My dark tones and gradations are getting absolutely murdered somewhere between exporting from Lightroom and viewing on Flickr, but here's another with the 28 Distagon -
Have acquired a used 100/2 ZE as well. Infinity doesn't seem to be on with the lens marking (fair enough but it'd sure be easier if it was - do Zeiss recalibrate lenses for infinity?) and I'm finding a lack of contrast on a lot of f/2 shots. Is that to be expected?
I haven't really had much of a chance to properly test it out yet, bad weather/busy days, so it could just be a case of poor conditions/user error. I am always using the hood/no filter.
coogee wrote:
Have acquired a used 100/2 ZE as well. Infinity doesn't seem to be on with the lens marking (fair enough but it'd sure be easier if it was - do Zeiss recalibrate lenses for infinity?) and I'm finding a lack of contrast on a lot of f/2 shots. Is that to be expected?
Canon body tolerances are so gigantic that there Zeiss can't calibrate their lenses to infinity. I had 3x 5DmkII and 1DmkIII and there wasn't any camera which would have had infinity exact same as any other camera...
There have been cases, when there have been issues with Zeiss ZE lenses that Zeiss could not calibrate without having also camera (e.g. ZE21) to user satisfaction. So I would assume you could ask Zeiss to calibrate for infinity, but then your lens would be calibrated in temperature Zeiss has in their laboratory - depending lens design focus would be either too far or too close in any other situation than Zeiss laboratory situation. For some longer focal length lenses it's known fact that lens should go well past infinity to compensate temperature changes.
PS. In digital era the hard infinity stop is useless, there is no way I would ever trust it with digital. It might have been useful on film era, but I really can't see how it would work in real field shooting for 36+Mpix.
For 2/100 contrast wide open; yes it improves a lot closing down to f/2.8. I mostly shot it f/2.8-4 as best compromise between DOF and optical issues (aberrations, boke quality, contrast).
Thanks WhyFi, Samuli. Duly noted (and bookmarked) about the other (Z*) thread.
And yes, figured as much with infinity hard stop, it's just a nice bonus for low light if you are lucky enough that your lens/camera/climate match.
Good to know on the f/2 contrast, I was just a bit worried, new baby and all, it hasn't been all shots but it has with difficult bright sunlight. Raining again here so no chance to test it all out more.
I just withdrew my C/Y 80-200 from the market and decided to keep it. As long as I have owned it, I have felt it was nothing special, giving results about like a kit lens. While I was taking a photo of the lens for the sale listing, I removed the UV filter. Before putting the lens away I took a couple of shots without the filter. When I got around to processing them, I was amazed how much better they looked. The bottom line is this. A perfectly normal looking UV filter was distorting the images. I have no explanation and I have never seen this happen before.
These shots were taken with a NEX 6 and the C/Y 80-200.
Thanks Cadaver! The photo's sense of scale may be a little skewed - those are Cabernet Franc vines in my vineyard out on Red Mountain in eastern Washington. The Planar's bokeh worked out well, though
