That's a remarkable lens. One thing that I think has been lost in photography today thanks to the smartphone is the value of high quality lenses. You simply can't replace great optics with software (at least, not yet).
I've got a few higher end cameras, and my favourite is probably my Leica Q2. It has a fixed prime lens (28mm), and the photos are just astounding.
I find it interesting that the lens matters much on a 2 megapixel sensor.
On a lot of the photography forums, people talk about how much a lens "out resolves the camera's sensor", meaning that any improvement in the lens will go unnoticed until they upgrade the sensor. They often use the DXOMARK score (perceived megapixels?) as a metric of this. It seems to make sense but I really have no idea how much truth is behind this!
When someone says a lens, or an optical system, resolves 2MP, it is 2MP @ 50% MTF (maximum contrast between adjacent pixels). 50% is the "good enough" of photography, but digital sensors and screens can be 100% MTF. Lenses can't do 100% but can get asymptotically near, so yes, using an "8MP" lens with 2MP sensor will show.
And, even considering 50% MTF, many professional lenses struggle to go beyond 3MP.
Still have a Nikon D70 from ~2004 that has only about 6 megapixels but will take better photos than any phone made today even using lenses that were made in the 1970s. It is hard to describe to people without showing them but the sharpness of photos is amazing with high quality lenses.
I still shot (for still life images, mostly, with external flash) with a D60 until I upgraded that to an used, beat-up D700.
You can definitely get much better images if you have a good lens, and on older cameras good lighting or very good form. But more modern smartphone lenses and software are plenty good for certain types of photography (and especially video).
I shoot less and less with my D750 and D700 (in non-studio / non-low-light-event situations), and more and more with my iPhone, because of the convenience and portability.
But there are definitely types of pictures that can't be taken without good glass and a larger sensor size. No software can simulate the physics that makes a longer focal length make a great portrait. (You just can't stuff that quality of glass into such a small lens, and the sensor can't physically gather enough photons to compete.)
Agreed. I bring all my travel photos into Lightroom which I subsequently edit on a 5k display.
Today I travel with an iPhone 11 Pro and a Fuji X-T2. In the past it's been whatever current-gen iPhone and pocket cameras like the Sony RX-100Mk3, Canon S110, Canon S95, and DSLRs like a Nikon D3000 and D50.
It used to be, the photos looked better on the phone after shooting them, just because the screen was so much better, but once imported to the computer, the iPhone photos looked like an oil painting even compared to a upper midrange P+S pocket camera, let alone a DSLR. It wasn't even close.
These days, between the XT-2 and the iPhone 11 Pro, it's hard to tell which is which. Sometimes the iPhone looks better as-shot because of the image processing presets. Other times it's the Fuji. At 1:1 on a 5k display it's just not as obvious as it was when the pixels were blown up more.
Even in good light, yes, the sharpness on the Fuji is better, but not by leaps and bounds. Not in a way that would be immediately obvious to anyone walking by the computer as it used to be.
I've never bought high-end glass, and frankly, some of my earlier DSLR photos are pretty bad compared to what my iPhone returns these days.
Rent some high-end glass sometime when you're bored. It is enlightening both in its capability and when realizing that a lot of consumer glass is wonderful, especially at ~f/8 (here's looking at you, nifty-fifty).
D70, D60... I think it's inevitable to add that I still use my D50 with a 20 years old 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5D that I bought second-hand on eBay. While I agree that "the best camera in the world is the one that you have with you right now" and nowadays we always have our phones, I encourage people who enjoy taking pictures in their phones to try a second hand camera with a good lens.
Seriously, even a beat-up one from eBay, just try! Costs way less than a new flagship phone and the difference is still amazing. And nowadays it's not difficult at all to learn how to use them decently, don't be afraid!
basically I can agree on the basic premise of shooting holiday pictures with an iphone. it works well, as long as there is lots of light. If there's less (and even just rain), quality get's wonky. Today not "can't put into a family-album"-wonky but more like "won't make a magazine cover or desktop background or simple posterprint"-wonky.
Which is perfectly fine for everyone of course, but given that you have to buy high-end (my very own 150$ Android One device has no such camera) and a central theme of this high-end innovation is that you buy a new device every 2 years (nowadays mainly advertised through the camera) and then throw the old one away, I just decided to buy a small ILC (EOS M10 on sale) and use that for taking pictures until the shutter dies (at times where my main camera is too big (and thus most would use a mobile)). Works fine for me and with 12mm/2 and 22mm/2 lenses I can (the 2010ish sensor notwithstanding) still only grin at the nightmode of the newest iPhone or the star mode of Google...
I used to have a D70 and was disappointed by the sharpness of the D7000 I upgraded to after it took a bath in a river. From what I could find googling, sometime after the D70 they moved from CCD to CMOS sensors that were noticably softer on hard lines and edges.
Would love to know if anyone here knows more specifics firsthand, but that camera's sharpness has always impressed me compared to the replacements I've tried out.
There's simply no way a small sensor+lens can capture enough light, that's why even old DSLRs have higher picture quality (esp. sharpness/clarity) than the newest smartphones.
