Old lenses: better than they ever were-Ball of confusion
Chris Feola
Author, Perfecting Equilibrium: For a brief, shining moment Web1 democratized data. Then Web2 came along and made George Orwell look like an optimist. Now Web3 is Perfecting John Nash’s Information Equilibrium.
Foto.Feola.Friday; plus the Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, January 30-February 3, 2023
And the band played on
Great googa-looga, can't you hear me talking to you
Sayin' ball of confusion
That's what the world is today, hey, hey
Foto.Feola.Friday
The old lenses have performed surprisingly well in our comparos the last few weeks, have they not? It’s not surprising, actually – it’s kind of a cheat.
Lenses are, obviously, round. They project a circle of light, and are designed so that this circle of light is larger than the film or sensor for that system. (This is why you get vignetting if you use, say, Sony e-mount APS-C lenses on Sony e-mount full-frame cameras. The circle is too small and doesn’t cover the corners.)
Older lenses focused on center sharpness. It’s difficult and expensive to build a lens that’s sharp corner-to-corner. New lenses are better than at this because CAD/CAM has dropped the price of creating aspherical and other specialty elements. And electronics have allowed the creation of lens profiles that automatically correct for things such as distortion.
And that’s true in some cases. For example, my Voightlander 12mm f/5.6 Leica screw mount from my old Voightlander Bessa R 35mm film rangefinder has been less than spectacular on my full frame Sony a7rii. Though that may be me; one of my New Year’s Resolutions for this year is to really take the Sony out and shoot it, which I’ve hardly done, especially since I got the Olympus Pen-F.
That Pen-F has a Micro Four Thirds sensor, which is much smaller than 35mm film. And when you use Micro Four Thirds cameras to shoot with old film lenses, that smaller sensor only uses the sharp center portion of the lenses. So it’s kind of a cheat, but in a good way!
Got out for a bit in a Texas winter wonderland with the Pen and some current glass. Enjoy!
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My brain is a peculiar place, especially so when I’m writing. My brain likes to play word association, and then plays back songs with those words. So these are the songs that were playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
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Editor’s Note: Perfecting Equilibrium will be on vacation February 5-11
February 12th (Substack): The Daily Me sets sail and promptly runs aground on the shoals of targeted advertising. Part III of the occasional series Pandora’s Program-What exactly is Web3, anyway? How is it different from Web2 and Web1? How did we get here, and what does it all mean?