[Leica] Further clarification

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

Thomas Donovan: >>>I.E., is there a "difference in kind OR degree"
between the two methods? If only a difference in degree, & it sure
*seems* like.......hmmm, well, just how *do* you reconcile the two
quotes?<<<

...By separating the two activities. My interest in lenses is a passion,
I admit. But I also realize that it has little to do with my photography
(except perhaps that it sometimes distracts me from photography).
Artistically, I could do everything I've ever done in photography if I'd
picked two or three decent lenses decades ago and never used anything
else.

This isn't quite universally true, but almost: virtually every lens I
have used over the past 15 years has both given me "gifts" on occasion,
and also, on other occasions, disappointed me. That is, for almost all
the lenses I've used, I have pictures taken with each that really work
for me and that I consider optically beautiful, yet ,for each, I also
have evidence showing the lens's faults or flaws conspiring with
unfavorable or less-than-amenable conditions to produce less than
acceptable results.

I also have come to realize that, WHERE AESTHETIC EFFECTS OF PICTURES
ARE CONCERNED (I do wish others--not you, Tom--would stop putting words
in my mouth and quoting me out of context), the subtleties of lens
performance are mainly a matter of taste. I've identified some of the
properties of lenses that I like, and some that I don't care for. This
doesn't mean that one property is "good" and another is "bad": just that
I prefer one over the other. Secondly--and this is not opinion, but a
fact--no lens does everything equally well. So it matters what use you
are going to put the lens to, and whether what it does well is something
that is going to show up in the pictures you make. Let me cite a few
personal examples (yours will most likely differ):

- --I use black-and-white film. I do this because I am a black-and-white
photographer and I wish to produce black-and-white prints. Therefore,
color transmission, mild color fringing under some circumstances, and
the color cast of lens coatings are issues that typically concern me
relatively little, if at all. Yes, I'm not a lobotomized imbecile,
thanks: I do realize that there exist in the world other photographers
for whom color characteristics of lenses matter very much indeed.

- --I use a relatively fast, low-contrast, coarse-grained black-and-white
film. I do this because for me it results in pictures of better QUALITY
given the conditions I shoot under: if I used Tech Pan with a filter,
four-fifths of my photographs would show motion blur or camera shake,
and some of the remainder would suffer from excessive negative contrast.

    But because I use coarse-grained film, the ultimate degree of
resolution of fine detail doesn't matter much to me.
    Here, I'm less convinced of need in the case of other photographers,
because resolution of ultra-fine detail doesn't matter much to me in
35mm pictures by others, either. Past a certain reasonable point--say,
what the human eye can detect from 14 inches away in an 8x10 print--it
just doesn't seem to me to have much to do with how photographs
function. Plus, there are better ways to achieve it than using finicky
high-resolution 35mm films and ultra-high-resolution lenses: just move
to larger negatives and smaller enlargements. I'm really not sold on
ultra-fine resolution as a necessary or desirable property of 35mm
camera lenses. It's most often invisible anyway. (Yes, I know Kornelius
Fleischer of Zeiss has demonstrated what he believes is the ultimate in
35mm resolution. I've seen his work. It's admirable. Again, it's just
not a property that I happen to care very much about.)
    (Now, please, no inane responses saying Mike Johnston doesn't think
resolution in prints is important and all prints should look like
soft-focus pictorialsm, eh? I didn't say that. I'm talking about
performance in the 40 lp/mm graph line on MTF charts here.)

- --I pay attention to out-of-focus blur. Reason? Simply because there is
a lot of it in a lot of my pictures. So this matters to me. We have a
Contributing Editor, Ctein, whose life's work consists of approximately
180 stunning 16x20 dye-transfer color prints made from 6x7 negatives.
After our articles on "bokeh" (bo-ke, or blur) came out, he told me he'd
never thought about it. Then he went through his entire _ouvre_, and
discovered the reason why: he found NO pictures that contained any
out-of-focus blur. None. Therefore, this property of lenses naturally
makes no difference at all to Ctein, at least for his personal work.

I could go on and on here.

The bottom line with lenses is Ctein's quote: if you can't see it, it
doesn't count.

- --Mike

P.S. And now I'm really going to HAVE to get back to work, or those of
you who subscribe to the magazine will not get your Jan/Feb issue in the
mail.  :-)