JocoFoto wrote:
Nice series Samuli. 3 and 4 show special red and orange colors I haven\'t seen before in the Finnish forest (btw I\'ve never been in Finland, just saw your pics). The last one appears to have some unrest in the background, in particular the tree on the left. The other images do not seem to show it. Reminds me of the 25/2.0. Is it a Distagon thing? And can it be avoided?
Thanks JocoFoto!
The red/orange on trees is common on pines growing in national parks and swamps, another example about red stuff on healthy tree. I don\'t know exactly what causes it, but I have understood this happens to pine when it grows on too wet environment. Most of the Finland is covered by forest, but it\'s been hundreds of years modified for wood industry - this means that there are ditches to drain the soil to make it optimal for growing maximum volume of wood ==> no red stuff on ordinary Finnish forests. The worst part is that from Finland\'s forests only under 2% is in it\'s natural state - rest 98% is artificial monotonous industrial forest with minimal biodiversity
Bark of pine is always red from inside (at least for the pines in Finland). In the 3rd photo it looks quite intensive due to recent rain and polarizer usage.
Distagon 1.4/35 can produce unrest background (like any other lens). In my opintion it\'s not very prone to do it, but shooting f/1.4 you will get unrest boke very often (also too much vignetting, too much difference in DOF between center and corners, less microcontrast etc. I prefer to close down to f/1.7-2.2 where lens performs \"optimally\"). On last photo top left corner I would not expect to get any issues, because this frame is shoot with f/2.5, almost 2 stops down - the detail what is there is most likely just incorrect frequency to cause boke quality issue(s). This kind of things happen quite often in Nordic forests, due to which I\'m quite picky about boke of lenses I\'m using - for example Sony FE35, otherwise competent lens, can\'t be used in my forest photography; it\'s bokeh get really super ugly most of the time. I took few other apertures from this same scene, smallest being this f/10 which you can study to understand what caused unrest boke.
\"Is it a Distagon thing?\" - In my experience all Distagons can produce it, but so has done any other sharp retrofocus lens I have ever shoot with. I haven\'t yet seen sharp retrofocus lens, which could not be lured into situation in which the boke becomes unrest. I have understood based on what other photographers have written that some rangefinder wides (e.g. ZM 1.4/35, Leica-M 28mm, etc.) are better than retrofocus SLR-lenses - but I have no experience of these lenses. Only rangefinder wide I have is Zeiss G28 and it\'s not designed for boke (can be extreme harsh for Zeiss @ f/2.8-4).
