That's a very cool shot, and the red blur disk in the centre adds some mystery to it. I do miss something sharp a little though. I guess this lens can only be sharp in the centre, unless stopped down?
Great collection of some very nice watches. This looks like a timezone.com luncheon. The Omega Seamaster 300 is an eye catcher. The Panerai's are very nice as well. Watch collecting is a great hobby.
carstenw wrote:
That's a very cool shot, and the red blur disk in the centre adds some mystery to it. I do miss something sharp a little though. I guess this lens can only be sharp in the centre, unless stopped down?
Thanks Carsten!
I agree with wanting more sharpness in the near foreground but I think the lens is not very sharp in the far edges/corners wide open at f1.5. I need to confirm that with some more shooting. If I were to shoot this shot again I would have a tripod along and then maybe combine the foreground of a stopped down shot with the rest of the wide open shot.
In this shot I was trying to use the under-corrected SA type of rendering this lens has which is similar to the new 35/1.4 where the objects in the background bokeh still maintain their basic shapes and are not obliterated into blobs. Hard to describe this behavior but it is described well in the Zeiss article on bokeh on their website. The red dot in the far background is the strongly drawn bokeh circle of a walkway crossing light. I kept in the shot as a mystery.
@FlyPenFly, nice watch macro shots. That's a lot of watches!
I am delighted how well the Zeiss 24-70mm does with it's 1:4 mag ratio. It's flexible and lets me take regular shots of the people at the event without having to switch lenses.
Ahamb can pick up some CA but to me it's effectively invisible.
MorrieC wrote:
FlyPenFly
Great collection of some very nice watches. This looks like a timezone.com luncheon. The Omega Seamaster 300 is an eye catcher. The Panerai's are very nice as well. Watch collecting is a great hobby.
Morrie
Yeah, it's not so much a hobby as an addiction perhaps even stronger than LAS (lens acquisition syndrome)!
Such watches, so modernesque without overload.
Thanks much. How many do you keep up to speed oiled and cleaned at any one time? A dilemma.
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FlyPenFly,
Is the ZA 24-70 as sharp and contrasty as the CY 35-70?
I misread, thought it was CY 28-70! In any case I finally found the internet page with the links for the Italian MTF pages on the Contax CY lenses in the Library of Congress web archive. These numbers might not have the authority of the Zeiss charts, but they are so easy to read. Since these Italian pages also supplied the Zeiss MTF charts, I assume that they attempted to duplicate and extend the results.
I would say the ZA 24-70 is not as contrasty as the 35-70 which is in a league of it's own as far as contrast. I think the 35-70 is perhaps even more contrasty than the 28mm F2.8 in it's best FL and aperture.
The 24-70 has a more saturated look and it has imperfect extreme corners.
It has an incredibly high level of sharpness though in it's central middle that give images life at medium range distances.
It's definitely not the sharpest lens or highest resolving but the rendering is very vivid. It's almost too saturated that I sometimes turn down saturation from import if it's a golden hour shot.
It's not an ideal landscape lens, more of a great general purpose lens and in that way, I prefer it over the 35-70mm. But if I were taking landscapes all day, I would take the 35-70mm.
These photos have no post production, straight from the camera import, if it looks crunchy its because of FLICKR!:
I have been admiring the images on this thread for a while now. Am now in posession of a Zeiss 35mm f/2 ZF.2 for my Nikon D700. Hope to post images regularly. The following are my first few images from this lens in Amsterdamse Bos which is a forest in the South West of Amsterdam where I reside.
I haven't been buying or selling much lately though.
I am fortunate that the community I met in Manhattan in the watch world gives me access to some out of this world expensive pieces that I could not buy.
I have been wondering though about how I can take my watch photography to the next level. I'm not sure I have many ideas.
Do you have special hooks on the inside of your trench coat?
