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 p.22 #1 · Digital-Picture review ZE 100 MP lens | |
gdanmitchell wrote:
I think that the problem is not so much that "nobody knows what exactly is causing it." It is actually that the term is almost completely meaningless. Whatever it is that people think they are seeing when they use this term, it is likely the result of a whole range of things, most of which have little or nothing to do with the choice of lens. These things probably include at least the following:
- subjects not all in a plane parallel to the sensor, and/or...
- something in the image appears to be relatively sharp compared to other things in the image, and/or...
- some effect of exaggerated depth caused by OOF background, and/or...
- some effect of exaggerated depth caused by focal length compression, and/or...
- some effect of exaggerated depth caused by short focal length (!), and/or...
- separation between background/foreground/subject due to lighting, and/or...
- separation between background/foreground/subject due to color relationships, and/or...
- separation between background/foreground/subject due to compositional choices, and/or...
- too many other things to list here.
To be blunt, ascribing this thing (or these things?) referred to as "3D effect" to the quality of the lens seems photographically naive to me....Show more →
The blanket term "3D" is meaningful and useful precisely because it encapsulates such a complex and messy bundle of individually concrete effects.
The human brain and visual system is constantly filling in a huge amount of "missing detail" from the narrow and relatively poor quality image captured by our retinas so that we can "see" a detailed and accurate mental image of the space around us. Along with true stereoscopic effects (obviously absent in a flat photograph), the brain uses a huge range of subtle visual cues (like many of those that you listed) to interpret visual input into a map of identified objects and the spacial relations between them. A photograph with the appropriate complex mixture of these visual cues can do a decent job of tricking the brain into "seeing" a realistic, spatial "3D" scene (as if through a window) rather than a flat, representational image. Where this effect of realism is the goal of the photographer, it is useful to have words to describe and evaluate it as a whole (like "3D," "presence," etc.) rather than attempting the (often futile) task of picking it apart into the hundreds of simpler (reductionist) factors that contribute to the desired effect (but only succeed as an integrated whole).
I don't recall many of the main contributors to this thread on the "pro-3D" side ever disagreeing with (indeed, frequently voicing support for) the notion that the overwhelming majority of contributions to a "3D" image are extrinsic to the lens. Subject, composition, lighting, etc. play the dominant role, and most any reasonably decent lens can create images with a sense of realism when all the compositional factors are appropriately aligned. Nonetheless, the lens does contribute its own characteristics into the larger mix of factors. Some of these characteristics are associated with "good" or "bad" performance of a lens, such as ability to uniformly resolve the fine detail and contrast that our brain expects in a "realistic" image. Others are more subtle and not classifiable as "good" or "bad" in isolation, such as the details of transition from focus to blur.
Out of experience from observing multitudes of both our own shots and those of other photographers, many people notice that some lenses produce images that, on average, appear to "tip the balance" towards or against "3D" more frequently than other lenses. The differences are almost never great enough to be clearly identifiable in a single, isolated image (where the external compositional factors are of far greater importance), but they can sometimes be seen in side-by-side tests (controlled for compositional differences), or emerge from impressions averaged over many images.
Finally, I do not consider a lens' "3D look" or lack thereof to be "good" or "bad," but, as another poster wrote, only a "characteristic" that may or may not align with a photographer's particular vision for a photo. In fact, a lot of my own lens collection is invested in lenses that do not produce "3D," at least not of the characteristic Zeiss style. I have fairly redundant and parallel Zeiss Contax, Leica R, Mamiya, and Olympus (plus misc. others) lens sets. The Leica in particular have their own look quite distinct from "Zeiss 3D;" their images can be very detailed, color rich, and have clear subject/background separation, but in my opinion the effect is more often "flat cardboard cutouts in front of an abstract painted background" rather than dimensional shapes positioned throughout a realistic volume. My impression of the drawing style of Canon's better lenses is that they are often more "Leica-like" than "Zeiss-like;" this is not an insult to their image quality (or to the judgement of those who love the results from their Canon lenses), but only a subjective and stylistic observation. The Canon (or Leica, or Oly, etc.) "look" can be used to good effect to produce stunning and beautiful images in their own right (I really like the 100L photos posted by Bobbytan on p.11,12 of this thread) without being the same as Zeiss or tending strongly towards "3D".
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