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 p.31 #18 · Digital-Picture review ZE 100 MP lens | |
gdanmitchell wrote:
I stand by what I wrote about that original post, and more importantly about the obsession with "perfect gear" in ways that are irrelevant to producing photographs. I am most certainly not "ignorant" of technical issues related to photography, all the way from lenses and cameras through the printing process. I do, on the other hand, eschew the "equipment fetish" business, particularly when it becomes a distraction from producing photographs.
By training and long experience I am familiar with this affectation in areas other than photography. For example, in music you will find people who are absolutely obsessed with owning the "best" audio systems and who will invest tons of money it obtaining the supposed best - and who will argue at great length about which thing is better. They even use the same sort of pretentious terminology we find among people with a comparable relationship with photographic equipment.
When compact disks first came out, some professional musician friends and I went to one of the stores that caters to these people do discuss CD players. This was back in the time when the technology was first available. You could get a CD player for perhaps a bit less than $200 or you could spend several thousand dollars for an audiophile player. We'll never forget the audiophile techie at the store telling us, people who did music for a living, that we should prefer multi-thousand dollar vinyl disk players because CD systems clearly exhibited "digital glare." Barely suppressing our laughter, we left.
I had another friend whose business was doing on-site live recording of professional classical performances. He used to tell the story of audiophiles being duped into buying something called "Wonder Solder." Apparently the story was that if you de-soldered components in your audiophile system that had been constructed using "normal" solder and then re-soldered with "Wonder Solder" that you would achieve a wonderful "expansion of the sound stage" and other such hoo-hah. At this point in the story he would begin to laugh uncontrollably.
The double-irony is that very few real musicians give a damn about the supposed high end best audiophile gear, at least beyond the point at which a) performance is very good indeed, and b) any differences are trivial or completely irrelevant to their experience of hearing recorded music. The "triple-irony" is that the ability to distinguish (or imagine you can distinguish) among such technical differences in machinery is just about wholly unrelated to the ability to "hear" and understand music, much less produce it with technical and aesthetic power.
Photography is little different. The majority of excellent photographers do care about the quality of our equipment, as measured by the extent to which it allows them/us to achieve our goal of producing excellent photographs. But while many of them find test results interesting and informative, they understand the context for this in ways that the equipment obsessives seem not to. If you think that the differences in image quality between, say, this vaunted (and no doubt excellent) Zeiss lens and, say, the Canon 100mm macro will actually be visible in your photographic work, I say go for it.
On the other hand, it often seems like a sorry distraction when people get so wrapped up in which lens provides some tiny (and often mystical) increment of "difference" in some way that may or may not be measurable... when the same energy applied to actual photography with a wide range of appropriate equipment could make an actual, visible difference in the work they produce.
Take care,
Dan...Show more →
I have edited the quote to include the parts I respond to.
1) In the audio reproduction chain, differences in such things as signal cables with 99.9999% pure copper and ultra stabilized CD players, are neither measurable, nor explainable in theory, nor audible in blind tests. With lenses, the differences in images are both measurable, explainable in theory and visible in blind tests to an extent beoynd any comparsion with the audio case.
2) Lenses should be compared to microphones, not reproduction equipment. Microphones are crucial in sound recording. The quality you get for money is significant in high-end recordings, a long way up the "obsession" stairs. There are even vintage mics with characteristics that are preferred by musicians, and the properties of which cannot be emulated by signal processing, because they have to do with 3 dimensional sound waves being transduced to a simple time-domain electrical signal.
Those "distractions" are not as severe among us as you may think. Thedigitalbean who made side-by-side comparisons of the two lenses in question, and did not find the same color and contrast differences as others, yet still decided to keep the Zeiss lens for its incremental improved characteristics in certain landscape images. His body of work is wonderful, and his main focus is on photography. Many of the photographers posting in the plethora of gear-related image threads in the alt forum, show a photographic eye and a vision for image content and, may I say so, even poetry in their images. It seems that their obession with alternative gear serve as one of multiple sources of inspiration, rather than a distraction. Myself, I am not posting images here very often, but that doesn't mean I don't spend a lot more time on making photographs, developing image creative skills, publishing images, printing and selling prints. And I am not a professional, I do this for enjoyment.
You do have a point regarding some differences between lenses may not be relevant in many cases. Still, based on the number of your posts here that are concerned about this matter and various problems people have with gear limitiations, one could easliy believe that you have an obsession in preventing what you think is irrelevant in photography from having their place in peoples knowledge. Luckily, I know that you also have a significant photographic production, so I rest assured that you are not distracted by discussions either. After all, our participation here is hardly indicative of what we do outside.
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