Yes, but the software and hardware capabilities in the phones are decades ahead. My Pixel 4 categorically takes better low light photos than my 80D because it takes dozens of photos, does AI voodoo on them, etc. If the DSLRs had that software who knows what they could do.
Surely that depends quite a lot on the display size though, right? If you print out the 6 MP image the GP was talking about at 300 DPI, that's something like a 7x10 image. If you're printing at typical wall portrait sizes, surely the latest iPhone (with its superior low-noise processing and all) would win in the majority of shooting conditions.
Well sure, but the high quality photo printers I've looked at seem to recommend 300 dpi.
Some back of the envelope math: 20/20 vision = the ability to resolve differences 1 arc minute ≈ 290 microradians across. A distance of 1/300 inch subtends an angle of about 280 microradians at 12 inches, so I estimate someone with 20/20 vision could see pixelation on a 300 dpi image inside 12 inches.
Is that too weird? Well, maybe if you're hanging it on the wall, but it seems odd to put a 7x10 image on the wall unless it's in a collection or montage. I think photos printed at 7x10 are more likely to be held in the hands, in which case shooting for transparent at 12 inches seems like the way to go, actually. (I suspect many people would have trouble discerning details in a 7x10 image from several feet away.)
It depends on the image. Very high contrast areas (like text) on high quality coated stock can resolve up to 1200dpi (where higher resolution don't hold up even under a loupe).
Photographic continuous tone images never have that sharp of contrast, though, and, again, depending on the image, you might not see jaggies even at 100dpi.
300dpi is sufficiently overkill to be an easy "set it and forget" resolution to recommend. (Source: I paid for college doing typesetting, graphic design, and digital prepress work).
Meant to come back and make this comment. I've made a LOT of photographic prints at 150dpi and have never once had any comment other than "that looks amazing".
I used to think 300dpi was "bare minimum", having studied computer graphics in college and Nyquist limits and all that. And then one day my father printed a 640x480 cellphone camera photo as an 8x6 and... it looked fine. I was blown away.
And then I finally remembered: human eyes don't detect absolute light value, we can only see relative differences in light values. Gradients don't provide enough change to see the edges between colors. You can see it on a computer screen because the screen amplifies the contrast of the image (another old lesson I eventually had to relearn so as to compensate when making prints of digital photos).
Nobody knows what resolution you print things when they see the print. If the average joe "knew" how the photo was made, they might scoff at it. I guess people think that craft requires fine precision at all steps of every process. Certain craft does, but some other craft requires randomization and binning, and others have diminishing returns on extra effort. So I find it kind of fun to print low-resolution photos. Feels like I'm winning a game against overly officious critics.
> Gradients don't provide enough change to see the edges between colors. You can see it on a computer screen because the screen amplifies the contrast of the image (another old lesson I eventually had to relearn so as to compensate when making prints of digital photos).
> Nobody knows what resolution you print things when they see the print.
Well sure, you're right about the gradient thing, but what if you have an image with some really sharp, contrasted edges?
Just anecdata, but my family and I were walking through a seasside town a while back and ended up in an artist's shop. Took a look at some photographic prints on the wall (going for $50-$150+, as "artisan" stuff often does), and I had to call my partner over to look at them because I couldn't believe they were all pixelated! Some of them quite badly. I was about 18 inches away from them, I guess, and they looked to have been printed at about 100 dpi. Sure, you probably don't need 300 DPI for large wall prints, but I'd rather have a margin of error and not have that happen to one of my prints. Most people aren't likely to notice flaws in printed images, and are even less likely to tell the owner if they do.
I guess it's possible the shots sent to the printer were badly compressed JPEGs, but that seems unlikely.
It not only depends on the image content, but how you send the image to the printer.
Print engines can apply nearest-neighbor interpolation which results in visible, blocky pixels. If they'd upsampled the image with lanczos or another higher-quality algorithm before sending it to the printer, it would have looked like it was just a touch out of focus.
I sync all my photos to my phone, even those I took with my camera, and whenever I show people photos on my phone they always notice immediately, even in thumbnail size. “You took that on your phone!?” No, definitely not, I just synced it to my phone.
Just to give a visual example of my own experiences, the first image is a typical shot from 2017 iPhone 8, 12MP, shot at ISO 20 (lowest possible noise), and the second image is from a 2011 Lumix GF2 Mirrorless, 12MP, shot at ISO 200.
The first image is a splotchy mess, while the second image retains fine details, only the outside edges are blurry due to the toy lens I used. The other big differences that people are quick to notice, depth-of-field and focal length.
> You simply can't replace great optics with software (at least, not yet).
The lens quality and software quality should be complementary ways to improve the image. My DSLR has much better lenses than my phone. My phone has Night Sight, which is an amazing software solution for getting the best out of its relatively poor optics. (IIUC, it aligns multiple short exposures to minimize motion blue in an overall long exposure, as well as denoising/color-enhancing/stuff with ML.) I'd love to use them together.
Unfortunately, camera manufacturers have been very slow to adopt computational photography techniques in professional grade bodies. We're just now starting to see things like image stacking (usually called "digital ND filter" or other such nonsense). I'd like to see in-camera HDR, better processing, etc.
