milandro

it is really funny that so much attention has been dedicated to the fuji newborn, the 90mm, which, as it has been said by many, equals the 135mm on a FF or 35mm format camera.
 
I am old enough to remember everyone buying reflex camera with a 50mm  and then progressing to the 135mm and 28mm the holy trinity of photography when I was a kid. I too did that.
 
After buying it I found out that the 135mm was the most boring focal length that I could own. Neither fish, flesh, no good red herring!
 
Too long to be offering a good portrait lens and too short to be of any use for anything really far away.
 
Most bought it because it was affordable, small and relatively light efficient. Not many really ever used it a lot.
 
Who knows! Maybe after so many years photography has changed and now there are more and better reasons to use this kind of lens.
 
I really cannot see which though.
 
The 56 is a true portrait lens which brings you at a distance short enough to produce little “ visual compression” ( not in electronic terms but perspective ones) of the image. 
 
But, as always, to each his own!

I am really puzzled by the scope of these continuous “ improvements” with the introduction of so many duplicates and especially of the real “ kaizen” of all this which starts looking distinctly like a “ follow the fashion of the moment” kind of thing.
 
So, any time soon a wannabe Fuji photographer would have 3 lenses in this focal range to chose from? The 35mm F 1.4, the 35mm F 2 and the 33 f 1.0?
 
It was already bad enough to see the 56mm being differentiated into an APD version and its  f-utility ( I love a good pun!   ), then they announce this shiny and eye candy 35mm 2 ( ok, that might be a sealed lens) and now another “ bokeh” lens...( I hope they don’t bother putting an aperture at all since the customer for this lens will never bother selecting any other aperture than f 1.0 , so this lens will be the most silent Fuji lens lens possible!  ).
 
What’s the point? The market is what it is. I seriously doubt that someone will switch to the Fuji system because of a lens or two to lure them in. All they do is to compete with themselves and waste productive energy which could be otherwise employed).

My fellow members.
 
I don’t want to patronize anyone.
 
The point of any discussion, anywhere, is not to get the upper hand or “ win” the argument. The point of a discussion is to exchange ideas and points of view.
 
Disagreement is the thing is the thing. 
 
I don’t necessarily want to “ convert” anybody to my thinking or diminish someone else’s position. Arguing one position is simply explaining one position to another person but ultimately we all have to resign to the fact that, thank G-D, we are all different!
 
There ’s a very long (!!!)  Italian poem called “ Il Cicerone” written by Gian Carlo Passeroni, a part of which is dedicated to the difference of taste and habits (culinary or otherwise) among humans none of whom are exactly like any other.
 
It is only the other day that two friends of mine were singing their praises of boiled rice, which, nice though it is, I always use as an example of although certainly healthy but uneventful and rather boring type of food!
 
So some like primes and some don’t.
 
Isn’t it wonderful that we can all buy what we like and let the others do what they prefer?

oh but give it time it will!
 
In the NL there are a couple of secondhand copies for about €650-699 and there are also shops making this part of a kit ( NEW camera and NEW lens) with the X-Pro 1 ( it will be raining these cameras in kit form soon).

I am really puzzled by the scope of these continuous “ improvements” with the introduction of so many duplicates and especially of the real “ kaizen” of all this which starts looking distinctly like a “ follow the fashion of the moment” kind of thing.
 
So, any time soon a wannabe Fuji photographer would have 3 lenses in this focal range to chose from? The 35mm F 1.4, the 35mm F 2 and the 33 f 1.0?
 
It was already bad enough to see the 56mm being differentiated into an APD version and its  f-utility ( I love a good pun!   ), then they announce this shiny and eye candy 35mm 2 ( ok, that might be a sealed lens) and now another “ bokeh” lens...( I hope they don’t bother putting an aperture at all since the customer for this lens will never bother selecting any other aperture than f 1.0 , so this lens will be the most silent Fuji lens lens possible!  ).
 
What’s the point? The market is what it is. I seriously doubt that someone will switch to the Fuji system because of a lens or two to lure them in. All they do is to compete with themselves and waste productive energy which could be otherwise employed).

I am really puzzled by the scope of these continuous “ improvements” with the introduction of so many duplicates and especially of the real “ kaizen” of all this which starts looking distinctly like a “ follow the fashion of the moment” kind of thing.
 
So, any time soon a wannabe Fuji photographer would have 3 lenses in this focal range to chose from? The 35mm F 1.4, the 35mm F 2 and the 33 f 1.0?
 
It was already bad enough to see the 56mm being differentiated into an APD version and its  f-utility ( I love a good pun!   ), then they announce this shiny and eye candy 35mm 2 ( ok, that might be a sealed lens) and now another “ bokeh” lens...( I hope they don’t bother putting an aperture at all since the customer for this lens will never bother selecting any other aperture than f 1.0 , so this lens will be the most silent Fuji lens lens possible!  ).
 
