the mostly green of the shot and pattern of the leaves makes it more difficult.
I notice the effect more when there are color differences - just a thought
Rob Riley wrote:
i think a deeper more film like tonality has something to do with it too
additional sheens and shines take that flatness away
True, though even pure matte paper has tremendous depth. I've printed some large format architectural shots on matte paper and gotten a really beautiful sense of depth.
Although there are no absolute answers to this question, I'm surprised that nobody have mentioned colours related to composition here. Many of the technical sides mentioned in this thread are part of what works, but it's a well established truth within most forms of visual art, that some colours seem closer (warm reds in particular) and some seem more distant (cool blues).
Brent's excellent river bend on page four of this thread is a good example. The red in the background pushes the cliff and the river forward, making them coming "out of the frame".
jrn813 wrote:
I Think All Aspects Of A Photograph Contribute To The 3D Effect...
DOF, Color, Contrast, Saturation, Resolution, And Sharpness, Are All Factors...
Small Point, But I Believe I Did Mention Color....
There seem to be two unrelated discussions going on here: there's no mystery about contriving a scene in which one element 'pops out of the foreground': it's purely a function of DOF and contrast. Large format images simply have less DOF, hence the mojo.
The deeper and more interesting question addresses what's going on when two lenses shoot an identical scene with the same lighting at the same focal length and aperture, yet one more vividly depicts a plausible sense of 3D space, or plasticity. As has been suggested, this appears to be something of a black art identifiable by German (especially Zeiss) glass.
To me the quality is akin to what audiophiles, in similar pursuit of fidelity to reality, call 'presence' – valve amps and high sensitivity speakers do the trick. Whatever the knack is, it seems easier to achieve with longer than shorter lenses. At 28mm there are many fine lenses but the Canon, Nikon and Olympus models give results that look like photographs shot with fine lenses; with Zeiss and Leica it's like being there.
However, the phenomenon is visible in the digital realm, so we might begin by following Adobe's original Photoshop maxim about edges and transitions. If you look at these 600% crops taken from a lens that has the mojo (Zeiss 28mm, right) and one that doesn't (Canon 17-40, left) you'll notice that the Zeiss describes transitions between strongly contrasting colours in fewer pixels, and that every one of those pixels is more strongly defined: the mid-tones particularly are spread apart, polarised more strongly towards lights and darks, and have greater luminosity. http://www.16-9.net/zeiss3d.jpg
The 'hi-fi' analogy is apt here, because the 'effect' seems to be to do with how closely the lens and camera matching your brain's impression of the scene via the eyes. Most glass delivers a tell-tale flattening of these differences that immediately signals 'artifice' to the viewer. But when the lens is well enough designed to transmit that colour and accutance untainted, the brain responds differently to it, and has a harder job recognising it isn't 'real'. This is evidently very difficult/expensive to do: eyes, like ears, take some fooling.
The 3-D look is difficult to see unless you are told that the image was made with a Leica. Then it just pops right out at you.
IMO it's the other way round. 3D is about the only thing Leica lenses do less well. It has nothing to do with DoF and a sharp subject surrounded by smooth bokeh. That is another thing altogether. The wonderful bluebells picture a few pages back on the Alternative Image thread has buckets of 3D effect but nil differential focus. Same for jrn's lovely rusty boxes. I agree with Bathman's selection. To my eye, some of the images being put forward on this thread as examples have strong differential focus but almost no 3D effect at all. It is a very subtle thing.
Thanks Hubsand, just saw your post, that is interesting. However do you still see the differnce when printed, when scaled. Do MF digital picturs have more of the 3D?
There is another candidate for the 3D effect. If you look at the lighthouse picture, you will notice a dark line down the right hand edge of it. The sun is well off to the right, so that line is NOT shadow. Close to 90° incidence many surfaces begin to behave like mirrors. Presumably that light is very polarised. It is a bit like a mirage. With Zeiss lenses you can quite often see background light 'clinging' to the edges of a foreground subject. It even happens with skin. I first noticed this effect with my first Hasselblad twenty years ago. When I compared my Leica 180f2 with my Zeiss 200f2 I noticed that the Leica did this less, if at all. Bokeh goes funky round the edges of things. Maybe Leica lenses reduce this effect to increase the smoothness of the transition to blurry bokeh. The weird thing about this effect is that if I look carefully at focus transitions with my eyes, I see it in real life too. It seems to be a feature of light's wavelike nature.
Try it yourself: hold up a pencil at a slight angle to a dark/light transition a way behind it and look at the edge of the pencil where the background line crosses it. You may see the background line bend a bit as it clings to the edge of the pencil. Here are two lens examples:
hubsand wrote:
Large format images simply have less DOF, hence the mojo.
As I've said about 4 times in this thread now, this mojo also pertains to large format images in which the entire image is in focus. DOF has zero, nada, nothing to do with it in this case. I went to an Ansel Adams exhibit, the majority of which was shot on 8x10 view cameras, and every single one of his images had a phenomenal 3D effect -- and every single one of his images was in perfect front-to-back focus.
Furthermore, I don't need to remind you that large format lenses DON'T have less DOF. They have the same DOF as any other lens with the same focal length / aperture combination. The shallower DOF one experiences on LF only comes into play when you're trying to obtain an equivalent field of view, because you need to choose longer lenses. On my 8x10 I use a 500mm lens as a routine portrait lens, so my operating DOF is shorter for an equivalent angle of view than the ~50mm lens you could use on 35mm. Not to mention that large format images are enlarged less than small format images for an equivalent output size -- which means that you have a larger circle of confusion, and a looser definition of "acceptable sharpness". Thus, if you plug 300 f/5.6 and a 20 foot focus distance into a DOF calculator, you find that your depth of field increases when you increase format size.
It would be interesting to compare a large format image with front-to-back focus with a similar one shot on a smaller format. Naturally the larger the format, the easier it is to reproduce reality (and the 3D mojo) with sufficiently convincing fidelity.
Yes, I think part of it is a matter of the sheer abundance of detail in larger formats. Irrespective of subject size, a larger format will give you an image that is captured much closer to life size, so a print will have more of the textural details we expect to see. Every transition, including gradations of tone, color, focus, and texture, is projected over a much larger recording surface, so the subtlest real life details seem to make it into print.
I do think that luminosity has a lot to do with the 3D effect, which means having textured highlights. Placing important details on Ansel's zones 6 and 7 is a very good strategy, especially in the context of a long transition from deep shadows through midtones.
I'm with Grant and Paul on the DOF issue. The first images I saw that really popped with the Zeiss 3D look were from the CZ21 at infinity. A certain 3D look can be achieved with shallow DOF, as has been discussed and illustrated in the posts, but this is not the only way to have the 3D look. Nearly every shot I took with my CZ21 looks like I am looking through a window into a 3D environment. I attribute it to acutance, microcontrast and sheer resolving power.
Yep, the old Adaptall version. Not all are so great though. I've tried out four and kept two. The excellent ones are the best 24mm lenses I've tried - and I've tried just about all of them. A good copy of the Zeiss 25/2.8 is also very nice, but it's a lot more expensive to wade through those to find a good copy, and fit it with a good working adapter. Then it's still more like a 26mm than 24mm. The FOV difference is very obvious when taking the identical shot with the Tamron 24mm and Zeiss 25mm.
