a darkroom, a room where it is dark

oh no?, mm it said it sent okay (via ilx, right). maybe give it a while & if nothing turns up i'll hit you up some other way. it wasn't like ... an urgent diagnosis or anything?, just shooting the shit.

haha okay - my e-mail is yao dawt daniel at g, the mail company, you know

thanks for the well wishes stet! 'pretty big illness' is probably stretching it compared to what a lot of people have gone through on this board + they don't whinge about it! I'm on the recovery tho

When you factor in the vagaries of printing (chemical or digital, with all the post-processing involved in either), I generally believe that the difference in various similar lenses is almost impossible to discern one lens from another. With modern lenses, the only problem I run into seems to be autofocus - lenses with a tendency to front or back focus to a degree that's almost unnoticeable in the viewfinder but shows up on a 10x15" print.

The important difference in lenses/bodies/etc., to me, is how they let you work. A rangefinder feels different in the hand, carries in a different way, from a digital SLR with a 3 pound zoom hanging off the front.

I process film in buckets in my garage (16mm negative)

But also I will soon be teaching at a school with darkroom, looking forward to that

Also I just got one of those, what now
http://www.mattdentonphoto.com/images/yashicamat_124.jpg

i think you do your wash on like 30 degrees in the top barrel & then just move the load down and set it to spin dry oh wait what?

admrl I had a 124-G as my first TLR, it's a sweet camera!

schlump - so the deal with lenses is that, by what metrics do you measure them? what are the standards that you rate all lenses against? how do you choose those standards, for what reason?

the pretty standard response to that is 'lens sharpness.'

which is kind of bullshit because there are so many factors that go into how we perceive the sharpness of the rendering of a lens - see wikipedia definitions of 'acutance.' you can bump a lenses sharpness in post if you're shooting digital. a sharp lens is also not always preferable - there are lots of telephoto lenses that are 'razor sharp' but also render people in a very unflattering way, since they are so 'clinical.'

people obsess about sharpness - is the lens sharp wide open, is it sharp in the corners wide open (ask yourself: how many times can you remember actively disliking an otherwise great photo just because some detail in the corner was rendered unsharp)? all lenses become pretty sharp stopped down 2-3 stops (around 4, 5.6, 8) for most lenses and become indistinguishable from one another.

I think the following characteristics are more useful for evaluating lenses: resolution, contrast, tonality. resolution - a measure of how much detail the lens can resolve, usually measured in lines per mm - you can use test charts to do so. this is not necessarily related to lens sharpness.

lens contrast - how big a dynamic range the lens renders. modern lenses, for the most part, are high-contrast because that is naturally pleasing to the eye. lenses from before the 70s tend to be much lower contrast, which is great for black and white and for color images too if you like that pale, washed out pastel look.

tonality - how the lens renders transitions in gradations of color. this is related to lens contrast, I think, and is also very subjective. it's also controlled much more by the developing method as well.

the problem with the last two characteristics is that they're really subjective and hard to measure! much harder than lens sharpness, anyhow. lens sharpness rarely contributes that much to a good picture though, I think? unless you're shooting landscapes. I personally care much more about the contrast/tonality of a picture nowadays than the lens sharpness. in fact one of the lenses in my kit is a 50mm 'sonnar' design which is used primarily because it renders things pretty softly wide open! lovely effect.

in short, you won't see any differences at all between the 50mm you have right now and any other 50mm unless you're using some metric like 'sharpness', and even then does a sharper picture make for a better picture? think of your favorite photos, think of favorite photos taken by other photographers - would any of these photos have been improved by better sharpness? half the time, what we mean when we say "this picture shoulder have been sharper' is that 'this picture should have been focused better'!

When you factor in the vagaries of printing (chemical or digital, with all the post-processing involved in either), I generally believe that the difference in various similar lenses is almost impossible to discern one lens from another. With modern lenses, the only problem I run into seems to be autofocus - lenses with a tendency to front or back focus to a degree that's almost unnoticeable in the viewfinder but shows up on a 10x15" print.

