A Simple Room
With three young people at my beckon call, I put two different lens to the test – one old, one new. The point in sharing this post, however, is to demonstrate how light and the beautiful simplicity of kids, pre-teens and teens drives most images, especially when done in a simple setting. Yeah, I also want to show off some differences in lens.
About: THE NEW: the brilliant Zeiss Sony 50 1.4 Planar, which is one of the sharpest and most beautiful 50mm lens in the world bar none. THE OLD: a 1956 Leica Summarit 50 1.5, which I often feature on my blog. Wide open, the Summarit can be quite quite soft… but when you move the f stop to 2.8 or 4, it sharpens up. The bokeh (background blur) can be extraordinary. THE KIDS: Children of immigrants. THE LIGHT: Natural.
Young lad captured with Zeiss Sony Planar 50 1.4. Even wide open (1.4 F stop), it’s as sharp as a ninja’s sword.
Using the same low-resolution image, the young man’s face is cropped and superimposed to show how detailed this Zeiss Sony lens can be. Even though his face is a small part of the image and even though the image was taken at 1.4F, the details are still stunning.
Now, I’ll cut to the chase and show some variances in similiar images. The windows here directly show how the 1956 Leica Summarit has a busy, somewhat disruptive but highly interesting bokeh (background blur) while the Zeiss Sony, using an old Zeiss Planar design, is creamier.
A cropped window from a Zeiss Sony image pasted next to the Leica Summarit image. Bokeh is a matter of taste.
Now, using similar images, you can see a side-by-side comparison. For a “soft” lens, the Leica shows quite well while the Zeiss Sony Planar is mind-blowing with clarity of subject.
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- 1956 Leica Summarit 50 1.4
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- 2017 Sony Zeiss Planar 50 1.4
Okay, so here are a string of images. The first two are the Zeiss Sony Planar and the remaining images were taken with the Leica Summarit, which is stopped up in a few shots and was surprisingly sharp (though not as sharp as the Zeiss Sony). The morale of the story is that while lens matter and can affect resolution, color, light, clarity and blur, beauty comes through any lens. Just take a look at these beautiful young people!
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