[Leica] Re: Canon 50/1.4, etc.

[Douglas Cooper <visigoth@cloud9.net>]

> I am VERY familiar with the flarey-assed Canon 50 1.4

Okay, those are fightin' words.  This is, as I've often said, one of my favorite lenses.  And if yours
has flare, I suggest you check to see whether there's oil on the diaphragm blades, or grease on the
surface, or some kind of weirdness in the paint (e.g.. all scraped off internally).  I shoot this lens
with an old Canon skylight filter, *no* shade, and I've never seen flare of any kind.  Ever.  And I've
put many rolls behind this lens, in all manner of lighting conditions, in both hemispheres of the
planet.

Ahem.  Glad to get that out of my system.

Sorry, kids, but this argument comes down to what you like in lenses.  Period.  I prefer Tessar
formulas to Planars, for instance, which makes me peculiar, but I rarely shoot wide open, and stopped
down the Tessar has a much nicer signature.  Does this make me right or wrong?  Neither:  it's what I
like in optics.  I doubt I'd be happy with any of the recent Leica asphericals, as they've been
described by members of this list as "hard;" and bokeh is more important to me than lines per
millimeter.  But if you're shooting on a tripod, and you want every pore on your model to stand out
like a volcano, then you'll want one of these two-thousand-dollar lenses.  (Okay, that last sentence
betrayed a bias.  But you know what I mean.)

If newer were always better, it would be hard to figure out why we're all Leica-obsessed.  We should
want the latest image-stabilized Canon  wunder-optik.  And, in fact, the 200/1.8 USM has the best MTF
of any lens ever tested by Photodo.  So enjoy.

I've managed to get professional results for years out of some of the most primitive tools in the
trade:   the Leicas and Rolleiflexes, for all their craft and precision, are basically light-tight
boxes with a shutter. The old lenses tend to suit me better than the new ones.  Are they as sharp?
Maybe, maybe not.  (Although the Planar on the TLR is one of the few lenses tested that routinely
manages over 100 lines per millimeter.)  But they throw a lovely image.  To my taste, anyway.

If I wanted ultra-sharp, highly blown-up images -- and believe me, I'm a great admirer of Jeff Wall,
Chuck Close, etc. -- I'd use the largest negative/Polaroid I could find, and manipulate the plane of
focus.  In fact, I'm beginning to do this.  With old lenses, of course...


awaiting the flames, like Joan of Arc,


Douglas Cooper