Charles, plese repeat after me: "My name is Charles, and I am an altoholic"..:-)
If you post many more such pictures, I am going to run out of wall space ... Thanks!
Got the 85 1.4 on Saturday. Shot the 3rd day of an indian wedding with it but didn't take a single photo... So I took a couple shots in my backyard this evening. Thought I would share one with a crop.
Should probably mention that it is actually the ZF nikon version with an adapter ring. Samy's didn't have any more ZE's.
Shot with 5D Mark II 1/640, f/1.4, iso400
Edit... Forgot to mention it was shot using live view focusing in with 10x.
swanny338 - I would strongly recommend you take the ZF back to the store if possible, and pick up the ZE version from somewhere like BHphoto and have them ship it to you.
Honestly you really should, auto aperture is just a feature you shouldn't be without, esp when manual focusing...
Now that you know you like the lens, I think it's worth the few extra bucks to get your native mount.
Wonderful colors Charles! I will never accuse you of too much saturation
Look, would be great if you stick to one size though, 900 or 1000 pixels
would be great
adamdewilde wrote:
swanny338 - I would strongly recommend you take the ZF back to the store if possible, and pick up the ZE version from somewhere like BHphoto and have them ship it to you.
Honestly you really should, auto aperture is just a feature you shouldn't be without, esp when manual focusing...
Now that you know you like the lens, I think it's worth the few extra bucks to get your native mount.
Best,
Adam
Considered that, but the lost functionality doesn't really bother me considering the price I got. On top of that it was a tax free day at Samy's.
Samuli, on the picture of the red car I find the transition from the edge of the snow to the green a bit coarse and distracting. A sort of fuzzy/double edged bokeh which gives me head ache to look at. The car stands out nicely and crisp from the background but the transition from white to green feels distracting.
...oh, and the license plate looks a bit fuzzy - decentered optics maybe?
Very nice natural coastline shots. I prefer these much more than the over-processed, over-darkened sky,over-use-of-contrast-n-saturation shots of some others which don't look natural at all and are super fake. Pls. keep posting shots with your new ZE lenses.
Samuli,
Love the 2nd shots and you did a nice job with the HDR blend. What software did you use?
Was there a reason you didn't stop down more in the 2nd one?
kosmoskatten wrote:
Samuli, on the picture of the red car I find the transition from the edge of the snow to the green a bit coarse and distracting. A sort of fuzzy/double edged bokeh which gives me head ache to look at. The car stands out nicely and crisp from the background but the transition from white to green feels distracting.
Henrik, for smooth bokeh I would recommend something else than ZE85, for example Samyang (+1000 other brands selling same lens). Regarding bokeh I find the bokeh CA most disturbing feature in 85ZE, however I have only seen it on snow against X situations, so I'm waiting the snow to melt away to see is it problem also in real life. In this image I find most disturbing the green bokeh CA on edge of snow and black side mirrors since there is nothing green close-by, the snow to forest edge is not that distracting (to me) since forest is green.
With Zeiss bokeh it's always a little challenging, but personally I don't like the smooth bokeh which does just look gaussian blur, e.g. Sigma 50/1.4 even it seems most people consider that kind of bokeh best.
On this photo I liked most the how the DOF - bokeh transition happens when going from front of the car to back of the car. However slight double edginess can be seen in back of the car a well.
wayne seltzer wrote:
Samuli,
Love the 2nd shots and you did a nice job with the HDR blend. What software did you use?
Was there a reason you didn't stop down more in the 2nd one?
Wayne, I use PhotoMatix Pro (Mac). I try to avoid the traditional HDR look, in other words I try to replicate reality with HDR when my camera fails to record enough dynamic range, not to make my photos look weird and unreal. It's difficult to find settings, which don't look the normal artificial HDR (like the software would be done to make that kind of photos) and every scene seems to needs it's own settings. Sometimes it's good to leave HDR very low contrast very high dynamic range, and then I adjust black point and exposure in Apple Aperture. Sometimes that doesn't work and I need to finalize the picture in PhotoMatix Pro.
I used f/4 since there was no need to close down more, for some weird reason Zeiss has optimized 85mm (traditional portrait focal length) to infinity and it's really good starting from f/2.8 at infinity. Secondary reason is that 5DmkII is not very good at low ISOs and HDR tends to pick up noise very well (can be handled by smoothing in HDR software but that decreases micro contrast in final image) - shorter exposures tend to have less noise, unless you go over 1.3s when the dark frame noise subtraction is used. Sometimes I wish I would have Sony A900...
Thanks Snowboarder and Wayne. Appreciate the comments. I figured how to upload properly on this forum :o)
HDR is a great tool. PhotomatixPro on windows 7 64 bit is great with 5DII raw files, with about 12G of ram, works great.
I am with you Samuli, I do not like the overcooked HDR look, but this is not to take away from photographers that do, as it is another art form. This is another recent photo but with 24L 3 frame HDR +/- 2 blended raw. This photo was taken just before a large storm hit the coast. I will try the HDR with ZE 21mm this weekend.
It is interesting the colors of the 24mmL do not have the depth or clarity that the ZE lens have. Maybe I am just biased!
The ZE 2.8/21 is an incredible lens, with amazing close-focus capabilities. This is just horsing around in my back yard.
Here's the full size version (a f/2.8, focused at less than a foot):
And here is a crop of the center of the frame:
The full size version isn't the greatest artistically, but the detail in the crop is freakin' amazing! (These are from the 5DmkII, processed in C1v5.1)
I agree with Samuli that I like landscape shots to look real whether they are from a HDR blend or a single shot that is being post processed. When the lighting ratios between the sky, foreground, background and subject get too out of whack between them then it just looks fake.
IMHO that Charle's last picture doesn't look real like his earlier shots because of foreground rocks looking too bright relative to the sky and other parts of the picture.
Maybe this is just me and pls feel free to disagree.
What I worry about in general is that landscape photography becoming less real in the future and in the quest to make ones picture standout from the rest everyone will be trying to make the scene more incredible than it was by over darkening the sky making the lighting on the subject much brighter than the background/foreground, adding lots of contrast and color. This has already happened in portrait/fashion photography where every shot is airbrushed and retouched all over to make the model look perfect.
When I went to Antarctica three years ago with Michael Reichmann, one of the professional photographers who was instructing was Stephen Johnson. I really respected his philosophy of keeping landscape shots as real as possible. His idea is to document the national landmarks in a truthful way as some of these places may not be the same in the future.
And while I am on the topic of fake, I don't like when people take a moon shot with a tele lens and then photoshop that into a wide angle scene of a large object like Delicate Arch. Also, just saw a wildlife shot in magazine where the guy obviously took a shot of a puffin in flight perfectly focused in the foreground with the background mountain in the distance also in good focus too. Looked to me like he photoshoped the bird right into his landscape scene and then claimed that he just set the camera up and took the picture when the bird flew into the right area. Yeah right.
Now that I got that out, pls. go back to posting your fine ZE shots, sorry for the OT rant.
