Preferences and Prejudices
My goal here is to produce pleasing images, ideally on paper.
This means, for me, character trumps technical perfection. By this I mean that I’m looking for lenses that draw in a pleasing manner. Yes, I want high contrast, and great resolution, and all that, but when I look back into the photos I’ve created in the past that I’ve loved the most I’m drawn to certain lenses that see the world in a particular way. I’m a photographer, so I love images that I can view on a pixel level that amaze me with their resolution and clarity, but I care more about compelling images than something that’s more perfect but a bit sterile.
My personal bias is for lenses that can isolate a subject in a pleasing manner. This tends to mean high local contrast around the subject, and a gradual, pleasing fall-off into the out of focus areas. This means good bokeh lots of times, but not necessarily – there are some lenses that didn’t have good bokeh that still produced lovely renditions of scenes (the lens that comes to mind is the 90mm Zeiss Planar on the Hasselblad 500C). This was a 150mm on Bronica 645 format:
What’s compelling to me about that image (technically) is how well the subject is isolated, and the rest of the image just sort of drifts off into nonexistence. It’s got a pleasing overall feel, is sharp enough where it needs to be, and is pleasant to look at. It’s got character. You’re drawn in to the subject, and you are interacting with her rather than with a scene with her in it, because the design of the lens facilitates that subtly but effectively.
Now, lenses that have the sort of character that I like tend to be older lens designs that have stood the test of time. They have weird names like Distagon, or Planar, or Summicron or Summilux. Well tested, well loved, and just good. Most of these are from an age where lenses were designed on paper using a pencil, and now we live in an age where lenses are designed in software.
And software lens design is good. We get great, measurable performance from lenses that are designed from the first principles in physics, and we get good resolution, little to no light fall-off across the frame, minimization of “defects” that cause things like purple fringing or glare when a powerful light source is in the frame; often though, these lenses are optimized for performance on test charts rather than for their overall pleasing rendition of the scenes they are photographing.
In the modern era, there are a few companies that try hard to create lenses that have both character and great optical performance, and these are the sorts of lenses and systems I buy.
I would say that Leica, Fuji, and Olympus are among the lens designers that really try to maximize character in their lenses, or at least are designers that have some “character-above-all” lenses in their lens catalogs.
PanaLeica
This is the system I am evaluating – a Panasonic G9 II which is a small (micro-Four-Thirds) sensor camera with 25 megapixels of resolution.
The nice thing about this system is that they have a series of lenses that are Leica branded, where Leica (known for the character of their lenses and their uncompromising build quality) influences the design of the lens and signs off on the quality of the finished product. These tend to be those lovely, time-tested designs that are tweaked for optimal performance using software and technically advanced lens coatings.
My hope is that this will be a Poor Man’s Leica, because while I would prefer to shoot with a Leica SL3, I find $900 for a new lens much more palatable than $6,000 for a comparable lens.
All of the m4/3 lenses I am evaluating are part of the Panasonic/Leica collaboration.
Pentax Full Frame
The Pentax comparison camera is a K-1, which many might consider old because it was introduced in 2016, but the images this sensor produces still hold up. This is a full-frame 36 megapixel camera that I think is (still) a great platform. It also offers IBIS, as do all cameras being evaluated.
The lenses used in these comparisons will be the Limited lens line. These are a bit special – Pentax brought in renowned photographers to guide the design process, and the designs were not evaluated based on MTF charts and objective and measurable performance tests. Instead, all the designs were evaluated by reviewing large prints, and those that created the best images were moved into production and assembled by hand, using the best materials available at the time.
These lenses are something special, and are well loved by the Pentax community. They aren’t perfect though – they were created in the film era (mostly), and they show some flaws (like purple fringing on bright edges) that more modern designs don’t show, but overall they are wonderful performers.
These are all fast prime lenses. Most are faster than f2 (the exception being the 21mm f2.4) and are lightweight and portable, which I’m looking for.
The exception here is the 100mm Macro lens, which is the exact same design as the Schneider-Kreuznach D-Xenon lens. This is known to be about perfect in all those testable performance metrics, but it also renders subjects in a very pleasing way. This may be the perfect macro lens.
Here’s a test shot I took of this lens last week when I took it out of storage to make sure it still worked well. Look at how well the salt shaker is rendered, and how cleanly everything out of focus just kind of blends into the background in a visually pleasing manner. It’s just smooth, and this photo was taken at f5.6 – opening it up wider gives an even more profound look.
Fuji GFX
This might be the best camera system for people who value image quality above all else. This is a “medium format” camera with lenses of uncompromising quality. While this isn’t medium format in the traditional sense (which I interpret as a sensor at least 6cm x 4,5cm in dimensions), it’s larger than full-frame 35mm format, and as such it has great advantages as far as light gathering, the quality of the pixels, and the additional subject separation you can get because at a given perspective a larger lens is required than with smaller formats, so you get shorter depth of field.
This is great for portraits, but for landscapes or other images where you want everything from near to far to be in focus this requires some planning and workarounds.
But the cameras are very high resolution and produce amazing images. The lenses are quite nice as well, though I only have one lens at the moment (the cheapest one.) The biggest problems with this platform are:
- Size and weight. It’s bigger than a DSLR, and the lenses are bigger than DSLR lenses, because of physics. This isn’t a deal killer – if women can suffer through wearing high heals for Beauty, I can carry a heavier bag for Art.
- Cost. These lenses aren’t cheap. If I were to splurge on the lenses I want to have, new, I’d be putting used car money into my photo bag.
- The lens range isn’t ideal. With the Leica lenses for the m4/3 kit, I can buy three lenses and cover wide angle (16mm full frame equivalent) to moderate telephoto (200mm equivalent) perspectives and do so at f2.8 across most of the lens range. With the Fuji, it’s kind of a sparse lens landscape, and real sacrifices need to be made. What is available is amazing, but I want more than exists.
With that said, this platform is amazing as far as quality is concerned. I have the 50S II camera body (because 50 megapixels is enough for my printing needs), and the images this produces are amazing.
This is an unedited RAW file from the camera, followed by a close-up showing pixel level detail:
That’s an incredible amount of detail, and the files are very easy to work with. While I haven’t printed big prints from this system yet, I’m confident I can print big prints from it and be happy.
But do I need that level of detail?
That’s what I’m trying to answer with this series. Is it possible to scale back from the “best” to something more affordable and manageable, and stillproduce results I’m proud of?
I’ll let you know in the coming weeks and months.
