brafman wrote:
This lens really confuses me. In many of the images here I love the bokeh and find the focus point plenty sharp enough. In others, I find the out of focus background to be unpleasant/nervous, and the lens really really soft. Is that just how the lens is -- wildly different character depending upon subject & distance to background? Or are some copies much better than others? Or...
You can make any lens bokeh look nervous or busy if you use it incorrectly with bad aperture settings and not selective about the background you are shooting. That said, I think it has one of the smoothest if not the smoothest bakeh rendering of any 5x mm lens out there today. like Charles said, it takes a long time to learn to use this lens optimally. I have been using it for 2 months and still discovering new characterics and it's pros and cons.
Another birthday BBQ shot
D850 and 58G
All the shots with the 58G were with the D850 set on AUTO AF mode @ f/1.4. The eye AF works really well here assuming you have the correct fine tune AF calibration.
brafman wrote:
This lens really confuses me. In many of the images here I love the bokeh and find the focus point plenty sharp enough. In others, I find the out of focus background to be unpleasant/nervous, and the lens really really soft. Is that just how the lens is -- wildly different character depending upon subject & distance to background? Or are some copies much better than others? Or...
I find in the most cases this lens is able to create a good background, but of cause it depends on each situation and the light there.
It is very hard to focus with this lens, so I think a lot of images are a little bit out of focus and the problem is not the sharpness itself, but the incorrect focus. The sharpness plane is very thin. If the object is deeper then the sharpness plain, a lot of the object is out of focus and the whole image seems to be unsharp. If the object would be flat in the sharpness plain, the image would seem sharper.
In near conditions this lens seems not very sharp, but it can create also sharp images at low distances, if the focus is set correctly. At normal distances the sharpness is better.
From f1.4 to f2 the sharpness is not such good as between f2.2 and f5.6, where it is very sharp.
On my D500 this lens works better, than on my old D300s.
The images can be easy sharpened in post processing.
So this lens needs a lot of try and error if one does not know how to use it.
If I look the images in this thread, I think, that sharpness is not so important mostly and maybe it is better just to view the images in normal resolution and forget about sharpness. Lens Sharpness
I did an 'in home' family session yesterday. I tried to force myself to use the 58 as much as feasible. This is processed in Analog FX from the old google stuff. It was a fun session!
Nice posts guys! Just wondering if this is the most popular lens on the whole forum base on viewership?
It's the second most popular after the Nikon manual focus thread and nothing like it on Canon and Sony threads.
Goes to show the attractive allure of this lens.
ivan.cai wrote:
Nice posts guys! Just wondering if this is the most popular lens on the whole forum base on viewership?
It's the second most popular after the Nikon manual focus thread and nothing like it on Canon and Sony threads.
Goes to show the attractive allure of this lens.
Not sure how to rate the popularity of this lens. It is true that it is one of the more popular lenses on this forum in terms of viewership. Part of that may be due to communities within a community. I feel like I know many of the members of this thread even though we have never met, so when I post photos, I usually go first to the 58mm thread first because the peeps here are great!
When this lens was first released, and for many years after, it was pretty polarizing. People either loved it or hated it. Over time though, I feel that is getting less and less so. It seems in the last year, people are buying this lens knowing what they will get and loving the results of it. We seem to have less trolls stumbling onto the thread telling us we are all ignorant to sharpness and there are much better lenses available.
In the end, it still ranks as the best lens I have ever used. Of course, that opinion is very personal and bias but I do honestly think this lens is capable of producing images that few other lenses are capable of producing.
I like a few of my lenses in the past 10 years of photography as a hobby, but no lens got me as obsessively hooked as this one. Most other lenses are straightforward to learn, use and understand, this one takes fair bit of challenge which kept it interesting. The photos that it produces seem to be so soothing and pleasing that there's nothing like it that I have ever used. From the first time I visited this thread, I know I was on to something special that I have to have it.
Since I got this lens, I haven't touch another of 50mm lenses and only occasionally used my 28mm and 85mm in certain situations that were called for.
ivan.cai wrote:
Nice posts guys! Just wondering if this is the most popular lens on the whole forum base on viewership?
It's the second most popular after the Nikon manual focus thread and nothing like it on Canon and Sony threads.
Goes to show the attractive allure of this lens.
I think the Voigtlander 40mm 1.2 has it beat in the Sony forum. I think both of these lenses have a very unique rendering so people gravitate to these posts to see that.
Geoff CB wrote:
I think the Voigtlander 40mm 1.2 has it beat in the Sony forum. I think both of these lenses have a very unique rendering so people gravitate to these posts to see that.
Is that so?
Which thread?
