Tag Archives: flaws

Embracing Imperfection

With all the online talk about lenses being “tack sharp”, “corner to corner sharp”, “sharp wide open” and so on, you could be forgiven for thinking that any lens that isn’t “sharp” is fatally flawed, good only as a paperweight.

Sometimes, sharp is exactly what you want. But I wonder if this obsession with perfect lenses isn’t going too far; yet another aspect of photography that’s being homogenized into perfect, bland sameness along with the sensors in digital cameras.

Wide open, effective 100mm/2.8 with plenty of spherical aberration.

Wide open, effective 100mm/2.8 with plenty of spherical aberration.

I’m seriously starting to see where the Lomography movement and the Polaroid freaks are coming from. Perfection in our gear means one less thing we can use to differentiate our work from the next guy with a sharp lens and 20+ megapixels behind it. Imperfections, be they random Holga light leaks, or weird colors from cross-processed film, or any of the other things which camera manufacturers are trying so hard to “liberate” us from, are something we can embrace to make our work unique or different. Sure you can do it in Photoshop, but it’s always going to be “pseudo-imperfection” generated by an algorithm.

I recently picked up a cheap 2x teleconverter, a 4-element multicoated Vivitar. General Internet opinion would suggest that any amount of money spent on this was wasted money, and looking at the first shot taken with it (wide open, in flat, bad lighting) it seemed like that was a fair assessment.

But I tried a few other shots, with the 50mm f/1.4 FD lens and teleconverter and good lighting. Wide open it has a ton of spherical aberration around highlights, giving a soft focus, dreamy sort of look. I have a feeling this would be a satisfying portrait lens if used right. I’ll be sure to put that theory to the test!

What if I want actual sharpness? Well, the trick is that most lenses perform very well when stopped down. There’s a lot of techno-babble and optical diagrams out there which explain this a lot better than I can (I understand why optics work like this, but am not great when it comes to communicating these things to non-geeks).

The point is, by stopping down even a couple of stops (in this case, to an effective f/5.6) the dreamy look goes away and real sharpness starts to set in. The next image is a case in point.

How can you look at this and *not* feel just a wee bit happier? Effective 100mm f/5.6, focused as close as possible.

How can you look at this and *not* feel just a wee bit happier? Effective 100mm f/5.6, focused as close as possible.

Ignore the horizontal lines, these look to be scanning issues and will be corrected once I’m able to.

This was just 2 stops away from wide open, but already is looking much more like those sharp lenses everyone keeps going on about! Extra bonus, the close focus distance stays the same so now I have a near-macro lens option.

Not bad for a $10 investment whatever the Internet might say about it.