Hopefully the camera industry steps up the quality of it's software before it collapses into obscurity. Right now the only thing keeping it afloat is the fact that we haven't found good ways to take the effects of large apertures and longer focal lengths.
I feel like the moment phone manufacturers are able to convincingly fake something like an 85mm f/1.4, we're just going to be done with full-frame cameras.
are able to convincingly fake something like an 85mm f/1.4,
If that were the case we have a good long time then, most likely; Really what you are talking about is how you can't beat the physics of large sensors and lenses; for now 'faking it' isn't anywhere close, but also the techniques being pursued aren't likely to get there.
I suspect in-camera processing though is a bit of a dead end for pro and prosumer cameras because your laptop/desktop is going to be able to do a much better job, and your camera just isn't going to have a good workflow for post-processing and organizing photos.
For phone camera use it makes more sense, because people are rarely doing much more than delete these two, crop this one a little and send it to mom.
Don't get me wrong, phone cameras are having a ton of effort put into them and have way more resources than conventional cameras - but the effort is almost entirely being put into making something small and light work pretty well under most circumstances, not into making something great.
What's more important is that most people don't care for most applications. More people use to buy "good" cameras because their other options were poor or nonexistent. A top of the line current phone camera may not be great, but it's good enough for most people.
I don't know what this means. It could well kill off the "prosumer" market and leave professional cameras an expensive niche product. It just likely won't be because phone cameras got as good at creating pictures.
> I suspect in-camera processing though is a bit of a dead end for pro and prosumer cameras because your laptop/desktop is going to be able to do a much better job, and your camera just isn't going to have a good workflow for post-processing and organizing photos.
Something like Night Sight as a post-processing method might not be practical. You need many short exposures instead of one long exposure. So basically, you've got full-resolution raw video to deal with instead of a single shot. More efficient to process that before storing it and transferring it.
Based off of how cameras are currently used (at least from my limited sample size), I don't think that would really matter.
People regularly shoot in various "raw" formats which are significantly larger in size so that they have more flexibility in how to post-process. They capture a whole bunch of extra data, move it around, and generally store it indefinitely knowing they will throw a lot of it away in the final photo so that they can make the decision what to throw away later while they're looking at a 27" colour-corrected screen instead of a small camera screen.
People don't do HDR on-camera, they generally shoot multiple exposures and adjust in software after to get the effect and balance they're looking for which is basically Night Sight to a lesser degree.
A bit of extra disk space and transfer time is small peanuts and already fits the workflow most photographers are used to.
Yea. You can't beat the physics of big optics... but there ARE ways to get around some of the limitations of smaller optics.
You can fake depth of field, use image stabilization and image stacking to gather more light with a smaller aperture, utilize "super resolution" and/or neural network techniques to get or fake more detail, etc.
I'd love to see some of the awesome work being put into phones carry over into full-frame cameras before the whole pro-sumer market and a bunch of the pro market dissolve.
Image stabilization and stacking both started in SLR's before phone cameras were doing it. The best image stabilization is still opto-mechanical, of course.
Nobody fakes depth of field that well, and super resolution (the algorithmic kind, not the real kind) doesn't work that well either. We've been doing research in those areas for 25+ years now, and while some real progress has been made it's not magic.
Phone cameras are doing a lot of heroic stuff to get around the limitations of their optics, and it results in "hey, that's not bad". Nothing wrong with that!
But I don't see why you would want to see that stuff in a digital SLR, say, though - if you take your photography seriously enough to lug that thing around, you're doing post processing on a computer anyway, and you can do all that stuff better there (at least in theory). Now if you were asking why photo processing software on your desktop wasn't absorbing or improving on everything in the phones, that would make more sense to me.
Well first of all, there are things that can be done in camera better than they can be done in post in any reasonable amount of time. Image stacking is one of those, since alignment even with the best software is spotty, and cameras could include fairly robust accelerometers to do a bunch of the work in the background. There's also currently no depth info in DSLR images, so image processing involving depth of field isn't going to work unless you do the work by hand, which is quite laborious. In addition, it would be very nice if HDR pictures could be taken by my full-frame camera. I don't necessarily want or need to deal with bracketing in lightroom just to get an extra couple stops of dynamic range.
You're right that the best image stabilization is opto-mechanical, but it would be very nice to have access to digital image stabilization as well as in-body and in-lens stabilization. Again, a decent accelerometer can go a long way.
Honestly, most of what I'd like to see has involved image stacking in one form or another. Digital ND filters are the same idea.
And don't get me started on ergonomics and usability. I definitely picked the worst camera brand in terms of user interface (sony), but all the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras I've touched are noticably lacking in that department. I don't necessarily need a giant phone screen like my S9+, but I would expect a device costing $2000+ to at least have a fairly high resolution OLED panel on the back of it with solid touch controls. Meanwhile touch controls are distinctly lacking in any camera I've tried.
> Well first of all, there are things that can be done in camera better than they can be done in post in any reasonable amount of time. Image stacking is one of those, since alignment even with the best software is spotty, and cameras could include fairly robust accelerometers to do a bunch of the work in the background. There's also currently no depth info in DSLR images, so image processing involving depth of field isn't going to work unless you do the work by hand, which is quite laborious. In addition, it would be very nice if HDR pictures could be taken by my full-frame camera. I don't necessarily want or need to deal with bracketing in lightroom just to get an extra couple stops of dynamic range.
