Bifurcator wrote:
I think for everything sharpness counts - a lot! For your art you can always blur an image but you can't get details out of an image where none exist. It's MUCH better to have and use the superior tool and then form your art instead of using an inferior tool and be stuck with just one result.
mh2000 wrote:
This is a matter of degrees. At one point -- a long time ago -- AA said that most "modern" lenses were "good enough" to take "good photos." This was more than 25 years ago I think, lenses are now much better.
When you can barely see any difference, if any, in sharpness when viewing a print, it is hard to support your claim that, "sharpness counts - a lot!"
Yes, better is better, but chasing the "best" gear is rarely the most productive way to get your best photos.
It's not a claim and it doesn't need support. It's my opinion. It's an opinion I think only common sense but that's how opinions are after-all.
Also who's talking about chasing gear, or making any correlation between doing that and taking photos? Wait, I can answer that: No one!
FlyPenFly wrote:
I don't know, I used my work ipad 2 to look at an image then saw it on my personal iPad 3 and a 800x600 image taking up the full screen looked horrrible on the iPad 3.
i can't imagine a 800x600 resolution image looking even ok on either ipad at full screen. most of what of the images i've seen that are bigger than ipad 2 screen res but smaller than ipad 3 res still look better on the ipad 3 to me. in any event, sharpness doesn't equal screen resolution. my softest lens shot on my NEX-7 will still look blistering sharp at full screen on an ipad 3.
My experience matches sebboh's. I went from an iPad to an iPad 3, and decided to make some test images for seeing how big the resolution difference was. I chose a few of my photos and sized them perfectly for 1024x768 and 2048x1536, and I had to look really closely to see any difference at all, and then the advantage went to the iPad 3. For images which are not the dimensions of the screen, much of the time I see no difference, and when I do, it looks better on the iPad 3. I can imagine that it is possible that there are exceptions, but I have not seen one yet. I would be curious to see one if you feel like posting one. I still have both iPads.
Text is the killer application for Retina displays though, night and day difference.
Artistic photography is based on a "vocabulary" of techniques. We all know that amongst other things we can radically change the look of our work by changing viewpoint, composition, exposure, shutter speed, aperture, lens focal length, post processing, bw or colour etc etc.
Now sharpness is definitely an available tool in photography, some shots work best very sharp, but other images may well be impressionistic in intention, blurry, noisy and wonderful. I like my kit to be able to provide sharp images because that allows me to fulfill images I want to be sharp. But there are often times that I want my images from my sharp Canon kit to appear less sharp, and I know the techniques to do that.
Personally I love using fast lenses near wide open with very high ISO, to me the possibilities of doing this are very satisfying. But its nice to know that my Canons used carefully, can also produce very detailed large prints. I appreciate the options that the sharp, and impressionistic photo worlds offer. Sharpness isn't always essential, but its nice to have it when you need it!
sebboh wrote:
i thought that was kinda the point of the discussion. how much does sharpness really matter? or does it matter at all?
incidentally, the answer is no, not for art.
That’s too absolute, albeit a useful exaggeration in many arguments.
Sharpness – of the extreme kind we argue about here, not whether a photo’s roughly in focus and shot with a high enough shutter speed to avoid motion blur – doesn’t matter for lots of things (including some commercial photography: yes, a packshot must be very sharp, but plenty of lifestyle and other advertising photos are soft in some way).
But there are artists who are obsessed with sharpness. Take the current Düsseldorf objectivists, for example. This intriguing essay is critical of Gursky’s obsession with sharpness, but judging by the price his work fetches, I guess that sharpness appeals to multi-millionaires! From the essay:
‘The sharpness and the massive amount of information that is offered to the thousand eyes of Argus, contrasts fiercely with the poor content - if not the absolute emptiness - of the images that are conjured up with all that digital vehemence.
‘And that sheds a new light on the all-seeing eye of Gursky: it turns out to be a fetishist eye to the thousandth power. The stubborn obsession with which Gursky wants to fill his panoramas with a profusion of details, only betrays how much he is unable to see the invisible that goes hidden behind all that visual profusion. The accumulation of details is a substitute for the invisible whole that remains inaccessible to Gursky' camera. And the homogenisation of details on the micro level, just like the compelling brutality of a mostly merely symmetric composition on the macro level, are only a substitute for the more subtle structure that would be revealed to an understanding eye.’
