Posted by ndr 7 days ago
https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05
is a fantastic wide aperture lens which is commercially available, affordable and a great value. Personally I tend to get bored if I am walking around with a 50mm lens but with that lens, the challenge of manual focus, the ability to take photos with hardly any light, and the ability to take dreamy photos like people have never seen I have so much fun. They make it for all the major camera brands.
Overall I am impressed with Chinese lens manufacturers who make other lenses like
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/
which again are a great value and let me take pictures you haven't seen before.
Another fun, small one is the Korean brand Samyang (also sold as Rokinon, Bower, and some other names). Their 12mm f/2.0 manual wide angle is excellent despite being quite cheap. Photos I take with it often get a unique look that I can't really explain.
I'd probably opt for the 50mm f/1.2 since it's 1/3 the price of the f/1.05 (£90 vs £260 for the M43 mount) if I didn't already have double-digit number of 50s in PK mount that I use with an adapter (and they're surprisingly good for 30-50 year old lenses.)
(I've got a 7A 10mm f/3.5 that I've not really got around to using much but now the UK is heading into Fake Summer, there's more light to make it useful.)
But I do wish my Sony 50 was a little less noisy/slow. Suppose I should pick up the GM version at some point.
The images at the end of the post are indeed amazing, but I find it funny that we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning.
For most of the history of moving pictures, cinema had the exact opposite problem: it looked for the deepest depth-of-field possible in order to make every part of the image count and not waste it to blurriness.
It's a weird reversal of expectations.
Nicco here. I didn't use a shallow depth of field here for either reason. I wanted it because all of those scenes are memories of years ago compared to the main events. Thus, I wanted to give the feeling of details blurring out as memories fade. By contrast, I shot the main events at ~f8 on the Helios, so the background is quite sharp.
You're gonna love it.
Unless you find yourself building an open source rotary film processing system, which is a possibility we can't rule out. :)
Not only do many see it as a sign of quality, it lets you ignore the set and stage more than ever. Imperfections? Anomalies? Bah they're blurred out of recognition. Of course it can be used still mindfully and tastefully however such nuance is ever more rare.
Most of my cameras both digital and film alike are medium format. While I'm more of a photographer than someone who does much with video it pains me to have to remind people regularly, just because I can get insanely shallow DoF with the creamiest bokeh they've seen doesn't mean it always makes sense to. Theres a story to be told with foregrounds and backgrounds, and how they can be used to guide the viewer.
It's not necessarily a sign of "quality", but it is something we see less often, which makes it more interesting. Phone cameras can't do shallow depth of field, for example.
And of course, the human eye also has a limited DoF range. It is interesting to see things in a way that we cannot directly perceive.
White bread did this, as did purple dye, and synthetic materials.
The only reason why people think this is valuable is that it’s scarce, and scarcity is a terrible metric for art
The exterior shots I've got more mixed feelings about. I think these shallow lenses work best when you have a very controlled backdrop that can be deliberately staged. Using it in a wide outdoor shot feels like a real risk unless you're doing some Kubrickian blocking to make sure everyone is arranged just-so. Or you're making them stand stock-still.
> My camera sensor size is 35mm by 24mm. Multiplied by 12, we get 420mm by 288mm. That's, uh, 42cm by 29cm. It's, like, pretty big. That's the size of a painting you'd hang on your wall. This gives us two issues:
> Firstly, such a sensor simply doesn't exist. …
The Vera Rubins telescope camera has a diameter of 64cm!
<https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vera-rubin-observatory-d...>
Of course everything has to remain quite still…
Next level indeed: https://youtu.be/KSvjJGbFCws
There’s also (maybe) http://largesense.com
https://www.mcad.edu/events/visiting-artist-lecture-alec-sot...
Kudos to him for exploring it though! The leftover wax could supply a small candle making operation.
Spellcheck wouldn't help here because definitively is also a word, just not the "write" one :)
This isn’t necessarily true when using a retrofocus wideangle design (as most modern ultrawide lenses do).
From an optical point of view, light does not bend differently just because you put a differently-sized rectangle somewhere in its path. Or to put it another way, if you cut the edges off your sensor, that won’t alter the image on the remaining area of the sensor.
Only in the sense that you generally use a smaller sensor because you want your camera to be small.
If you take a full frame SLR and attach a 100mm f1.8 lens to it, you’ll get a shallow depth of field. Now crop that image down to an area of the sensor corresponding to the size of a phone sensor, and the cropped image will have the exact same depth of field.
> Now, here's the kicker: the bigger the focusing lens is, the larger the cone of light rays is, meaning the the out of focus parts of the image will be more out of focus
From the page [0] it takes the depth of focus image from:
> [Depth of focus] differs from depth of field because it describes the distance over which light is focused at the camera's sensor, as opposed to the subject
[0] https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.h...
Depth of focus isn’t really relevant to the rendering of an image (except insofar as you want your camera to be built to sufficient tolerances that a sharp image can be obtained when desired).
I assumed you were using “depth of focus” to mean “depth of field”. If you really meant “depth of focus”, then I would say you are mistaken in thinking that the author’s goal is to obtain a narrow depth of focus.
FWIW, here is what Claude has to say:
>> Is depth of focus, as opposed to depth of field, generally relevant to practical photography?
> Not really, no. Depth of focus and depth of field are related but distinct concepts, and for practical photography, depth of field is what matters almost all the time.
> Depth of field refers to the zone in front of the camera where subjects appear acceptably sharp. This is what photographers think about constantly: choosing apertures to blur backgrounds in portraits, stopping down for landscapes to keep everything sharp, figuring out hyperfocal distance, etc.
> Depth of focus refers to the tolerance zone behind the lens, at the image plane (the sensor or film), within which the image remains acceptably sharp. It tells you how precisely the sensor needs to be positioned relative to the lens for focus to be maintained.
> For the overwhelming majority of photographers, depth of focus is invisible because it's a manufacturing and engineering concern, not a shooting concern. Camera makers deal with it when designing bodies and ensuring sensor flatness, lens mount tolerances, and autofocus calibration. You encounter it indirectly if you ever need to calibrate autofocus micro-adjustments, shim a lens, or diagnose back/front focus issues, but you don't actively manipulate it while composing a shot.