50mm lenses, fast ones

Tesselator — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 03:12:30 +0000

I thought there was a thread on this already but I can't seen to locate it. I guess it could have been on another site tho... Anyway I recently compared 10 "normals" with apertures larger than 2.0 in a 1m res-chart test and thought in might be useful to post up.

During the shooting of the Takumar I caught some specular reflections. I recently built an automatic indoor bird bath for my parrot and it's got a little lightshow that goes off every time it turns on. Those lights showed up in the test chart without me noticing - and I'm way too lazy to reshoot. :D

These were all done on the 1m chart at ISO 100, with AE turned on. WB was set to the chart's white looking through the Canon FD 50/1.4 SSC and left there so the color differences (for white at least) could be compared. I only included the right and left corners cuz that's pretty much mid-area if shot on a FF anyway (not center, but mid).

This test obviously won't tell everything about a lens like how sharp it is when focused to infinity or what the bokeh is like, but I guess it's a pretty good comparison for these to show sharpness at one meter. And 1 to 3 meters is nice bust portraiture with a 50mm on the GH1.

The chart numbers are to be multiplied by 100 to get LPP (Lines Per Picture). But actually, since I was pulled out just a tad in order to use the box for framing the shots, maybe multiplying by 107 or so would be more accurate. :D I shot them all in 4x3 format on a Linhof tripod, with the 10s timer, using the 15X zoom MF assist - using the right-most red box (above) as the focus point.

The Canons seem to be the winners (in this test) but all of those are IMO excellent lenses - except the Rokkor-PF F/1.7 maybe. And it's an awesome looking antique. I have a bunch of other 50's that start at 2.0 or greater which are also very wonderful - like the 55/2.8 Nikkor Micro, the Minolta AF 50/2.8 Marco or some of the Zeiss/Jena Biotars and various Tessar implementations, etc..

I also wanted to test the Voigtlander 50/1.5 but I can't seem to find my adapter.

Normal prime lens for m43 recommendations

ppcroft — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:53:01 +0000

Ok, I have GH1, Lumix 20mm pancake, Lumix 14-140 and now a 85mm 1.4 Samyang Nikon mount.

Without realizing it, my GH1 had become a video camera as I found myself taking less and less pictures with it. Much as I like the 20mm, I find that I tend to use it much less as I shoot people a lot and it is not the lens for portraits.

I just got the Samyang 85mm last week and suddenly I have re-discovered the joy of shooting the stills. The 85mm is quite a joy for both video and stills and the manual focus is not the trouble I had imagined it to be. So I am looking for add a normal lens (35mm equivalent) may be in the range 35-60mm, preferably in Nikon mount with manual focus and aperture rings. Of course, I don't mind using a m4/3 or a FD lens. I would like to try a macro lens as well, so don't mind if it is macro lens in 50-60mm range. This will be used mainly for portraits, product photography and video.

I have considered the following:

Samyang 35mm 1.4 Nikkor 50mm AIS 1.8 Vivitar 55mm macro FD 50mm 1.2 Lumix Leica Elmarit 45mm 2.8 macro'

Please advise your suggestions. Thank you...

Tagged with normal - Personal View Talks

50mm lenses, fast ones

Normal prime lens for m43 recommendations