Very few lenses in my photo backpack have autofocus, even new lenses like the Laowa 12/2.8, the 8mm Fisheye or the Samyang 14/2.8 are built completely manually. I don’t find that particularly difficult. The only thing I have to do without is the autofocus on the very old lenses. In some cases this is quite easy, sometimes a little more difficult. Almost any lens can be used on almost any digital camera with the ability to change the lens. The path that the light travels is made up entirely of glass, no matter how many other electronic gadgets are built into the lens housing. Light enters at the front and comes out at the back. However, I find it very worrying when salespeople in specialist photo shops say things like that and the aspiring amateur photographer believes and parrots them.Įven without an A-level physics course, it should be clear to everyone that a lens is always analogue. It’s one thing for the salesman in the “stupid is cool” shop to spread such untruths after all, he wants to sell something and usually doesn’t care whether the happy customer comes back next week. If I had received 1 euro every time for saying “You can’t use an old analogue lens on a digital camera”, I would be rich, very rich. Sometimes, at the end of the performance, I open the aperture to 2.8 or even 2 to capture weak residual light in a relatively short time. In most of our light painting pictures, the aperture ring is set to values between 5.6 and 16. In light painting, I don’t need lenses with f1.8 or f1.4 anyway, because the risk of burning out the light trail would be far too great for most pictures. Only in astrophotography can I capture one or two more celestial bodies on the sensor with the larger aperture than with f2.8, despite very high ISO values. But in the end, I usually reach my destination with the 190 hp Toyota just as quickly as the Porsche when I drive 300 kilometres through Germany. But of course f1.4 sounds as impressive as 500 hp in a passenger car. And, in order to free the lady from the background, aperture f2.8 is easily sufficient at 85 mm focal length. The normal viewer finds the portrait better if not only the eyelashes of the left eye of the pretty lady are in focus. Portraits taken with an 85 mm lens at f1.4 are usually only pleasing to the owner of the expensive lens. Oh yes, there was something else… “Cropping”. Thanks to the high dynamic range of modern sensors, you can also tease out a lot of initially invisible information from the RAW image during post-processing. With the Nikon D750 I can take very usable pictures with ISO values of 6400 or even higher. But nowadays fast lenses are actually unnecessary. Most of them stopped at ISO 3200 and the pictures with ISO 3200 were often unusable because of the strong image noise. And even on the first digital cameras, very fast lenses were still useful. Instead of the very coarse-grained film with ISO 3200, I could then insert the more pleasing film with ISO 800 into the camera. Why do I need lenses with aperture f1.8 or even larger in 2019? In analogue photography, such lenses had their raison d’être in many areas, such as concert photography. Blur and vignette draw the viewer’s eye to the actual subject, which is usually more in the centre of the picture. What is there to see in the corners of most pictures? Exactly, nothing. For 99.99999% of all pictures it doesn’t matter if the lens is sharp in the corners at open aperture and shows no vignette. A good picture needs a good idea and good light… and sometimes a little luck. You don’t need sophisticated post processing to take a good picture. You don’t need a lens with a resolution of 85 lp/mm to take a good picture. You don’t need 50 megapixels for a good picture. When working with old, “imperfect” manual fixed focal lengths, it is often much easier to concentrate on the essentials. However, despite, or perhaps even because of, the technical shortcomings, this picture immediately takes the viewer into the scene and the subject. Sometimes, however, there is a ray of hope, like the World Press Photo 2015, which is “technically” a disaster, blurred, noisy, the head of the protagonist cropped, etc. Many photographers are increasingly losing sight of the essentials and are concentrating their work mainly on some technical parameters and counting pixels. The highest resolution and the most sophisticated post processing count more than the actual image. What the new high-tech lenses usually lack, however, is character, just as photography in general is increasingly losing its soul. They have a high resolution, the brightness is approximately the same throughout the image, they are relatively insensitive to backlighting, etc. The vast majority of newer lenses are optimised for the best possible image quality and packed with electronics, at least the somewhat better and more expensive ones.
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