Steve Spencer
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gdanmitchell wrote:
How about we all not "go there" with the troll labeling? Disagreeing is not trolling.
Someone — sorry, name escapes me at the moment, but I'll edit when I remember — was convinced a few years back that many of the MF backs were not correctly aligned, and he recommended shimming them!
Roger Cicala has, if memory serves, pointed out that if one looks at a number of lenses of any particular model/manufacturer, there is typically a range of adjustment issues. Not all lenses are created equal!
Ha! And I didn't even mention the musical thing. (He played at our wedding, oh so many years ago... And we'll be heading into the backcountry together soon for some work. :-)
Another funny story from our print review group. My wife is an excellent macro photographer who treats flowers as subjects for abstractions. At a meeting a few months back she put several 12 x 18 inch prints under the lights for us to consider, and she somewhat slyly asked if we noticed anything in particular about one of them. Again we pondered, and when we looked very closely (nose to print) we could see some issues with perhaps contrast and possibly color, but nothing shocking.
It was an iPhone photo. Damn her! ;-)
OK, one more testing story. Another person in this circle is both a fine photographer and a person with a ton of technical background in areas related to image file formats and digital printing. Lots of us — me included — most often manually focus our landscape photographs He did some tests and determined that it was almost impossible for anyone to MF more accurately than a properly used AF system, and he challenged some good photographers to try to prove him wrong. No one has. (I still MF my landscape photographs, and I have my reasons...)
The technical "how many angels dance on the head of the pin" discussions — which, yes, I do understand — often tell us less in the end than actual photographic results.
When both A and B are very good performers, it often doesn't really matter, at least not in a definitive way, that A performs 5% better than B on text X that won't be visible in a print.
Yes, I do read and understand MTF charts and other kinds of data. Yes, I do find them interesting. And, yes, sometimes they do reveal serious differences among lenses. No, they aren't the be all and end all of lens quality. Unless owning the lens that tests best is your goal. That's OK, but the real question is how it performs for making photographs. And once you get into a certain range of lenses, there are often multiple choices that will perform very well.
My Pentax 80-160 no doubt scores lower on some of these tests than certain other options. Yet, I know that when I put it on my camera and make photographs that they have excellent technical quality.
FWIW, ;-)
Dan...Show more →
I agree that disagreeing is not trolling, but making provocative statements without evidence and not backing down when it is pointing out that you haven't provided any evidence that is trolling and I am going to call them the way I see them. I don't care if akpo.ca disagrees. I am all for that and don't mind it a bit, but that is not what happened. The claim that the majority of MF lenses (as opposed to smaller format lenses which was the context) are misaligned out of the box is a clearly provocative statement made without any evidence to back it up, and when asked for evidence he did not provide it but just obfuscated. Note the original statement was not an expression of an opinion either. It was cast as a statement of fact. Well, when you make statements of fact you should be prepared to back them up, and if you can't you should own up to it. Making provocative statement of fact that aren't supported by evidence and then obfuscating when asked to provide evidence; that is trolling. So, yes I did go there and I will when I see it.
I do appreciate your contribution to this thread and I hope you know I am not criticizing you. I do not think you are trolling. If you are bothered by my statement that the test you described is in my view not very definitive or that different testing may be able to show differences I would be glad to explain my thoughts about that more. I am not questioning whether the printing was done well. What I am questioning is making an inference that a difference cannot be observed from one test when it wasn't observed. My concern is a basic philosophy of science concern about observing the absence of a difference. Typically, this requires a lot more evidence that one single test even if it is done pretty well. I also have seen tests done here on the Alt forum where people could judge fairly accurately shots taken by different lenses, so that suggests to me that differences can be observed, so I would see this as an unsettled issue and my guess (i.e., hypothesis) is that under the right conditions difference could be observed, but I acknowledge that I don't have any real evidence for that at this point.
So, thanks for your contribution. I do appreciate it even when we disagree. And I want to be explicitly clear that I do not think you were being a troll here, but I reserve the right to label someone as a troll when I think their behavior warrants it.
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