My pal Mike Johnston has posted a good article about lens quality. I am totally with him: I love great lenses... and at the same time, nobody will be able to tell whether you took a picture with a 50-dollar standard lens or a 2000-dollar standard lens.
It's like buying a Lamborghini. You won't get there faster if you drive by the law, you get one for the pride and pleasure of owning something really fine. Which is not something to be sneezed at, but it has little to do with the photos you make.
(Photo by Mike Johnston.)
4 comments:
That smile is a work of art in itself!
I wouldn't mind if you told me you shot this with a pierced cardboard box (the "prehistoric" pinhole camera). :-)
I don't understand the article. He starts of philosophical about how the quality of the lens contributes very little to the final product. But then he abruptly goes into listing "some of the best 50mm lenses" by their detailed type numbers, and ends the article there.
Great photos, though.
Reminds me of an article on Luminous Landscape where an engineer is quoted as saying the very same f1.4 SMC Takumar would be worth 1000$, not 50$, were it to be manufactured today. I have its Pentax-M cousin and I can't wait till I get a camera body to put on it ;-)
Oh, by the way, I believe I first heard about Luminous Landscape in one of your blog posts a few years ago... that may well be what awakened my interest in photography.
The difference I think is more in the way you feel about the tool you're using. My all time favorite is the 80mm Planar 2.8, and I've got a Hassy and a Rolleiflex with the same lens. Same pictures? No. There's a different feel, a different level of involvement with the subject. The slight hesitation with the Hassy, knowing that the machine is going to make one heck of a racket when the shutter is released, as opposed to the whisper of the Rollei, the slight difference in the viewfinder, knowing the Hassy is going to be more accurate in recording the image, and above all the different mistique of the tradition behind the cameras all combine to make very different images.
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