philip_pj
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 p.5 #8 · Voigtlander Heliar 50mm f/3.5 | |
A long answer to a short question, apologies in advance.
I shoot most everything travel with 2-3 cameras/lens pairs. Or when bushwalking, I revisit the same compositions with 2-3 different lenses. I've been doing this for many years. It's why I am so keen on people getting their lens comparisons right, so they can properly evaluate what is coming from each one.
I shoot several CV 'Vintage' lenses side-by-side with the 35mm and 50mm CV APOs in this way. Much of what I shoot and post does double duty as guides for future off-track walking. Walkers crossing tough terrain in my country need to form accurate pictures of the terrain features: bushes, heath, sedges, sphagnum, trees, rocks, lichen, even water. We do this - often unconsciously - by seeing both 'brightness tone' and 'colour tone' as well as detail. You can see which plants are young, healthy or not, which are wet, safe to tread on, etc.
As you can imagine, walking across gnarly ground even in a light mist in low light is very hard to do, it's like seeing a B&W image. So it is a very desirable feature to be able to perceive fine differences in these tones, to identify the lie of the land, the best routes to take, the dangerous places, the depth of rivers (from rocks and sand under the stream's flow).
Back to lenses, those that better show you these qualities are ones that best portray the scene by capturing 'distance cues' in various ground cover. It leads to an appreciation of lenses that do this best. In my experience, they happen to be the APOs and Zeiss CY and Loxias, some other CVs are also very good. Flat fields and cross-frame quality are very important too.
Depth perception is also very important to us. It even includes the type and extent of out-of-focus and bokeh - it's no accident CV/Zeiss lenses retain motifs inside the focus fade more than say, Sony or Leica lenses. And they also better show grades of detail at different distances inside the bokeh. Edward Teller's images comparing the new CV 50/1 with the Summilux 50/1.4 asph (at common apertures) illustrates this effect well:
p.6 #13 on this page:
https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1741370/5
Fred sometimes shows crops of the trademark CV bokeh effect in his reviews, and much of it it looks ugly at 100%! But smooth bokeh does not help my needs, as outlined above. By the way, we all carry imprints of the countryside we inhabit as children - Nordics see snow and ice tones better, Irish famously see more green tones, etc. The better colour performance of APOs might be a by-product of their greater detail but the colour model is equally critical - Leica APOs do not match the characteristics discussed here, in my experience.
So those are the whys and wherefores from this 3D maven. ;-)
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