The important difference in lenses/bodies/etc., to me, is how they let you work. A rangefinder feels different in the hand, carries in a different way, from a digital SLR with a 3 pound zoom hanging off the front.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, August 24, 2011 12:15 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

I agree with a lot of this, but I think broadly speaking you can still 'see' differences between lenses - like I shot with a modern 35mm biogon for a while and I can easily pick out the shots with that one versus the ones I took with an old canon RF 35mm from the 60s. if you stick with one film/developer combination and switch lenses, you should get sensitized to the differences over time.

I definitely agree with you in choosing lenses based on how they feel in the hand - lens ergonomics tend to be underrated.

realizing that digital has shown just how much of the film era is artifice - and by extension that artifice reflects onto digital itself now.

Dayo what did you mean by this?
― stet, Tuesday, August 23, 2011 3:58 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

well stet I guess it's as much a part of my own innate assumptions than anything else - until I started to take photography 'seriously' I just took it for granted that pictures were a true depiction of things that were seen in real life, you know, because it's formed from physical light that has struck a physical objected and been recorded by the camera. I never really thought about the 'decisions' that had to be made in order for that recording to be displayed back to us.

but now I think of pictures as, to borrow from winogrand, how the light struck an object and was focused by the lens of a camera onto a piece of recording material, whether that be film or a digital sensor. the camera is not a replacement for the eye and will not be for quite some time - I think that the perfect camera would probably be a device that plugs into your brain and records the signals your eyes send to your brain, because that would actually be a recording of what your eyes see! but for now we have cameras.

so now when I look at a photo I tend to think about what decisions were made to represent that photo - the contrast of the image, the brightness/darkness of an image, the lens used (is it a distorting wide-angle? a compressing telephoto?) the color palette. when you compare a digital photo to a film photo, you realize that film really did distort the picture in terms of the way it rendered color. and there are differences too between what film does and what digital does that's just not in the film grain - it's also in how transitions between out of focus and in focus areas are rendered (I find film to be much more pleasing in this respect), in how long tonalities are rendered (here we see the common complaint that digital is too 'plasticky'). the 's-curve' is also much more evident in film than with the flat, linear response of a digital sensor.

at the end of the day, even a straight processed RAW file is going to look pretty different than the actual scene that was captured. I guess that's what I mean by the 'artifice' of photography. probably pretty obvious to all of you guys!

such a great run of posts, dayo: thanks for the breakdown. feeling slightly empowered at being able to confidently rebuff the idea of investing in the non-specific improved functioning of a superior 50mm.

tonality - how the lens renders transitions in gradations of color. this is related to lens contrast, I think, and is also very subjective. it's also controlled much more by the developing method as well.

one of the articles you linked upthread (the one i hadn't heard of the author of) was really good at pointing out shots that were 'sharp', maybe to the detriment of the images, & then also touching on images that had the leica 'look' on account of, (i think), gradation of colour and then also that interplay between the content in & out of focus. & that's probably something i'm more interested in, which film & light seem to be bigger determinants of in my experimentation with cameras. there is a local guy, here, who takes photos a lot & teaches & stuff, & is technically on another level, and occasionally sets up his MF camera in town to shoot people, posting the results online. and they're really good, strong photos, but how stern the handling of light is - eg, in rendering faces with enough pronounced variations in tone so as to make everyone look variegated + blotchy, & so texturally diverse to appear made of stone - really detracts from their effect as the portraits-of-people they're intended as, i think, making something else that is perhaps as interesting, but really diverging from capturing the people involved, because of that discrepancy.

half the time, what we mean when we say "this picture shoulder have been sharper' is that 'this picture should have been focused better'!

please do not take away my ability to blame my tools / otm

so now when I look at a photo I tend to think about what decisions were made to represent that photo - the contrast of the image, the brightness/darkness of an image, the lens used (is it a distorting wide-angle? a compressing telephoto?) the color palette. when you compare a digital photo to a film photo, you realize that film really did distort the picture in terms of the way it rendered color.)