> You're right that the best image stabilization is opto-mechanical, but it would be very nice to have access to digital image stabilization as well as in-body and in-lens stabilization. Again, a decent accelerometer can go a long way.
> Honestly, most of what I'd like to see has involved image stacking in one form or another. Digital ND filters are the same idea.
> And don't get me started on ergonomics and usability. I definitely picked the worst camera brand in terms of user interface (sony), but all the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras I've touched are noticably lacking in that department. I don't necessarily need a giant phone screen like my S9+, but I would expect a device costing $2000+ to at least have a fairly high resolution OLED panel on the back of it with solid touch controls. Meanwhile touch controls are distinctly lacking in any camera I've tried.
> Software is important too!
I would like to see a panorama mode also vs firing up stitcher applications. All these should be basic firmware upgrades tbh even on the older models. Features available on a CoolPix entry level camera should not be missing from prosumer DSLRs.
Panoramas are one of the things I wish I hadn't left out of that comment. It blows my mind that a phone can do this so much better than a camera unless you invest in special mounts and such.
I got a Canon Rebel SL3 recently (APS-C, not full-frame, but still...) and it can do HDR on-camera. I wish it would save each individual exposure too instead of just the composite though. It also has touch controls on the display and a REST API for remote control via wifi. And this is not that expensive a camera.
Sounds like another direction to expand RAW formats. Accelerometer data is small, burst shots wouldn’t be that hard to take diff and store along. Then you could hypothetically feed it to Photoshop 2022 and run a 3D reconstruction.
I don't think the convincing fake will ever happen anytime soon (no ML will give you that pixel-perfect sharpness gradient along each strand of air on a 30MP image).
Generally speaking I also haven't seen a phone picture yet, which beats my cams at sharpness (which is simple physics...). It's pixelpeeping ofc but I can happily look at my pictures right from the raw converter w/o any sharpening or AI-magic applied and they are sharp and crisp. Do that with you phone-raw or jpeg. You'll spot a difference even on a phone screen...
Also, I don't think that these things should be put in camera software as a feature (making them subject to obsolescense as phones...) but instead they should just add a very basic scripting API (=tool) so you can store all the things you need for postprocessing and control capture (like the lua-scripts on CDHK).
I think it's important to bear in mind that the phone doesn't have to beat the full-frame camera at this game. It only needs to be "good enough". The fact that the phone is much more convenient to carry and use already gives it a huge leg up. What's the saying? "The best camera is the one you have with you"
If someone can make a phone that gives convincing fake bokeh and covers wide, normal, and tele focal lengths while producing images that are even remotely comparable to a "real" camera in an 8x10 print... that person will demolish what's left of the camera industry.
Right, which is why the low end consumer camera market has basically died. For average use, a phone is already "good enough".
So another plausible path is that the damage has already been done, and what is left of the prosumer and pro level stuff will remain stable.
Note, I'm not saying that I think that is what will happen, I haven't thought about it much. But there is nothing in current tech development that suggests the phones will bridge that gap (to prosumer level image quality) any time soon...
I think you might be right. A lot of the damage already has been done... but the pro and prosumer camera markets are still shrinking pretty quickly.
It's a concerning trend, which makes me hope that camera manufacturers get ahead of the trend by introducing features that I feel are lacking in "real" cameras.
Well, if you look at Nikon DSLRs: if you are shooting landscapes or portraits and are ok with the ergonomics of your gear/not printing _really_ big posters: your D750 is still state of the art (6 years old), so why buy new. What is a little bit disconcerting is, that everyone is jumping the full-frame wagon and not going the niche/mini-series way, they should probably go (this might lead to a disruptive change with a lot of knowledge lost in bankruptcies – which would be bad).
basically, except for the family pictures application, documentation (traffic accident) or "art"/hobby, noone needs a camera anymore, because today, everything there is, is already documented a thousand times, available in the mediocre quality for free, anytime, with an internet connection.
The first two categories are well served by any smartphone camera nowadays, which leaves the third.
And here I think that this is still served best by a dedicated device because you are basically really interested in taking pictures of a certain quality. And no, the current state of the art in fake-bokeh will not really hit this group (it's a very small group though and the instagram-people with their nice portraits will probably go for the fake too. Though they probably could just do a 3D-scan of the person and then do a render (no more bad hair. no more bad skin. pure perfection). Doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with photography though).
It’s not just the look of the larger aperture and longer focal lengths, The sharpness is abysmal. I can’t stand that watercolor look that every smartphone photo has.
Also dynamic range, but that’s much easier to fake.
It's easier to fake, but it's still not the same. By that, I mean that the final image might have that look, but you can't do anything with it after the fact. With a RAW image with true dynamic range, you can do whatever you want with it and change it up as you wish.
The compression on the images is also another thing contributing to the watercolor look and lack of sharpness. Cell phone cameras are worried about space constraints on the device itself and across the network.
