[Leica] Guess the Lens, was PWIFLI: Portrait of Marianne

[Peter Klein <pklein@2alpha.net>]

OK, folks, here's the results of the Guess The Lens contest.  Only one 
person correctly identified one of the lenses, but he matched it to the 
wrong picture.  The person who thought one picture was taken with a Summar 
and one with a Summicron had the right idea, but the wrong lenses.

This picture was taken with an early-1950s 50/1.4 Nikkor, wide open at 1/60:
http://www.2alpha.com/~pklein/temp/marianne-4.jpg

And this one was taken with a nearly-new 50/1.5 Voigtlander Aspheric 
Nokton, wide open at 1/60:
http://www.2alpha.com/~pklein/temp/marianne-5.jpg

The 1/3 stop difference in apertures is insignificant for black and white 
film.  The reason why somebody thought the Nikkor picture was exposed less 
is because the Nikkor has significantly less contrast.

As far as delivering detail to the negative, the Nokton is clearly the 
better lens wide-open.  However, the Nikkor is kinder to women over 30.  My 
wife strongly preferred all the Nikkor's "portraits" to the Nokton's, 
having no idea which was which.

For those who thought that camera shake or focusing mistakes played a part 
in which lens looked better, sorry, but I don't think so.  I shot several 
pictures of two different people with each lens, and the differences 
between the lenses are apparent in all of the shots.  One thing about the 
Nikkor is that at this distance, wide open, it has a "hump" of decent focus 
rather than a sharp "peak" of razor-sharp focus like the Nokton. I focused 
very carefully on an eye in all cases.

Remember, neither picture has any sharpening applied.  And all lenses are 
less than perfect at f/1.4, where abberrations abound and the depth of 
field is a whopping two inches.

Perhaps a couple of more pictures will demonstrate things a little more 
clearly.  Here's a Nikkor shot of another colleague.  This is a full frame, 
shown for scale.  It's is a normal Web-JPEG with curve adjustments and 
sharpening, reduced from my printing 
file:  http://www.2alpha.com/~pklein/temp/susan.jpg

Now here's a detail of just the face with each lens. No size reduction, 
*no* sharpening and *no* curve adjustments.  These pictures were both shot 
at 1/30 and f/1.8.  Warning: These are approximately 140K files.

Nikkor:  http://www.2alpha.com/~pklein/temp/susan4-detail.jpg
Nokton: http://www.2alpha.com/~pklein/temp/susan5-detail.jpg

Anyway, I hope this has been useful to somebody.  It's unscientific, may 
not apply to your lenses,  and may have been influenced by the moon, swamp 
gas, or the fact that I saw Cirque du Soleil last weekend.  BUT it does 
show what these two lenses do, hand held, in available light 
conditions.  The differences show up on a 2700 dpi scan, so they're not 
academic.

- --Peter Klein
Seattle, WA

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