Thanks guys, but the wishes for good luck didn't matter in the end. I had forgotten that it was all saint's day, a national holiday and the store was closed. Instead I took the 75 Cron for a spin.
Great panos Dan and great portraits Charles!
So, what do I think of the 75 Cron AA?
It's about as perfect as a lens can get.
I don't mean that as a compliment but just as a factual statement about its optical performance. It's corrected for everything. If you would mathematically model an ideal 75 lens you would get very close to the 75 Cron. As far as raw optical performance goes, you could hardly ask more of a lens. The down side of that is that it contributes exactly zero to the look of the image. If you look up "neutral" in a dictionary, I'm sure you'll find the Cron among the definitions. It's rendering style isn't bad and it isn't good. It hasn't got a rendering style. The image you take with it will be delivered with mathematical perfection with nothing added or removed. It's all up to the photographer and the only thing the lens contributes is the optical perfection of the image. I posted some Rokkor 58/1.2 shots earlier. This is the anti-Rokkor.
So, do I like it? I don't know. I don't dislike it as there is nothing really to dislike about it. I have not experimented much with postprocessing but I think that due to the neutral style of the image that color and contrast adjustments are probably a good thing to avoid getting a completely clinical rendering. I do prefer Zeiss rendering which requires no or very little PP but as I have already got a bunch of Zeiss glass it's not bad to have something a bit different.
Apart from the front focusing I've had two technical issues to deal with. One is that I've manged to move the aperture ring by accident from f/2 to f/2.4 or f/2.8 a bunch of times. The other one is that I keep forgetting that it's the inner frame lines I should look at!
Well, I feel redeemed Yes, it is a great lens, optically, but to me, it is missing a little magic. The 90 AA has a little, and the 50 Lux ASPH has a little more. But I think you hit the nail on the head with your description: Leica lenses are typified by the 75 Cron: they don't get in your way or in your face like Zeiss glass. The subject is the subject, not the photo.
In fact, this gets down to the bottom of why I sometimes prefer Zeiss, sometimes Leica. The Zeiss is great for making photos with a great look. The subject is somewhat less important. The Rokkor is also such a lens. There is so much added to the scene compared to with the naked eye that the subject is often not even mentioned in the discussion of the photo. It is all about "I love the lively boke" or "amazing colours" or "look at the micro-contrast".
The Leica gets out of the way. The modern Leicas have very little to no CA, are sharp edge to edge, and have very neutral boke with no extraneous features, more perfect than perfect. The ultimate lens designer's lenses. When you look at a photo made with a Leica, it is all about the subject. This is possibly why photojournalists have such a strong historical tie to Leica.
Sometimes I am just walking around making photos of whatever. Zeiss lenses are perfect for this. However, for some subjects I prefer Leicas, like portraits.
Charles, very nice portraits, especially the last one
Luka, very nice shots with the 75Cron. The first one is beautiful, very surrealist painting like! The rendering from this lens is very nice. Sorry to hear about your issues with the lens.
carstenw wrote:
The subject is the subject, not the photo.
Yes! Precisely. Very well put.
The reason why I'm skeptical of the rendering style (or lack thereof) is that I look at a photograph the way I look at a painting. It's not about the subject but about the image. The subject is a part of it but so is the rendering (colors, bokeh etc). A van Gogh is interesting largely because of the impressionist rendering style ( ) and not because the focus of the painting is on an interesting subject.
I fully agree with Garry Winogrand's philosophy: "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs."
To me the photograph itself is the interesting part and not the subject. An interesting subject can make a photograph better but for me it is still all about the image. Subject, composition, colors, bokeh etc are all constituent parts.
The ironic thing though is that by its insistence on being as neutral as Swiss foreign policy Leica has managed to partially undo the "subject first" ideal. When I look at a Leica shot I'm acutely aware that I'm not looking at the subject but at a photo of the subject. Zeiss on the other hand provides images that look more like you are looking at the real thing and not a photograph of the real thing. Edward (h00ligan) posted a couple of pages back a comment from his girlfriend about images that look "like you are looking through a window". That's Zeiss. Some Leica glass can provide it partially but the completely neutral 75 Cron completely obliterates that feature by its many optical corrections.
A couple of more shots of the same type (medium distance, people) with neutral rendering:
This one is an exception with a slightly less flat look:
Luka, I am shocked and have to agree, there is much less depth in the 75 shots you have posted compared to the zeiss.. that's a real selling point for zeiss.
I think the m9 75 still seems to have a lot of depth, but it's just different. I really can't quantify it, but thinking maybe it's contrast...
which leads me to ask, can you then recover much of it in post with a bump of some sliders?
Edward, not really or at least not in any sure way I know. My personal theory is that the depth effect of the Zeiss is related to micro contrast and the sharpness to blur transition.
I have tried to get a bit more depth by increases in global contrast and by adding a vignette, but not very successfully.
Here is an example - an image I posted above. Here is the unprocessed version (lightroom default settings + default resize & sharpen):
I increased contrast, added vignetting and reduced the saturation and added some more sharpening to the in focus areas. Result:
Although I like the result better than the original, I can't claim that it has more depth. To really see the difference open the images in separate tabs and flip between them.
Why did you reduce the saturation? It looks like neither Zeiss nor Leica.
I think the Zeiss look is partly about contrast (Leica also has high micro-contrast, just lower overall contrast) and the dof transition, possibly including the edge effects that Brainiac was always bringing up. It works well to enhance photos, but if you don't want an enhanced photo, just what you saw, the Leica works better, IMO. The only aspect of reality that the Leica messes with is the foreground-background separation, which is stronger than in real life. It is quite a big change, actually, and maybe the reason why these window comments about Zeiss arise, but it has a subject-isolation effect stronger than the equivalent Zeiss, which includes more of the background in the image.
Its interesting, the Zeiss 28/2 seems to act more like a Leica in regards to contrast and micro-contrast (in that its lower contrast and high micro contrast) than most of the current Zeiss lenses and I thats one of the reasons I like it. Sometimes subtlety is good. I personally like the unaltered shot, denoir, the altered photo looks harsher in regards to the tonal transitions and doesn't jive well with what seems to be a soft light.