Yes, but ultimately no matter how much computational photography and odd filter arrays you throw it, the diffraction limit will kill you with a 2mm wide smartphone camera.
IMHO, they should mostly optimize the bits of the pipeline that are needed to capture the kind of data needed (e.g. recording short high speed bursts etc), and maybe make ad-hoc data transfer of the camera nicer. More flexibility to do it on another device and update the software there quickly, while keeping the camera platform stable, and the battery life jump downwards from DSLR to mirrorless is already painful enough.
I've swithched to Olympus about a year ago and was surprised to find out they are doing some nifty things. Alas, with all that FF hype they are not getting much attention, despite having some smazing things to offer.
You'd think there'd be an opportunity for a disruptive newcomer here, but I guess there are enormous barriers to entry on both sides. Perhaps the watershed will be when one of the major camera manufacturers offers a device with good optics that is also capable of running user-installed software, whether that device is a conventional form-factor camera, or perhaps a sensor/optics-only box that works in conjunction with a phone.
Fundamentally, phones just give bad workflow for photo processing and organizing. The more you care about this, the harder it is to justify this approach as your primary workflow.
Sure, but no one's doing processing or organizing on the back of a DSLR either. Maybe the real problem here is that 13 years after the original iPhone, iCloud and Google Photos are still the least-bad solutions for archiving a family photo stream from multiple devices— there's a missing middle option between those and the prosumer solutions like Lightroom and Aperture (which in turn have their own issues, like the fact that AFAIK they mostly tackle organizing a local library; you're largely still on your own when it comes to things like collaboration and managing backups).
Anyway, I would have thought the dealbreaking issues with an augmented phone/camera would more be around the dearth of tactile controls, but that can be at least partially addressed by moving some of them to the strap-on accessory.
I don't see a gap in camera-processing for either phones or DSLRs, because the experience sucks on both. But you are right there is a gap between "consumer" software and "pro" software that could be addressed.
I don't know if offloading a bit of processing to your phone from a camera would fix much really. Ergonomics of cameras is much better for taking photos, and there isn't much in there you don't need.
I guess you could get rid of the screen entirely, and some of the user controls. That could be nice but would be difficult from a product point of view, as you would be dependent on the whims of a larger market. See all the difficulties getting standardized on things for car, where there is much more incentive...
I'm hoping to hit a chunk of that "middle option" you spoke of with PhotoStructure (details in my profile). I'm building sharing next, so hopefully that aspect will be addressed as well. Hosting the software yourself addresses privacy concerns. The beta is being offered for free in exchange for feedback.
Even cheap lenses have gotten really, really good. One of my favorite lenses of all time is the Panasonic 25mm f/1.8 I have on one of my video cameras. Plenty sharp for 4K and looks great--for $150.
I'm video-first, so the AF is adequate, but I definitely get that. Sony would be my next stop on that front rather than MFT, mostly 'cause their full-frame lineup is better than Panasonic's right now.
Honestly, I'm having tons of fun with really old viewfinder or DSLR lenses. If I had a bit more motivation I'd figure out the electronic lens protocol of my Sony camera, and program a microcontroller to drive an extension tubes and make autofocus lenses out of them.
So yeah, if you're willing to do without AF, and especially if you're doing video, it's difficult to beat a fairly sharp 50 1.4 for 50$
Over the years I only slowly came to realize something.
When I was purchasing a camera, the body was what you were spec'ing out, and would determine what you could do. The lens to me seemed to be the accessory.
Turns out cameras (bodies) are transient, and lenses persist.
It was as surprising to me as if tires+wheels turned out to be more important than the car.
That said, when it comes to ultra-long lenses, your best bet might be to buy a camera+lens all-in-one like the nikon p1000 / canon sx70hs (focal length + small sensor makes things more achiavable than large DSLR sensors)
That's an interesting thought. All those old mirror lenses with 35mm seemed to be f/8 or f/16 (and manual focus), but I assume the idea is to have a smaller sensor + make up for the aperture with the ISO boost. Thank you for your perspective.
Yep. But the big part is that even with a smaller than full-frame sensor, you still end up with a higher effective aperture and better noise at a given luminosity than say a Nikon P1000, for less cost. You give up zoom and IS (unless you go for an a6500, still cheaper than a P1000), though.
> One thing that I think has been lost in photography today thanks to the smartphone is the value of high quality lenses
Indeed, I have a Lumix LX3 from 2008. The sensor in my smartphone is better, as are the quality of the photos in low-light, and the autofocus is much faster. But in good lighting conditions, the photos from the LX3 are much higher quality.
If you shoot RAW and use a fairly recent Lightroom equivalent application that has good noise reduction, etc., you can still get the LX3 to shoot above its weight.
One thing in particular that I like about the LX3 is that the black and white mode is a surprisingly fun mode to shoot in. In fact, one novel way of using the LX3 in 2020 would be as a dedicated black and white camera.
I sometimes use my Canon 100D in BW, just to not cheat, and commit to a look beforehand. Makes you think of the subject slightly differently, just like when you shot on BW film.
But composition is step #0. :-)
I have taken some of my best shots on my iPhone 7. But there's no joy, maybe because of shutter lag. And also the good image to bad image ratio for me is horrible. Maybe 2000 deliberate shots per year and a handful keepers.