i think what's funny about this, though, is that there's a loop made by, first, understanding & resigning yourself to the artifice of it all, and, then, coming back to seeing it as a kind of truth in accepting that while all of those things were indeed variables & manipulated, it was to the end of capturing & encapsulating 'something', the threads of which float disparately amid a real life scene but that you might get a chance to tie up to give an impression of a sum total that could never be captured. so obviously cf: picasso, art is a lie that tells the truth, or herzog's ecstatic truth, beyond facts to convey spirit (i like this andrew marr article on being painted by hockney, actually countering the capacity of photography in this respect, but about capturing something nonetheless (also has a precis of his fascinating secret-history stuff about camera lucidas & the old masters). there's this chris fujiwara thing about contemporary cinema i just read:

Contemporary art film has its already established dominant traditions, the main one being the extending of photographic realism to the hallucinatory degree where the image is so saturated with reality that the viewer becomes aware of being faced with a gallery-installation subversion of documentary realism that throws the construction of reality back on the viewer

which i thought about a lot & names a thing i hadn't quite understood the process of, & seems relevant. i go back and forth when i think of someone like eggleston, in whose photos there is a simultaneous unreality - shit just isn't that vivid; it just isn't that focal in anyone passing's actual vision!, and yet who seems to be able to fold a lot of actuality or truth or insight into the objects or people he's shooting (cf this is a fucking trike, even if the thing he was photographing was just a tricycle). & i also think that there's something about that physicality of photography in its backdrops; the presence of objects being in a certain time at a certain place is as close a thing as i can get to considering something 'objective' rather than subjective, & that photography collaterally captures that stuff on some sorta factual level is p interesting & significant i think (like i like this in films, just the fact of seeing a place not so much 'definitely as it was' but just probably 'in a way that couldn't be avoided', so even if you don't end up with something that conforms to a truth of geography you get the fact of the presence of things in the background).

aw thanks schlump I'm really just regurgitating what others have said ad infinitum and what is probably taught in any basic photography class. otm about eggleston, as much as people like to clown hipsters for latching onto him he really is unique, and stephen shore is no replacement. I bought this: for now but haven't had a chance to look at it and now probably won't get a chance until december but I'm stoked. and yeah, a close study of eggleston is a great way to learn about the differences between film rendering and digital rendering. 14 pictures was a mindblowing series when I looked at it, still is! the blue-ness of the fridge, the ice, the otherwordly antarctic in your kitchen.

and yeah as much as photography is an artifice, there is still the irrefutable immanence that you will never be able to erase, that some light at some location at some point in time was the catalyst for whatever photo you're looking at.

I agree with a lot of this, but I think broadly speaking you can still 'see' differences between lenses - like I shot with a modern 35mm biogon for a while and I can easily pick out the shots with that one versus the ones I took with an old canon RF 35mm from the 60s. if you stick with one film/developer combination and switch lenses, you should get sensitized to the differences over time.

ie Nikon 50/1.4D vs 50/1.4G vs 50/1.8D vs 50/1.8G vs the equivalent modern Canons - sample variation is probably going to be greater than any intrinsic difference between them. Aperture blades and their relation to bokeh might be noticeable (rounded highlights vs those with obvious edges) but that's sort of iffy, IMO.

oh yeah I totally agree, all digital lenses look the same. it seems to me that digital lenses differentiate themselves through 1. who can offer a bigger aperture through a bigger portion of the zoom range and 2. sharpness wide open. everything else is all much of a much-ness, really. they all seem to have the same character.

another aspect to think about with lenses is how the lens "draws." pretty much every lens outside of a 50mm for 35mm (and even then, there are a lot of different designs in the 50mm focal length) is going to be making some decisions on how to compress the field of view to fit on to that 24x36mm piece of film. some of them are 'well corrected' (i.e. no barrel distortion). some of them aren't. some of them will go for flatness of field (i.e. biogon) and some will go for a more 'rounded' look (i.e. leica designs). there's a ton of variables that go into lens design, nearly all of them invisible to dilettantes. the danger is, of course, becoming one of those people who obsesses over a single element of lens design (maybe bokeh?) and analyzes pictures based totally on that characteristic.