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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2bIAEqt:
torrilin:
bomberqueen17:
ineptshieldmaid:
bomberqueen17 replied to your photoset:shirazade:
Oscar Isaac photographed by Mark…
the thing i’m most jealous of in that shot is that it’s clearly a f/1.4 or even 1.2 lens which is like a giant sheet of glass, to get that shallow a depth of field, and I’m like, rolling around in agonies of jealousy here
That is a point. Does everyone look amazingly good at low depth of field, I wonder? Flowers tend to. Perhaps people are like flowers.
sigh. no. not everyone looks amazing. it turns out it’s really hard to use a lens like that. not that i’ve had that much practice.more than many people, though. i do work in a camera store. i used to play with the expensive merchandise and get excited about it back when i had human emotions.
Weird lenses like a Lensbaby can make really pedestrian stuff look neat. Apparently the way I wind up using one fools various computer algorithms into thinking its a super bright huge prime. Dunno. Since so much of my defaults are about macro, I get very cranky about depth of field. And then when I do use super bright primes, I spend the whole time pissed off because the depth of field is wrong and bad and too small and everything is terrible. My Lensbaby somewhere in f4-f8 tends to be much more what I want.
But also, most super bright primes just aren’t for macro. Like at all. They’re for other stuff that I can’t seem to figure out. I know a lot if people get very excitable about them and stuff, but when I’ve tried, I end up with really really strange pictures that don’t say anything or make sense.
I’ve never used a Lensbaby. They’re an attachment, aren’t they? I thought they went onto an existing lens. I could be wrong about that. But they’re a special effect tool, and as such, kind of outside my experience.
Yes– it’s important to distinguish that shallow depth of field and macro focus are totally different things. Those really cool flower pictures are macro shots, with a lens that magnifies the subject to be the same size on the film as in real life. (That’s what 1:1 means, when it’s on a lens.)
(last year, queen anne’s lace, 50mm f/1.8 macro, literally the first macro shot i could find on my desktop)
Bright primes are useful partly because the wide aperture can isolate the subject from a background, like in the original Oscar Isaac pictures that started this discussion. It’s a great tool.
But the main reason those lenses are like they are is that no lens is at its best wide open. Most lenses perform best in the middle of their range– closed down a few stops. My 35mm f/1.8 does best at about 2.5 or 3.6, and by then your depth of field is starting to get pretty thick. So if you start at 1.4 or 1.2, you’re still really wide open when you hit the lens’s sweet spot.
The point of those bright primes is that they’re so sharp, so high-quality, and so you can use them so wide open. They expand the amount of light available to you, and let you isolate your subject, and let you capture detail on a level most zooms don’t.
The key to using them is to pick one that’s a focal length you shoot at normally. I have an all-in-one zoom, and i just went through and looked at my photos and figured out what range I used most, and got some primes in that range. I have an 85 whose images I love tremendously, but it’s almost never the right lens for the situation; you get these great intimate close-up shots, but you’ve got to be across the room to get them. So I have a 35 that’s often great, but I can only shoot scenes, not portraits. So I wind up using a 17-50 zoom almost all the time, because literally no matter what lens I use, it’s the wrong one for where my subject is.
(I have a crop-sensor camera, so those numbers are for the DX lenses. 35 on a crop is like 50 on a film camera.)
85:
same thing at 10mm with a 10-24 not-very-fast zoom, from approximately the same position, though different camera settings probably:
So it’s not just the different area captured, it’s that the detail looks different too.
For completeness, here’s the 35 prime:
that’s closed down pretty far, the depth of field is deep (on purpose, though the wood grain of the door is totally not necessary I totally shot this in the let-camera-decide mode, don’t even pretend I cared what I was doing), but the details are more sharply rendered than it would be at the same setting with my all-in-one zoom. Presumably, anyway.
I don’t care about these things as much as most of the people I sell equipment to. But it’s a thing, and it’s a valid thing. Mostly, though, I bought my lenses when I mostly shot sports in low light, so I was just trying to get more light any possible way I could, and that meant all fast primes.
Bonus 85 shot:
Note that this was me trying to get a photo of my father on a ladder, blurry in the background, and realizing I could not actually compose a shot that contained enough of him and the context to make it work. So the petunias were my consolation prize; I missed the shot I wanted because it was totally the wrong lens.