I think that single purpose devices create more deliberate and mindful behavior. Thus even if the nominal task is completed successfully, the result just doesn’t feel right.
Example: I can and have read books on my iPhone, but I find the result subpar compared to reading on Kindle or dead tree. Even though I technically completed my task, the experience of completing it wasn’t what I would’ve had on a single purpose device.
I’ve never been convinced by this argument, because you control what camera you have with you. It’s not like the universe will surprise you by teleporting your camera to Pluto without warning.
If you’re into photography, you’ll find a way to have your preferred camera on you more often. Pre-quarantine I carried mine daily.
If you’re not into photography, you’ll have your cell phone, and that’s ok too.
A thing I have with photography is this obsession with very low F#’s as being better A low F# is hard to produce but it doesn’t always make for a high quality image. These lenses have large ROC and allow very high angle rays to enter the system. So there is often significant aberrations in these lenses.
Why is this strange? A low f-stop IS better because it let's more light in, meaning I can record more information using my sensor in less (shutter) time, resulting in sharper images (less shakiness/improved stabilization).
There are lots of things that can remedy higher f-stops to some extent, but nothing really substitutes that big aperature.
The big appeal if low f-stop lenses from high end lensmakers is that they have reduced aberrations/distortions because they use a shit ton of glass to improve the image, which in turn is why they can be so incredibly expensive. A $50 f/1.6 is going to be dogshit. The $5000 lens is going to have additional optics to remedy the large ROC and high-angle rays.
Faster lenses are more flexible, whether or not that flexibility is worth the added cost and weight depends on your intended use case. A lot of photography gets done stopped down to f/8 or so, after all.
> A low f-stop IS better ... they use a shit ton of glass to improve the image
Meh, they use a shit ton of glass _which introduces aberrations_ which needs more glass to correct.
I bought a 50mm 1.2 ai-s, and sent it back a few days later. The dof is unusable at f1.2 and after f2.8 it looks like any other quality 50mm lens. It vignets like crazy and edges aren't sharp until you stop down to regular apertures. So yeah sure you can shoot a bit better in low light, if you like blurry and soft pics.
> The trade-offs are often worth it.
For pros, maybe, for prosumers and consumers I highly doubt it.
40 years old actually, still made new by nikon in their japanese factories to this day.
> Canon RF 50mm f/1.2
I'd happily test one but it costs more than my whole 35mm + medium format setups + darkroom equipment. It weights 3 times more than the nikkor and uses 77mm filter instead of 52mm so this is already a big no-no in my books.
I'm sure there are good fast lenses, it's just that they have so many drawbacks that it doesn't make sense for the vast majority of photographers.
A fast f-stop is better only if it allows you to use a lower ISO or a faster shutter speed in a context where you need a fast shutter. And even then, with modern cameras with good IS and strong low-light performance, you might still be better off with a slower f-stop.
Everywhere else, most lenses are sharped stopped down to the f/5.6–f/8 range, and depth-of-field is an entirely stylistic choice — e.g. shallow dof is popular with portraits, but largely undesirable for landscape photography.
One thing that drove lust for low f-stops is that the lens had to be engineered and built to a higher degree of precision to produce acceptable quality fully open--which also benefited people who stopped it down. For a long time a f2.8 lens stopped down to f8 was likely to produce a better image than a f4 lens stopped down to f8--simply because the f2.8 was built better.
That is no longer necessarily true. For example in Nikon world the current 70-200mm f4 is generally thought to have the same quality as the 70-200mm f2.8.
Lens quality in general has gone way up as digital cameras have exceeded the resolution of film. Now companies have to engineer even mid-range lenses to produce very high-quality images since even mid-range DSLRs might have 20MP sensors or more. And on a computer it's easy to zoom in and pixel-peep... and share your disappointment with everyone else if the lens is bad.
For all the legend-making around the Nikon 300mm f2.0, their latest 300mm f2.8 is going to outperform it in every way expect for the number of photons it lets through.
> even mid-range DSLRs might have 20MP sensors or more.
This is actually a funny thing. The APS-C Canon 90D has a slightly higher resolution sensor than the full frame 5Dmk4, and significantly higher than the brand new, also full frame, 1DXmk3. Sony’s APS-C bodies are all 24MP, the same as the a7iii and the flagship a9/a9ii.
Other than dedicated high-res models (5DS, a7R, D850/Z7), high-end cameras routinely have much lower pixel density than cheaper cameras, because resolution doesn’t matter that much for most applications, and pros care for a whole bunch of other features that scale poorly with resolution (such as low light performance and buffer drain speed)
There's a whole category of pro cameras where the MP count is intentionally kept down to match the image-handling workflows behind the photographer.
Think of your classic Sports Illustrated photographer... those images are not going to run larger than double truck in a print magazine, and 12 MP is plenty for that. Heck, National Geographic's first digital two-page spread was shot with a Nikon D1X.
And news and sports images need to go out FAST... where again a lower MP count actually helps.
> For a long time a f2.8 lens stopped down to f8 was likely to produce a better image than a f4 lens stopped down to f8--simply because the f2.8 was built better.