What’s the point? The market is what it is. I seriously doubt that someone will switch to the Fuji system because of a lens or two to lure them in. All they do is to compete with themselves and waste productive energy which could be otherwise employed).

Nothing in ever really new under the sun.
 
The internet only gave a larger platform to this kind of discussions.
 
Years ago I was often asked to be one of the jury members (3) at a regional photo-club competition and of course part of the “ job” was to talk about the how’s and why’s we had chosen one picture over the other in the various categories.
 
Of course there were, at times, animated discussions on these matters and it was very interesting to see that the pro-jury was very much more interested in the end results than the participants who were very much more interested in the technical minutia.
 
Another thing.
 
About 15 years ago I was one of the photographers engaged into a lengthy and expensive digitization project.
 
We were shooting with a digital back ( scan back) for 4” x 5” large format cameras capable of shooting files of 720Mb.
 
The reason why we were shooting ( and keeping) such enormous files was not often clear to anyone. The people who had the direction of such project simply thought we are going to use the best possible file within the state of the art of the times so that no one could ever tell us that we didn’t do our maximum best.
 
The results way overshot the goal but that it didn’t matter.

Apparently each era has a need for unresolvable questions , some of capital importance and some perhaps of a little more than a petty nature. 
 
Take Angels for example! For at least 1800 years, people have been debating all sorts of things about them, one of which was their gender which seemed to be a matter of some importance to many and which fueled many vehement discussion and was object of councils of learned men and women too.
 
 
All of this must have seemed to be very enticing, at least to the participants of such a debate judging by the efforts which they placed into it.
 
So, in this era of secularization of ours, it is pretty possible that such a learned but religious debate would gather less debaters around and that the deeply rooted need for a “ pilpul” of some sort could get fulfilled by a question such as: “ how many lines can a 10-24mm (or any other zoom lens of your choice)  resolve at any interval of its zooming range and aperture correspondent to all the “ prime” lenses available? "
 
I have no doubts of the merits of this analysis.
 
However the way I have solved it is a mere practical one.
 
Until now ( with the sensors being what they are and the lenses being optimized for those) Fuji zooms performance has always been rather good, equal or close to equal to the performance of fixed focal length lenses.
 
If one needs more that one of the fixed focal length lenses contained within the range of any given zoom, you spend more money and carry more weight than the zoom itself ( and this is even true of the so called gigantic 10-24mm) by acquiring two or more lenses contained in the range.
 
It might very well be the case that printing a photograph to the maximum of its achievable size I might notice an enhanced performance of a prime over the one of a zoom.
 
But I don’t print all that many of my photographs, let alone print them so big!
 
Should I ever need to do that, tough luck for me and any other zoom owner then! I suppose I will have to learn to live with the shame of such limitation.
 
Or, alternatively, not care too much about this extreme and improbable limits and just do my own thing, which I plan to do for a long time.

Apparently each era has a need for unresolvable questions , some of capital importance and some perhaps of a little more than a petty nature. 
 
Take Angels for example! For at least 1800 years, people have been debating all sorts of things about them, one of which was their gender which seemed to be a matter of some importance to many and which fueled many vehement discussion and was object of councils of learned men and women too.
 
 
All of this must have seemed to be very enticing, at least to the participants of such a debate judging by the efforts which they placed into it.
 
So, in this era of secularization of ours, it is pretty possible that such a learned but religious debate would gather less debaters around and that the deeply rooted need for a “ pilpul” of some sort could get fulfilled by a question such as: “ how many lines can a 10-24mm (or any other zoom lens of your choice)  resolve at any interval of its zooming range and aperture correspondent to all the “ prime” lenses available? "
 
I have no doubts of the merits of this analysis.
 
However the way I have solved it is a mere practical one.
 
Until now ( with the sensors being what they are and the lenses being optimized for those) Fuji zooms performance has always been rather good, equal or close to equal to the performance of fixed focal length lenses.
 
If one needs more that one of the fixed focal length lenses contained within the range of any given zoom, you spend more money and carry more weight than the zoom itself ( and this is even true of the so called gigantic 10-24mm) by acquiring two or more lenses contained in the range.
 
It might very well be the case that printing a photograph to the maximum of its achievable size I might notice an enhanced performance of a prime over the one of a zoom.
 
But I don’t print all that many of my photographs, let alone print them so big!
 
Should I ever need to do that, tough luck for me and any other zoom owner then! I suppose I will have to learn to live with the shame of such limitation.
 
Or, alternatively, not care too much about this extreme and improbable limits and just do my own thing, which I plan to do for a long time.

