Samuli Vahonen Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Like Wayne says boke is subjective.
For me biggest problem was extreme steep field curvature in corners (depending focus distance either whole zone-C or just outer part of it). It's present always when outer part of the glass is used => let's say any time your focus distance is more than 1 meter (39inch). When you focus close, lens extends and "bad" part of glass is not used and whole field of view is planar = exactly what you want from makro lens! With landcapes your will not notice it has DOF is so huge. Also in landscapes outward field curvature means that your bottom corners focus way past the ground level (=look soft, not necessarily distracting) and who cares what your corners at the sky look like as there is not much detail.
Example of field curvature ( images are from my old website, if they don't come up just refresh this page until they load, database in the old website has seen better days )
#1 Top corners are almost completely in focus
#2 Boke very distracting at the top due to focusing to the trees at background
Secondary problem was that boke is distracting in most boke scenes. This is because of two reasons (and field curvature mentioned above)
a) boke has as high contrast as focus plane, extreme distracting when I prefer and I'm used to lenses having less contrast in boke
b) boke can be distracting when there is suitable frequency pattern in background, this tends to happen more when shooting ~1m (39inch) distance than when your subject is at medium distance (~3 meter / ~9 feet).
Examples of distracting boke behaviour:
Above large distance boke shots #1 and #2; due to medium shooting distance both have nice boke in A-zone and B-zone.
#3 When focusing close, but not yet in close-up territory lens tends to make boke annoying like this. I would estimate this is ~125cm (50inch) focus distance.
Third problem can be problem or not, depends what you want; for same aperturte many other lenses have visually thinner DOF and more blurred background. All examples I linked show this, boke always has "thick and heavy" look due to this, except close-ups and makros.
Also one can take "positive approach" and figure out "how you can use the weaknesses and turn them to positive outcome". This scene for example works quite well with high contrast boke:
#4 scene which works with high contrast boke
On positive side this ZE/ZF Makro-Planar 2/50 is one of the best short makro lens I have ever owned or shoot. Makro and close-up results are way better than with Sigma EX-series 50mm, Sony FE 50mm makro, Leica R 60mm or even C/Y Makro-Planar 2.8/60 (which is better on range 1:2 to 1:1 to my eye, where ZE/ZF 2/50 needs tubes as it only focuses 1:2) - in my opinion ZE/ZF 2/50 is only beat by Rodenstock APO-Rodagon-N 1:2.8 f=50mm, and even then only in scenes the 5 blade aperture of APO-Rodagon doesn't kill the shot... Better in this case is my definition of better, may differ from yours, bad work it should not be used. Specially enjoyed handhold makro-shooting as I had the ZE-version, and it could be focused @ f/2 (no focus shift at makro distances) and lens electronically closed to shooting aperture [luxury which most of my lenses don't do...] when I took the shot.
Samuli
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