And at the same time it was just as likely to result in poorer pictures because of focus shift when stopped down.
The focus on f-stops was/is for the same reason people chased high ISO film in the old days, and "ISO" on sensors now, and the focus on extremely long tele's also.
This isn't about getting the best image possible but about capturing something you otherwise couldn't get at all.
All of this gear is about flexibility to handle poor lighting conditions, things moving quickly, etc. If you are product photographer with a room full of lighting equipment you are going to pick the right lens for the job and make the room work. Other people rarely have this freedom.
It's worth noting that in the last couple of generations of digital sensors, we're objectively in a better situation than fast film was, so that loosens the need for fast glass a bit. The same is true for widely deployed mostly ok physical image stabilization systems.
Bird photography is my personal example. If you go back ten or twenty years, you quickly notice much of the bird photos of the age have no background- because high power flash was mandatory. But today, while it is a challenge, it is possible to photograph small subjects handheld in natural light- with the latest & greatest equipment.
Kinda reminds me to the legendary Canon 50mm f/0.95.
Manual focusing at f/0.95 is not that easy and with that reaaallly shallow depth-of-field, making interesting composition is hard.
The 'NIKKOR Z 58mm f/0.95 S Noct' is Nikon's answer to that, and yeah, it is difficult to nail focus when you have a depth of field for close subjects that's in fractions of millimeters!
Some of these lenses are quite amazing. My favorite lens from this class is the leica noctilux at f0.95. It is tac sharp even at f0.95 (if you can nail the focus) and the images make even an amateur like me look like a photo god.
Canon has their DO (Diffractive Optics) technology[1] which I think only ever made it into a 70-300[2].
Mirror lenses have been around for a long time. They fold the length of larger telephotos into about a third with some trade-offs in speed and image quality.
One workaround is the use of Fresnel lenses.
This is featured in Canon's DO (Diffractive Optics) line of lenses.
Another 'workaround' is the use of a mirror, but these lenses are only useful for very specific tasks and are usually not designed for the high end market.
Nikon's PF lenses, of which there are only 2 (300mm f4 PF and 500mm f5.6 PF) are worth a look too. I have the 300PF and it's smaller and lighter than a 24-70mm and plenty sharp. The 500PF has been sold out since launch.
I agree with Ken Rockwell's review of the lens except I add that it just doesn't have the color and contrast "pop" of equivalent lenses such as the 100-400 L II zoom. One thing, though, the used price for the DO lens is low.
There is the option of reducing sensor size which allows very long focal length equivalents but at the cost of reduced image quality - I have Nikon P1000 which has a 24-3000 zoom in a package which is fairly large but still pretty portable.
Is the image quality as good as my full sized Nikon gear - definitely not. Can I take more pictures that I couldn't even attempt before (wildlife and landscapes) - definitely.
There's this Polish guy that climbs buildings, and he uses the P1000 from time to time, for very dramatic zoom effect.
Like in this video
https://youtu.be/1fP4UArArNg?t=104
Well, this specific video was on April fools, and him standing on top of the mast was masked in (faked), but that background footage of the zoom out was from P1000 camera.
I've been looking for some magic workaround. The closest thing you can find at the moment is a mirror telephoto lens. You can get them pretty cheap but often standard telephoto lenses that have the images cropped get better results.
I had a mirrored lens (400mm). It worked ok, but I had it for a film camera and you can't adjust the aperture. This was more of an issue on the film camera I had, but long focal length lenses have a very small depth of focus and stopping down the aperture helps that.
Canon tried a fresnel lenes there "DO" series. Not quite as good quality at about half the size and way more money. Its interesting technology.
You can see the lens size comparisons near the bottom of this article.
One of the main things driving larger optics/ is the amount of light the lens lets in. EG: max aperture (a lower f number) means bigger lens, more money. The availability of digital sensors means often you can shoot with higher film speed and might not require as large a max aperture..
I picked up a Tamron Adaptall 55B 500mm f8 two and a half years ago. They were produced from 1979-1983 and sold new for about $400 as best I can tell.
The big difference from contemporary Samyang and Rokkinon catadioptrics is it's really long focus throw. It's about 350 degrees from 1.5m to infinity. At 500mm even f8 is shallow. Hyper-focal distance is over a kilometer on a crop sensor.
Even with a 2x teleconverter (1000mm f16/t22) it's less than a kilogram so it's easy to walk around hand holding and throwing it in the bag is not a major commitment.
Like any other lens it's a compromise. I live with it's technical shortcomings because it provides a specific capability to make images I would not make otherwise. In theory, it's a choice between lenses based on technical specifications. In practice it's a choice between making image with the catadioptric and no image at all. The images that would not exist otherwise exist because I can see in 500mm prime before I raise the camera and when my eye hits the viewfinder I'm not making a "well maybe I can crop it" compromise.
I don’t think that’s lost in photography today; more people than ever know that and get to experience it thanks to the amazing DSLR and mirrorless ecosystems available. The people that think smartphone photos are good enough are the people that never would have taken photos with cameras anyway.
Sales aren't necessarily always a decent proxy to usage (and high end cameras are probably less replaceable than phones), but it'd take a brave person to argue that large swathes of the digital camera userbase haven't jumped ship to phones.
