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 p.1 #19 · How do you use manual lenses? | |
In point form, with respect to AF lenses:
Made down to a cost schedule – bean counter product lines, large-scale manufacturers, large assembly plants, mass production.
Cheap and nasty manufacture – plastic casings, heavy lens bodies, dimensionally large, relatively large filters a necessity, throw away versioning philosophy - new versions perpetually ‘just around the corner’, unattractive and banal, cheap plastic hoods, implied heavier camera bodies, larger batteries and ancillaries, no material and finish choices, or variants; long-term reliability issues.
Difficult to restore and maintain – full of electronic ribbons and actuators, parts obsolescence built-in.
Present moment ephemeral devices – no connection to the past, short lifespans, update mentality (near future landfill items, built-in obsolescence, poor durability, ephemeral products).
Made in huge volumes – volume-centric manufacture rather than human involvement, consumer culture products, high expense, maker-imposed tier system (the cripple hammer), class consciousness, disposable remote supermarket shelf product, little user attachment.
Computer designed, computer manufactured, overly complex, increase battery dependence, ‘jumpy’ behaviour (no silent racking).
Optical design curtailment – aberration correction in-camera, diminishing sound optical design, image as a ‘computing artifact’ not a lens output.
Increasingly an adjunct to the optical computing device (camera) -which controls lens behaviour (eye focus, aperture, aberration control, control button roles, ‘presets’).
Deskilling – lack of left hand involvement, ‘brain out’ self-focusing, lens as subordinate to the photo device (‘camera’), lack of cerebral engagement, antithesis of artistic engagement, poor intentional manual ‘what if’ exploration of point of focus options (hard to rack manually), horrible FBW implementation, ‘time urgency’ as photography (FPS), mentally unsettling, encourage rapid fire of huge volume of images and image iterations, lack of visual feedback (physical rings, DOF scales), loss of visual skills (distance estimation, content ‘blocking’, previsualization due to induced auto-everything high FPS mentality), camera dependency, induced fear of manual focus lenses among new photographers.
Antithesis of craft – very few old AF primes or zooms, detachment from lens design history, opposite of ‘hands on’ craftsman development and time-honored design protocols, no critical hand-eye-visual cortex invocation necessary for superior craft photography and user involvement, usage is reduced to press button process often conducted without thought, very few AF character lenses, AF lenses have all the appeal of an optical toaster.
Maker-customer communication – boutique lens producers actually answer inquiries, they value their discerning customer base who prefer the better things in life.
Ever cheaper development path – plastics (resin aspheric elements), faster and larger lenses (now zooms too), ever more automated processes throughout, high volumes and profits as the main driver, corporate products – ‘the more AF in lenses, the less of you’ in the imaging process, ring fencing of users (poor cross-mount interoperability).
Massive long-term promotion to convince users of AF lens superiority, high speed capabilities are superfluous and/or intrusive to most artistic photography – portraiture, landscapes, intimate scenes, architecture, inhabited interiors, places of worship, etc.
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My default is manual focus and I grab an AF body when I actually need that for something. The majority of my cameras and lenses are MF only. I also shoot events often, and use AF for that usually, but even there I'm starting to use MF sometimes. 