Matter of personal taste - I have never been a fan of onion-like bokeh rings which have a shell-like type. For me it is clearly photo a which I prefer for this reason. Photo e seems to be a vintage lens since it has some swirly bokeh which looks kind of nice, too.
retrofocus wrote:
Matter of personal taste - I have never been a fan of onion-like bokeh rings which have a shell-like type. For me it is clearly photo a which I prefer for this reason. Photo e seems to be a vintage lens since it has some swirly bokeh which looks kind of nice, too.
Yeah, preference for sure. So set 1 you prefer photo a, and set 2 you prefer photo e?
1: a, 2: a but I also liked d -- I don't like much else. 1b I find the bokeh quite harsh. 2b the corners really become sharp so it looks like field curvature is creating a look I don't like. 2c the bokeh just looks busy to me. 2e seems to have more depth of field than the others. 2f has nice bokeh, but I would like to see more central sharpness.
I also don't like the way the corners sharpen up in 1b and others with similar characteristics. Hence why I also picked 2d and f. 2f has the most even background blur. Looks like the RX1... The focus transition zone is also the smoothest. But in a way f is kind of bland.
Set 2 "a" and "f" are the only examples that have reasonably close to the same size of the blur discs in the middle and corners (which can be because of lack of field curvature). To know which one of them I prefer I'd need to see more photos.
Edit: My guess is that "a" is the same lens in both sets but stopped down from f/1.4 to f/2. It's probably a modern, large lens made for mirrorless, while some of the others are vintage lenses. "F" could be the RX1 Sonnar since the rendering is extremely smooth but with a ton of LoCA. "D" is strange with triangular shape of the blur discs towards the corners. Probably something pretty special.
rating: 