gdanmitchell
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ggreene wrote:
I don't know if I would say well in advance for flexibility when the 16-35 is a zoom and has AF. Those are two pretty damn big components to flexibility in my book and why I own it.
That is kind of my overall point in these posts - that once you get to a certain level of, say, resolution (which can vary a bit depending upon your subject and so forth), resolution differences become less significant that other factors that sometimes get left in the dust.
As an example, let's consider two kinds of photographers - out of a wide range of types that you might imagine or even be yourself.
One is a product photographer who works in a relatively controlled shooting environment - backgrounds might be constructed rather than found, lighting is artificial and controllable, subjects rarely move, and so forth. Such a photographer might well find one of the longer TS lenses to be nearly idea for quite a bit of his/her work and the potential advantages of larger aperture or zoom might not be very important at all. For this person, the definition of "flexibility" might largely be about flexibility to tilt the plane of focus. (I have friends who specialize in food photographer who fit this category perfectly.)
Another is a landscape photographer who produces very large fine art prints of a wide range of subjects and often works far out in the landscape. Shooting at relatively smaller apertures diminishes potential resolution differences among lenses, most of which can produce quite good resolution in any case. Being able to adapt the focal length to a particular composition is very important, and for this photographer "flexibility" might be defined by what the zoom lens can do. For this photographer, who may virtually always manually focus, things like the speed or accuracy of the AF system or the ability to tilt and shift or image stabilization may have little or no appeal.
Another is photographing active subjects - lets say some sports or things like moving wildlife at a distance. For this person a zoom might not help in the flexibility area that much since he/she may simply need to shoot with the longest reasonable focal length available. If shooting in natural light, it might be important to get the largest aperture in order to keep shutter speed as high as possible and to deal with possibility that one will shoot handheld and more. Along the same lines the effectiveness of the AF system may be paramount to this shooter and IS may be indispensable.
Another photographer may shoot street photography in the "classic" manner, working quickly with a single focal length prime and always shooting handheld and not worrying too much about perfect focus or elimination of motion blur, preferring instead the spontaneity of the simplest possible system rather than the adaptability of zooms and TS and so forth.
Without telling any of you which lenses you should or should not use, I think it is reasonable to say a few things about all of this. First, that clearly there is much more to lens selection that answering the "which is sharpest" question. Second, once you consider the type of photography, the functional differences among lenses start to count for much more than the IQ differences. Third, the balance of which variables are most important will vary tremendously depending upon the nature of the shooting. Fourth, for some photographers doing more specialized types of work, more specialized lenses that function less well in more general photography may be appropriate. Fifth, a much larger group of photographers - a group that includes a lot of very serious and critical photographers - find that zooms are quite often the best choice.
Take care,
Dan
Edited on Jan 19, 2014 at 11:22 AM · View previous versions
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Try getting that across to Dan. (Dan, you know you double posted your last comments, right?)