Note, though: not a macro shot. Wide open, non-macro, prime.
torrilin:
bomberqueen17:
ineptshieldmaid:
bomberqueen17 replied to your photoset:shirazade:
Oscar Isaac photographed by Mark…
the thing i’m most jealous of in that shot is that it’s clearly a f/1.4 or even 1.2 lens which is like a giant sheet of glass, to get that shallow a depth of field, and I’m like, rolling around in agonies of jealousy here
That is a point. Does everyone look amazingly good at low depth of field, I wonder? Flowers tend to. Perhaps people are like flowers.
sigh. no. not everyone looks amazing. it turns out it’s really hard to use a lens like that. not that i’ve had that much practice.more than many people, though. i do work in a camera store. i used to play with the expensive merchandise and get excited about it back when i had human emotions.
Weird lenses like a Lensbaby can make really pedestrian stuff look neat. Apparently the way I wind up using one fools various computer algorithms into thinking its a super bright huge prime. Dunno. Since so much of my defaults are about macro, I get very cranky about depth of field. And then when I do use super bright primes, I spend the whole time pissed off because the depth of field is wrong and bad and too small and everything is terrible. My Lensbaby somewhere in f4-f8 tends to be much more what I want.
But also, most super bright primes just aren’t for macro. Like at all. They’re for other stuff that I can’t seem to figure out. I know a lot if people get very excitable about them and stuff, but when I’ve tried, I end up with really really strange pictures that don’t say anything or make sense.
I’ve never used a Lensbaby. They’re an attachment, aren’t they? I thought they went onto an existing lens. I could be wrong about that. But they’re a special effect tool, and as such, kind of outside my experience.
Yes– it’s important to distinguish that shallow depth of field and macro focus are totally different things. Those really cool flower pictures are macro shots, with a lens that magnifies the subject to be the same size on the film as in real life. (That’s what 1:1 means, when it’s on a lens.)
(last year, queen anne’s lace, 50mm f/1.8 macro, literally the first macro shot i could find on my desktop)
Bright primes are useful partly because the wide aperture can isolate the subject from a background, like in the original Oscar Isaac pictures that started this discussion. It’s a great tool.
But the main reason those lenses are like they are is that no lens is at its best wide open. Most lenses perform best in the middle of their range– closed down a few stops. My 35mm f/1.8 does best at about 2.5 or 3.6, and by then your depth of field is starting to get pretty thick. So if you start at 1.4 or 1.2, you’re still really wide open when you hit the lens’s sweet spot.
The point of those bright primes is that they’re so sharp, so high-quality, and so you can use them so wide open. They expand the amount of light available to you, and let you isolate your subject, and let you capture detail on a level most zooms don’t.
The key to using them is to pick one that’s a focal length you shoot at normally. I have an all-in-one zoom, and i just went through and looked at my photos and figured out what range I used most, and got some primes in that range. I have an 85 whose images I love tremendously, but it’s almost never the right lens for the situation; you get these great intimate close-up shots, but you’ve got to be across the room to get them. So I have a 35 that’s often great, but I can only shoot scenes, not portraits. So I wind up using a 17-50 zoom almost all the time, because literally no matter what lens I use, it’s the wrong one for where my subject is.
(I have a crop-sensor camera, so those numbers are for the DX lenses. 35 on a crop is like 50 on a film camera.)
85:
same thing at 10mm with a 10-24 not-very-fast zoom, from approximately the same position, though different camera settings probably:
So it’s not just the different area captured, it’s that the detail looks different too.
For completeness, here’s the 35 prime:
that’s closed down pretty far, the depth of field is deep (on purpose, though the wood grain of the door is totally not necessary I totally shot this in the let-camera-decide mode, don’t even pretend I cared what I was doing), but the details are more sharply rendered than it would be at the same setting with my all-in-one zoom. Presumably, anyway.
I don’t care about these things as much as most of the people I sell equipment to. But it’s a thing, and it’s a valid thing. Mostly, though, I bought my lenses when I mostly shot sports in low light, so I was just trying to get more light any possible way I could, and that meant all fast primes.
Bonus 85 shot:
Note that this was me trying to get a photo of my father on a ladder, blurry in the background, and realizing I could not actually compose a shot that contained enough of him and the context to make it work. So the petunias were my consolation prize; I missed the shot I wanted because it was totally the wrong lens.
Note, though: not a macro shot. Wide open, non-macro, prime.
