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.

Today I went out to take pictures against my better judgment, because the wind is so strong, it keeps moving the vegetation around and you basically can’t get anything still or in focus, especially if you’re doing closeups, as I was. However, I wanted to test something, so here we are.

I assembled a setup that’s closest to my (almost) first camera, the Minolta X-300 with the MD 35-70mm f/3.5 lens. Instead of the X-300 and Kodak gold 200 film that I commonly used, I used my old Sony A7II with an adapter, but other than the camera being 24MP full frame digital, the setup is functionally remarkably similar, giving me most of the feeling of working with film (manual focus and all that) while avoiding the hassle of having to develop and scan actual film.

The most remarkable thing about this experiment is that I expected to feel a sense of nostalgia, going back in time, using my old lens that I learned photography with and so on. There was none of that. The lens felt awkward, foreign, unintuitive to use because of the macro setting that basically moves the optics away from the film plane like a built-in extension tube when you run out of space on the focus ring to focus closer, and not having the autofocus was actually not that much of a problem because of the wind moving things, that made accurate focus impossible, so I just had to feel it.

Sure, it’s not actually my old lens; that one was lost while moving, in addition to previous situations that resulted in having to rebuild my Minolta system for scratch because I actually lost all of them; long story, but I decided I actually want to have them back, if only to compare with my modern lenses or if I happen to feel nostalgic about the film days. Fortunately, I got four lenses for the average of 50 EUR each, so it wasn’t an expensive indulgence, and there’s only so much you can learn by taking pictures of empty coffee cups, so I went out to see if such a setup would be worthwhile today.

It surprised me to find out how out of shape I am with the manual focus thing, and how absolutely zero nostalgia this triggered in me. It felt mostly awkward, with camera and lens not behaving the way I’m used to these days, and the results didn’t actually look like photos from my old ISO 200 negative days either. They looked like the stuff I took reasonably recently with the same camera and the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro lens, only less crisp, with worse bokeh and worse colours and the general look usually associated with old optics. Sure, if I wanted to make moody evocative photos on a gloomy day, that might be just what I want, but the nostalgia thing just didn’t happen with me, sorry. What’s surprising is that I ended up with over 15 winners, in that short walk, despite strong wind and the fact that I wasn’t familiar with the equipment, as strange as that sounds considering I used A7II since 2015 and the Minolta lens since 1984 to early 2000s. But that’s the truth – I haven’t actually used A7II with manual lenses for, well, ten years, and that’s a lot for muscle memory. That, however, is not really important, because it didn’t matter. What did matter is finding out that my style didn’t just magically revert into the early 2000s just because I returned to the lens I used then. In fact, nothing changed but the gear, and the gear was, well… worse. I mean, it’s not worse to the extent that I can’t make decent pictures with it, but I didn’t have any sort of epiphany about how great the old stuff was and how it can do everything the new stuff can. It’s just… meh. It’s worse, and not just worse than my best modern glass, it’s worse than my worst modern glass. I think the FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens that I replaced would perform better in every way, other than probably needing macro extenders for closeups. I mean, sure, the old lens creates a look that’s hard if not impossible to replicate with modern lenses, but if I react emotionally to something, it’s the crispness, clarity and smoothness of the modern lenses, where detail is perfectly sharp, and the rolloff is smooth as butter, the colours are clear and crisp, and there’s no stupid bullshit with white balance measuring greenish when the lens is open. I like that crisp, bright and clear look so much I basically bought every single modern lens that I found useful, regardless of them being expensive as all fuck, just because I feel so good about them. They are something I once would have dreamed about, if I knew it were possible.

In the days of early digital, I once said on a photography newsgroup that I would be satisfied with a Minolta MD digital body with a 35mm sensor, that I can mount my old lenses on, and just keep making pictures the way I’m used to. Now that I can try doing exactly that – with the only difference that the digital body isn’t an SLR that I expected, and it isn’t a MD specific body, but one that can adapt almost any glass to it, I can say with conviction that I was completely wrong. Those modern lenses… they are absolutely magical in their clarity, crispness and lack of all the stupid bullshit I once tolerated simply because I didn’t know better.

That’s an interesting thing about this life, as well. We got used to it, and we see death as something scary, because it means losing what we are used to, without first seeing where we are heading, and knowing if it’s better. Before I tried modern lenses and digital sensors, I’d actually fight to keep my old Minoltas and film, because it was all I knew, and I loved what it did for me, even if it frequently made me struggle and fail. But once I got used to the modern gear, it’s actually traumatic to revisit the old stuff, and I find the experience highly educational.

Similarly, when I have an experience of the “other side”, when the memory is fresh and immediate I could just shed the flesh without a single thought. As weeks pass, the memory fades, and I no longer feel that way; the physical experience, again, becomes all I am immediately familiar with, and I would instinctively try to protect it, and fear what comes next… if I don’t immediately experience it.  If you’re in a dungeon long enough, you’ll feel afraid of getting out. It’s something we all need to keep in mind. Lack of immediate familiarity with where you’re heading creates fear, and attachment to the known.