what flowers say about your photo gear

What do flowers say about your photography gear?

It's all good. Stop chasing more equipment. What you have is fine.

They say: F4 and be there.

And: Aren't we pretty?

With the punchline out of the way, I'll explain in some detail.

The setup

Yesterday the light was nice in the kitchen, so I took some photos of a flower arrangement, using the Panasonic Lumix S5 camera. I didn't fuss over perfection. I more or less got the same perspective on the subject with each lens. I shot hand-held using the excellent stabilisation built into the camera.

I used a series of adapted vintage lenses, shooting from wide open to F4 at ISO 400. These were:

• Contax Carl Zeiss Planar 100mm F2 (1981)
• Contax Carl Zeiss Sonnar 85mm F2 (1975)
• Contax Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm F1.4 (1975)
• Pentax-M 50mm F1.7 (1977)

The results you can see in this Flickr album. My basic development in Affinity Photo has been applied but no retouching.

The observations

1. Though I cropped to a square aspect, I did so on the right-hand side of the image. This means that the top-right and bottom-right corners are from the original frame. Vignetting? Nothing to see here.

2. Most of the photos are sharp enough. Though it's difficult to nail focus with an aperture wider than F2. I took these shots as quickly as possible. Perfect focus and composition was not my aim.

3. All the shots have a thin depth of field that focuses attention on the subject. All have a blurry enough background. I'd say that those shot at F1.4 and F1.8 don't have enough of the subject in focus. I was shooting at the close focus distance in each case, so this is also a factor.

4. All the images have a nice bokeh quality, even at F4. Even the 50mm focal lengths.

5. The colours are great. The lovely Panasonic camera reproduced the scene as I saw it.

6. The Carl Zeiss lenses have a very consistent rendering. The Pentax is a tiny bit duller, but nothing I wouldn't fix (without even thinking) during the development process.

The discussion

Now I can make some general conclusions. Here is where I respond to misinformation that circles the internet, fuelled by YouTube videos from so-called experts. (I am going to need to rant about that more later.)

Vintage lenses can be just as good as contemporary lenses for the photography most of us practice. Already by the mid-1970s glass was as good as we needed. Get over thinking that there have been major developments in optics in the last four decades. Of course there are edge cases. I am not talking to professional sports shooters here. (Because they have no reason to read my blog.)

Consider that most of the time we are staging photos in one of two ways.

One. We have a subject somewhere near the middle of the frame and a bunch of background elsewhere. We want the eye to go to the subject, so we choose a narrow depth-of-field, as I have done here. In this case F4 might well be good enough. Certainly if I was further from my subject I might want F2.8. But the only reason I need to go to F2 is because I am constrained by low light, not because it results in a better image.

Two. We want a sharp image corner to corner, say for a landscape. Then we stop down to F8, F11, or F16, depending on when diffraction kicks in. Any half-decent lens will then provide a perfect image.

Increasingly I see people complaining that their lens is not sharp from corner to corner at F1.4. What scenarios call for that aperture? The answer: none. These comments are driven by an unrealistic desire for a lens to be the ultimate at every task. Choose your tools for the job and then learn how to use them.

There is a good counter-argument to vintage lenses from the perspective of automation. Do you need auto-focus? OK, fine. In that case, use a contemporary lens optimised for your system. But I would also encourage you to practice your manual focus techniques, because photography is simply more fun that way. And you have more control. You can then stop complaining about how your auto-focus system is not intelligent enough to guess what you want to shoot. That alone would remove one-third of all internet traffic about photography.

Do you need a lens with built-in stabilisation? No, not if your camera already has this function. Get a better camera system. Seriously. IBIS is an essential feature in 2024 if you like to shoot hand-held in low light.

There are further provisos. It should be clear that I choose my lenses carefully, favouring high-quality glass. For me this means Zeiss, Leica, and Pentax. Leica is too expensive and their best lenses work optimally on rangefinders. That leaves the other two brands for me to source. And yes, I know there are fantastic lenses from other manufacturers. In fact, I would say that during the 1970 and 1980s every company made good lenses: Olympus, Minolta, etc. But very few are better than Zeiss and Pentax.

I also target lenses that do not impart their own style to the image. I realise that for many people "vintage" implies a certain swirly bokeh, lens flares, and other artefacts. The resulting image is then as much about the tool that made it, as it is about the subject. That's OK. Lens fetishism is a thing. You do you and go for your out-of-control aberrations.

That's of little interest to me. That's why I am using high-quality West German and Japanese lenses and not the cheap hit-or-miss products from the former USSR. OK, so recently I took some nice photos with a Carl Zeiss Jena Pancolar 50mm. But this set would have been just as nice with the Pentax. And I would have had more latitude to explore shots that didn't need to hide the poor corners and other issues.

The elephant in the room is price. I can spend six grand for a contemporary 50mm lens in L-mount. Seriously. It's called the Leica Summilux-SL 50/1.4 ASPH. Or I can spend €350 for the Zeiss Planar 50/1.4. To me that's already a lot of cash, but Zeiss is well-respected and commands a high price.

Remarkably the most I need to pay for the excellent bog-standard Pentax-M 50/1.7 is €50. Because Pentax isn't "cool" and flies under the radar of collectors (in most cases). On the other hand something like the Jena Pancolar is hyped in YouTube videos and so costs twice that of the superior Pentax.

Which lens will take better photos? Well, I'll be stopping down to F2 anyway, since I want something in focus. The rest you can guess.

So, what do the flowers say?

They tell me that ultra-fast glass is useless since I want a subject in focus. They encourage me to learn about exposure and focusing. They say: With all the money you save on lenses, you can buy several thousand more... of us!

Flowers. Sheesh. Always thinking of themselves.

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