Notes on life, art, photography and technology, by a Danish dropout bohemian.
When you drink the water, remember the river.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Big and bigger
I just love overkill... How about a lens weighing in at 250 kilos! Don't try to use it hand-held.
8 comments:
Anonymous
said...
You gotta say yes to another excess!
This lens has been widely mentioned around the net, but not much has been said about the owner or what he truly intends to do with it.
My educated guess is that he uses it to take candid shots of girls on a far away beach from the comfort of his own balcony. That is at least what I would use it for.
You mean apart from the claimed purpose of shooting wildlife?
Well that might of course just be a circumscription for what you're suggesting, but I thought it did have some plausibility.
I would think that with that sort of money one could organise other ways of photographing girls than with a long lens from the balcony - besides that I'm not sure there's much to train it on at the beaches of Qatar. It's not exactly inconspicuous, either.
But now you're asking - who knows, and will the world ever know? I, for one, would surely like to see some shots made with this lens, whatever the subject may be.
The bulk of the lens comes from the high speed of it. The focal length is actually on a bit more than twice the 600mm lenses the sports photographers are using. In other words it's not as extraordinary as it looks.
The focal length of 1700mm in connection with a Hasselblad is comparable with having a 1000mm lens with a 35mm camera, or a 600-something lens with an APS-size sensor like the consumer SLRs. All about 20x enlargement compared with what's considered a "normal" lens.
So the focal length itself is quite nice but not so unusual - in the small format range, that is; for medium format it is in fact quite extraordinary.
Also an f-stop of 4 means an effective opening of 425mm (17") which is unheard of outside of astronomy (and possibly the military - I wouldn't have a clue about that).
The huge opening firstly gives the photographer much more manoeuvering space with regards to low light and/or moving objects and/or low sensor/film speed (fine grain/low noise). Secondly the depth of field would be spectacularly narrow, e.g. just 80cm (32") either way at a distance of 100m.
Given that this is a Zeiss lens I would expect it to be tack-sharp (to say the least) fully open, and we're talking about some real resolution here, it being medium format, so they can easily be printed to over a meter (or yard) square, quite probably much larger than that, while still being tack-sharp (at reading distance, not "standard viewing distance").
Couple that with the narrow DOF and tell me that you wouldn't like to see those pics? I think I don't need to see them to be pretty sure that they would blow you away, but I'd certainly enjoy just that happening (in this particular way) to me!
Now there's a discussion about Bokeh waiting... ;-)
"Not as extraordinary", give me a break! :-P
(LOL! Or were you just being controversial to get the discussion going? :-D)
pleas excuse my typing i am recovernig from trying to use it hand-held ouch using a pencil in my mouth on the keybroad is hard but if you lived in qatar you too woold be desperate to see a woman's face at least i have a nurse caring for me at home now yay
8 comments:
You gotta say yes to another excess!
This lens has been widely mentioned around the net, but not much has been said about the owner or what he truly intends to do with it.
My educated guess is that he uses it to take candid shots of girls on a far away beach from the comfort of his own balcony. That is at least what I would use it for.
Really?
If you had the kind of money that lens costs?
The price hasn't been revealed but realistic estimates place it somewhere around 200-250. Thousand. Euro.
Well I'm just asking... ;-)
Sure thing. What other applications do you foresee?
You mean apart from the claimed purpose of shooting wildlife?
Well that might of course just be a circumscription for what you're suggesting, but I thought it did have some plausibility.
I would think that with that sort of money one could organise other ways of photographing girls than with a long lens from the balcony - besides that I'm not sure there's much to train it on at the beaches of Qatar.
It's not exactly inconspicuous, either.
But now you're asking - who knows, and will the world ever know?
I, for one, would surely like to see some shots made with this lens, whatever the subject may be.
The bulk of the lens comes from the high speed of it. The focal length is actually on a bit more than twice the 600mm lenses the sports photographers are using.
In other words it's not as extraordinary as it looks.
The focal length of 1700mm in connection with a Hasselblad is comparable with having a 1000mm lens with a 35mm camera, or a 600-something lens with an APS-size sensor like the consumer SLRs. All about 20x enlargement compared with what's considered a "normal" lens.
So the focal length itself is quite nice but not so unusual - in the small format range, that is; for medium format it is in fact quite extraordinary.
Also an f-stop of 4 means an effective opening of 425mm (17") which is unheard of outside of astronomy (and possibly the military - I wouldn't have a clue about that).
The huge opening firstly gives the photographer much more manoeuvering space with regards to low light and/or moving objects and/or low sensor/film speed (fine grain/low noise). Secondly the depth of field would be spectacularly narrow, e.g. just 80cm (32") either way at a distance of 100m.
Given that this is a Zeiss lens I would expect it to be tack-sharp (to say the least) fully open, and we're talking about some real resolution here, it being medium format, so they can easily be printed to over a meter (or yard) square, quite probably much larger than that, while still being tack-sharp (at reading distance, not "standard viewing distance").
Couple that with the narrow DOF and tell me that you wouldn't like to see those pics? I think I don't need to see them to be pretty sure that they would blow you away, but I'd certainly enjoy just that happening (in this particular way) to me!
Now there's a discussion about Bokeh waiting... ;-)
"Not as extraordinary", give me a break! :-P
(LOL! Or were you just being controversial to get the discussion going? :-D)
pleas excuse my typing i am recovernig from trying to use it hand-held
ouch
using a pencil in my mouth on the keybroad is hard
but if you lived in qatar you too woold be desperate to see a woman's face
at least i have a nurse caring for me at home now
yay
at least i have a nurse caring for me at home now
What, a female nurse?
So the investment did finally pay off, after all...
Well I hope you don't get better too soon, then! ;-P
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