nature details with it:
The thing is, the lens I used is FE 135mm f/1.8 GM, a famous portrait lens from Sony. Interestingly, portraits are the only thing I haven’t used it for, so far. My wife did, however:
Wildlife in its natural environment
Using a portrait lens for shooting everything but portraits seems to defeat its purpose, which made me think. Sure, the 135mm GM is a fantastic portrait lens, but why? Because it has excellent bokeh and sharpness-to-softness rolloff, it is incredibly sharp from wide open, corner to corner, and is likely diffraction limited (meaning, it only gets worse as you stop it down). It also has an almost-macro minimum focusing distance. That, however, makes it excellent for details of landscape, and isolating nature details with narrow depth of field, due to its extreme aperture. Sure, there’s one new Sigma that’s even better, at f/1.4, but it’s so much bigger and heavier than the already very heavy Sony, that I decided I’m good at f/1.8, thank you very much.
The fact that a lens is great at something doesn’t mean it should be used for that purpose. Sure, it’s great for portraits. It’s also great at landscapes, at closeups, at nature details, at shooting butterflies against the light, at atmospheric urban scenes at low light, and astrophotography. Saying that it’s a portrait lens because it’s great at portraits is like saying one should become a porn star because they are good at having sex. Yeah, it sounds absurd, but that’s because it is.
There’s something that Catholics do that annoys me, and that’s belief that there’s a “natural way” things should be done, that’s ordained by God, and going against that is a sin. I think they particularly insist on that in matters concerning sex; basically, if you’re having sex for any reason that’s unrelated to reproduction, that’s against the natural order of things and is condemnable. They even had the audacity to cite animals as a good example of how humans should be – sex for reproduction only, pleasure only as a regrettable side effect of reproduction, and if you accidentally feel some form of sexual pleasure that’s unrelated to that, confession time for you, buddy.
At some point later in the process they seem to have figured out the concept of “mutual giving” between people that’s actually an important part of sex that has nothing to do with reproduction, and if you give them long enough, like a zillion years, they might actually catch on. The most ridiculous part of it is that they actually don’t know anything about nature, or how actual animals do sex. For instance, the Bonobo apes (a smaller species of chimpanzee) use sex as some form of ritual bonding and de-stressing; the dolphins practice sex in ways remarkably similar to humans, and so on. Basically, de-coupling sexual pleasure from its reproductive function seems to be a function of evolutionary advancement, similar to self-awareness and abstract thought. Thinking that sex should be used for reproduction only is like thinking that numbers shouldn’t be used as abstract entities, but only related to actual things that are numbered; basically, you can count sheep and trees because that’s how God intended it, but if you start playing with numbers as abstract entities unrelated to anything physical, you need to confess your sins against the Creator. 🙂
Does something have an obvious purpose it’s been designed for? Sure. A FE 85mm f/1.4 GM and FE 135mm f/1.8 GM are designed as portrait lenses. That doesn’t mean you can’t use a 14mm ultrawide as a portrait lens, or that you can’t use a 135mm for landscapes, to great effect. If you use things for what they are designed, in exactly the way they are meant to be used, it’s instinct and programming, not creativity and abstract thought. Sure, if you decouple mind from instinct and introduce creativity, there’s no end to which you can fuck up, and anyone who’s been on the Internet can attest to that. The Catholics use abundant examples of this as evidence that “God’s plan is not to be messed with”.
I, however, submit portraits made with ultrawides and nature shots made with a portrait lens as evidence that God is not a limited idiot some seem to take him for.
Sin against the natural order: portrait with a 15mm fisheye
Every dog has emotions, breath and thoughts. However, humans decoupled those from their intended purpose and designed vipassana, pranayama and yoga. Super unnatural, as all things leading to transcendence necessarily need to be, because to act as a direct function of your design is to be an animal and a slave of Satan.