I've got an interchangeable lens camera (nothing high end, but a decent MFT offering), and my iPhone 11 smacks it for everyday usage.
It's just one datapoint, but for example the Nikon D750 is the most used Nikon camera on flickr (yeah I know, it hasn't died) and that camera is a few years old now.
And what has been lost even above the value of high quality lenses is the value of high quality lighting. Most people are completely clueless about light and especially flash. But lighting is a million times more important than lens.
One other thing is the perspective when taking pictures of wide architecture or natural formations, small cameras, even 35mm tend to distort what a scene looks like, say compared to a medium format camera. Though PC lenses for 35mm fix that too.
One thing to watch out for, with tele lenses, is the weight.
I personally really like Nikon's 300mm f/4 PF. They use a Phase Fresnel element (which, if you're a lens geek, is quite cool). In return for giving up a couple of stops of light, the lens is actually hand-holdable! (In fact, it's lighter than their top of the line 70-200 f/2.8 zoom)
I have the 300PF and it's fantastic. It's actually smaller and lighter than their 24-70 f/2.8. It fits, attached to my D500, in my smallest camera bag comfortably (a Lowepro Hatchback 16l).
One approach to saving weight while increasing telephoto reach is to use a smaller sensor. e.g. that Nikon 300mm f/2 lens can be mounted to a modern Micro Four Thirds camera (e.g. Olympus or Panasonic) for 600mm of equivalent reach while retaining the f/2 light gathering ability and unmodified optics. Adapters are very inexpensive (e.g. Voigtländer) compared to the cost of lenses like this or good quality bodies.
The other path to doubling reach would be a 2x teleconverter which would reduce light gathering to f/4 and introduce glass elements that won't do image quality any favours.
Small sensor downside: high ISO ability. Probably two stops lost, but with modern MFT sensors you can still shoot up to ISO 6400 with great results.
Small sensor downside or upside, depending on your needs: deeper depth of field (twice the depth of field, in this case, which is still pretty amazing for 600mm!)
At the risk of sounding pedantic - the f-stop* roughly equates to "light per area" or brightness, so if you're using crop factor, you need to apply it to the f-stop as well as the focal length.
So for a given full-frame lens at a given f-stop, if you drop down to an APS-C sensor, you're reducing the amount of light gathered by about one stop (half). On an m43, you're obviously losing 75% of the light gathering capacity (two stops).
Putting a 300mm f/2 lens on a micro 4/3rds body should result in images similar to a full-frame camera with a 600mm f/4 lens.
*Obviously t-stop would be better, since it's an actual measurement of brightness.
Except you're not. This is a popular talking point in 35mm circles, but the amount of light on a given area on the sensor remains unchanged, which is what actually matters.
The smaller sensors are challenged to keep their noise down, given they typically have a smaller pixel pitch to keep up the megapickel count.
> the amount of light on a given area on the sensor remains unchanged
This isn't the only thing that matters. It also matters that you're amplifying the noise more by enlarging it 4x as much as you would have on the larger sensor. It's analogous to film in that a larger format will exhibit less obtrusive grain than a smaller one despite using the exact same film speed. You're using the same exposure over a larger area, and thus gathering more light to drown out the noise.
You can either think of it in terms of total light gathered compared with the underlying noise of the sensor (signal to noise ratio) or in terms of enlargement of the image. The result is the same, smaller sensors have "more noise" simply because they're gathering less total light and amplifying everything more.
And don't be fooled by the old "higher megapixel = more noise" fallacy. All else being equal, it's the same amount of noise. However each pixel is gathering less light (signal) to offset the noise, so the signal to noise ratio is worse when comparing pixel for pixel. However, if you were to downscale the output of the higher res sensor to match the lower resolution sensor, you'd find roughly the same amount of noise in both images.
> One approach to saving weight while increasing telephoto reach is to use a smaller sensor
I make a 'soft' change to the the sensor size on my Nikon D850 by switching between FX (full frame) and DX (crop) mode. DX gives me a 1.5 effective multiplication of the focal length, but a still very good resolution of 5408x3600 pixels (uncropped FX is 8256x5504).
In some shooting modes (e.g. slow motion video at 1920x1080;30p x4) the camera automatically switches into DX mode, presumably to maintain a high framerate for a sustained period. I've now learned to select a DX crop in advance if there is a chance I might need slow-mo so that I don't get a jarring change in effective focal length mid-way through a shoot.
There’s also the even crazier Canon 300mm f/1.8 (yes, that’s not a typo!) [1] Apparently only four or so copies are known to exist and there’s almost no information on the lens available on the net.
> Only ten were made. NASA bought six to send round the dark side of the moon. Stanley Kubrick bought the other three.
That makes nine.
An instance of "The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen... Oy... ten! TEN Commandments! For all to obey!"? [15...10 Commandments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXeTsWGPT0w)
I also remember reading somewhere the actors had a bad time from having to make sure to stand still to not go out of focus. 4cm of depth of field isn't much.
I've got a few higher end cameras, and my favourite is probably my Leica Q2. It has a fixed prime lens (28mm), and the photos are just astounding.