Maybe that criticism, which I can’t fully agree with in Gursky’s case, would apply to many hobbyists.
The obsession with evermore sharpness among hobbyists – none of whom make five-metre prints like Gursky – is just greed, probably. It’s about as meaningful and fulfilling as the pursuit of evermore money. And perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Gursky is obsessed with supercars too.
carstenw wrote:
My experience matches sebboh's. I went from an iPad to an iPad 3, and decided to make some test images for seeing how big the resolution difference was. I chose a few of my photos and sized them perfectly for 1024x768 and 2048x1536, and I had to look really closely to see any difference at all, and then the advantage went to the iPad 3. For images which are not the dimensions of the screen, much of the time I see no difference, and when I do, it looks better on the iPad 3. I can imagine that it is possible that there are exceptions, but I have not seen one yet. I would be curious to see one if you feel like posting one. I still have both iPads.
Text is the killer application for Retina displays though, night and day difference....Show more →
native vs old icons are an easy example.
I mean, I'm not sure how you guys are getting these results. Reconverting my old photos in iPhoto from 1024 to native resolution made a giant easy to tell difference in quality.
kapytalyst wrote:
Making sharp images is the result of technique. Most good artists are also good technicians. Most good technicians are not good artists.
I dunno what he meant but that statement is a self-caneling idea.
If "Most good artists are also good technicians" and "Most good technicians are not good artists" then no artist can be a good technician and no technician can be a good artist. And of course one only has to consider da vinci to know it's completely untrue and baseless. I doubt it's not even true in most cases. <shrug> Of course I spent most of my professional life surrounded by genius level technicians (who were techs first and foremost) who were also hailed as some of the world's greatest artists - so I might be biased.
I don't see anything controversial in that statement, although I have little visibility on the truth of most good artists being good technicians. It is easy to cook up some numbers which show it to be at least plausible.
For example, let's say that A = good artists, T = good technicians. Let A = 100,000, T = 10,000,000.
Then all that is said is that at least half of A (50,000+) are also in T. Since T is much larger (10,000,000), it is of course not true that at least half of T (5,000,000) is in A. T is a much larger set, and includes a bunch of non-artists.
When you say, "sharpness counts - a lot!" it makes sense that you would want to chase the newest and sharpest gear for you work. If I shared this oppinion, I would be chasing the sharpest gear for my photography anyway.
Clarity of vision and execution makes for sharper *looking* photos IMO.
Bifurcator wrote:
It's not a claim and it doesn't need support. It's my opinion. It's an opinion I think only common sense but that's how opinions are after-all.
Also who's talking about chasing gear, or making any correlation between doing that and taking photos? Wait, I can answer that: No one!
In photography, sharpness counts "a lot" if it is required to fulfill your artistic vision*.
If your artistic vision is to have large prints with exquisitely fine details, some gear will do that better than other gear. That's just a fact. It's not really about "chasing gear" but about understanding what gear is required to fulfill your purposes.
*(In the instance of commercial photography, replace "your artistic vision" with "your client's expectations.")
True, but instead of "sharpness" I'd say that resolution is probably more important... IE. large prints from a larger format camera with higher resolution will be much more important than small changes in lens sharpness on a smaller camera. A mediocre lens on a LF body will produce better large prints than a top lens mounted on a FF DSLR.
artd wrote:
In photography, sharpness counts "a lot" if it is required to fulfill your artistic vision*.
If your artistic vision is to have large prints with exquisitely fine details, some gear will do that better than other gear. That's just a fact. It's not really about "chasing gear" but about understanding what gear is required to fulfill your purposes.
*(In the instance of commercial photography, replace "your artistic vision" with "your client's expectations.")
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Exactly!
instead of "sharpness" I'd say that resolution is probably more important
I thought we already established that they basically are the same thing and that "sharpness" doesn't actually exist as a quantifiable attribute? In the Bifurcator Photographic Dictionary anyway, resolution and "sharpness" are two hairs of the same horse.
And no, it doesn't really mean that one would go out hunting for the very sharpest gear in disregard of all other optical qualities. That would be kinda silly in my thinking. But for sure "sharpness" should be one of several or even many, considerations when on the hunt for gear. How important an attribute is it? Critically important! Lest you be limited to soft-image photography.
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carstenw,
Of course. We can use mathematics to "prove" all kinds of things that aren't true.
