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 p.93 #7 · which lens has the most 3D POP? | |
You can (with practice) learn to gauge small aperture image depth, even if you don't have the luxury to regularly see open vistas as 'training' for your eyesight. How easily do the foreground, midground and distance flow into each other? How closely does the scene approximate real life? Is color realistic enough? What photographic tricks do you see that act as 'hidden persuaders' to fool your visual system into thiking it is 3D?
3D is not just the absence of fast-fade fake 3D as perpetrated by Zeiss which only works with mid-FL lenses wide open or near to it - it is the recognition that two 3D models exist for fast lenses, and that stopped down images still need the vital inputs that work in such compositions, as foundations. It all starts with bokeh, however - the model is set there and flows into images created using f2.8-f4-f5.6-f8.
All image motifs must look credible to natural vision, their brightness tone values and color must look like you saw it yourself, there must be the right level of contrast at both macro and micro (and also middle spatial frequencies, which is why it is reported - 20 lpmm, or 30 lpmm as used by Cosina). Ironically enough, final micro-contrast is not vital, but it is sugar to the eyes. In particular, if your lens attenuates highlights poorly, the result is a flattening of the subject, it merely looks dreary.
Related to this phenomenon is the highlight blocking we all see in a bright sky, the appearance of which forces you to reduce exposure if you want that detail to stay inside the DR envelope. Natural vision is a subtle outcome that needs to be nurtured in natural landscapes, but our eyes do so well at compensating for what we see that we are quite easily convinced by poor 3D lenses.
The cine world, some of them and maybe most of them, are now reconciled to the fact that 3D is not going away, and it is not going anywhere in discussions of image depth as a value to final output. We must have bokeh, even if it contains identifiable motifs, as a consequence of how we pursue photography.
All people want is an understanding that it is important, worthwhile and they have the right to choose lenses on that basis. Even high 3D lenses can revert to the Zeiss 3D model simply by manipulating aperture, camera-subject distance. It's child's play to 'do a Sigma' at the work bench in the design studio, and just dish up a lot of soft blur and call that 3D. It's in fact just the opposite, they are producing photographic fog in their ART series. There is no 3D in fog. What such image makers are saying to you is that you don't deserve to get any sense of depth that might otherwise detract from the bride or groom. We call this reductionism, the erasure of all material to leave 'just the basics' on the focal plane.
Sigma's recent slow lenses are a kind of mea culpa from them, a step in the right direction, very nice and rounded. Below, notice how rapidly your vision settles on the scene and accepts it as quasi-realistic even if you sit on the other side of this fence of 3D? Your eyes are better than you are! Well, your visual cortex is better than your theories, another way to put it.
Related - guess where your visual cortex focuses first? Hint - it's not the far corners so beloved of reviews and APO enthusiasts. The photo lives or dies on its impact zones: the colorful, contrasty, bright and identifiable data in or near to the middle 'magic donut'. What is it? It's the circle that is formed with a radius of 12mm (known as the short edge).
Cooke knew this a hundred years ago, all their lenses conform to it. So do for example, the Simeras and many Chinese lenses. The fall-off in focus, contrast and muted color in corners are designed to correspond to your own vision. These are not design fails, they are design choices - hard nosed and carefully orchestrated. And they are coming to your niche of the visual arts via the process of cine-stills 'convergence'. This is going to be a kind of visual invasion from the cine world into our quaint and settled world.
Sony 55mm f1.8 at f5.6, all data is in gamut, with accurate tone values
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