Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/08/23
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]It's tough to compare those shots. I wasn't trying to get a nice shot with the park bench series. I was more concerned with getting some representative objects in the foreground and background, and have her in the pic just to make it a little interesting. And I didn't do a great job of colour balance and contrast with the test shots (as I could tell when I printed them on my 1270), I just wanted them to be as similar as possible to each other. This is an example of the dangers in comparing lenses this way. I could easily have used the 75 for the lens test, and I'm positive that the results would have been roughly the same as the others, apart from obvious magnification differences. Folks, don't take these tests too seriously! I never said or tried to prove that Leica lenses were crap, or that some other lenses blew them away. My point is and always has been that differences between lenses from different companies show up in the decimal places. Maybe some people like lens A better than lens B and vice versa (no relation to my A and B shots!). The point is, So What? You know something? Most people who view photographs (I don't mean photo editors or photographers) don't give a hoot about sharpness or bokeh. A model was by my place last week, picking out some portraits for me to print out for her on my Epson 1270. She wanted a tight crop from a full length shot, and I warned her that I could digitally crop the negative only so far before the quality would suffer too much. She told me to go ahead and print it. So I made her some 8x10s of several poses. To me they looked grainy as hell, but she loved them! She then asked me to make one on my 13" x 19: paper. So I told her, "we were lucky with the 8x10s, but for sure the larger print will look terrible!". She insisted. So I reprinted one on the larger paper, almost filling the page (I resampled the image to keep the printing dpi over 200). Again, up close the grain was very apparent, but she was thrilled with it! There's a lesson in there somewhere... Dan C. At 03:25 PM 23-08-00 -0400, Dan Honemann wrote: >Tell ya what: the 75 summi shot you have of the same model in your portfolio >blows all the 50 samples away. Or is this the result of better scanning? > >Dan H. > >> Check out the last row of images (it will be obvious which ones apply) in >> the portfolio link at http://www.photoartworld.com/leica/. Try and >> identify Photos A, B, C, and D. > > >