Title “ How to get away with buying what you want and avoid divorce”.

a different approach to nature

Makes you wonder how did we ever ever manage, for almost 100 years, to shoot pictures on films which simply never possessed the capability to be sharp without showing tons of film grain if exposed and developed at 3200 ASA and with lenses that were no way as light efficient.
 
And yet we all did.

I could not have said it any better.

Apparently each era has a need for unresolvable questions , some of capital importance and some perhaps of a little more than a petty nature. 
 
Take Angels for example! For at least 1800 years, people have been debating all sorts of things about them, one of which was their gender which seemed to be a matter of some importance to many and which fueled many vehement discussion and was object of councils of learned men and women too.
 
 
All of this must have seemed to be very enticing, at least to the participants of such a debate judging by the efforts which they placed into it.
 
So, in this era of secularization of ours, it is pretty possible that such a learned but religious debate would gather less debaters around and that the deeply rooted need for a “ pilpul” of some sort could get fulfilled by a question such as: “ how many lines can a 10-24mm (or any other zoom lens of your choice)  resolve at any interval of its zooming range and aperture correspondent to all the “ prime” lenses available? "
 
I have no doubts of the merits of this analysis.
 
However the way I have solved it is a mere practical one.
 
Until now ( with the sensors being what they are and the lenses being optimized for those) Fuji zooms performance has always been rather good, equal or close to equal to the performance of fixed focal length lenses.
 
If one needs more that one of the fixed focal length lenses contained within the range of any given zoom, you spend more money and carry more weight than the zoom itself ( and this is even true of the so called gigantic 10-24mm) by acquiring two or more lenses contained in the range.
 
It might very well be the case that printing a photograph to the maximum of its achievable size I might notice an enhanced performance of a prime over the one of a zoom.
 
But I don’t print all that many of my photographs, let alone print them so big!
 
Should I ever need to do that, tough luck for me and any other zoom owner then! I suppose I will have to learn to live with the shame of such limitation.
 
Or, alternatively, not care too much about this extreme and improbable limits and just do my own thing, which I plan to do for a long time.

Leaf Skeleton # 4 by Russell Dixon, on Flickr

cheers! Well, I suppose that since I was born in a time when the term “ bokeh” didn’t exist ( come to think of it, the term “ prime” didn’t exist either, we just had lenses, tout court, and zooms lenses ).
 
The use of selective focusing, outside the macro photographers who often used it mostly by necessity rather than choice, was very sparing back then. Few could afford the really ultra luminous lenses of the time. 
 
I remember the first lenses which made this aesthetic choice available to more photographers were, for example, the ultra luminous 85mm’s.
 
I was mainly a large format & studio photographer and in the ‘90 started taking portraits by means of wild twists of the front and back of the camera to achieve VERY selective focussing but on the whole what I trained hard to learn was to achieve maximum sharpness everywhere  by means of the camera movements.
 
I guess that that has created a “ forma mentis”.
 
 

cheers! Well, I suppose that since I was born in a time when the term “ bokeh” didn’t exist ( come to think of it, the term “ prime” didn’t exist either, we just had lenses, tout court, and zooms lenses ).
 
The use of selective focusing, outside the macro photographers who often used it mostly by necessity rather than choice, was very sparing back then. Few could afford the really ultra luminous lenses of the time. 
 
I remember the first lenses which made this aesthetic choice available to more photographers were, for example, the ultra luminous 85mm’s.
 
I was mainly a large format & studio photographer and in the ‘90 started taking portraits by means of wild twists of the front and back of the camera to achieve VERY selective focussing but on the whole what I trained hard to learn was to achieve maximum sharpness everywhere  by means of the camera movements.
 
I guess that that has created a “ forma mentis”.
 
 

I still use it, but I am a dinosaur, I know.

sometimes I wonder why do they even bother to put an aperture in lenses these days since there is helluva lot of folks out there who never stop the lens down 

the only stars I might be shooting aren’t in the night sky.
 
as for this lens being “ large and heavy” has anyone seen the 10-24 by Nikon? I am a big boy anyway! I don’t mind its size.

Rangefinder with a lens 20-250mm f 1.4 at less than $1000?

Doesn't require 
 

I suppose it depends on the way you have posted this picture. Apparently you have put it in the gallery here. You can also link it to an outside hosting site, as many do, or reduce it in size ( 500Kb max) and attach it to your post.
 
I can repost it I think, with a link to your post using the advanced editor functions where I simply get the address of the picture that you have put in your gallery, copy the link and paste it into the Icon which shows as a polaroid picture.
 
Voilà. ( click on it and the pic gets even bigger)
 

sometimes I wonder why do they even bother to put an aperture in lenses these days since there is helluva lot of folks out there who never stop the lens down 

Sorry you wrote monochrom(e) don’t you pheraps mean monoton(e)?