Bill,
Thank you for sharing, you post some beautiful pictures. I am actively looking for W/A primes and by your posts the Kern 10 and 16 seem to be good candidates, although the 10mm seems to have some 'smearing' in the upper left corner and slight vignetting in the upper left and lower right corner that could be easily corrected in software.
I cannot make out what happened to your SOM picture. The vases are super-sharp, but the lower part of the column and the steps are not, although they seem to be in the same area of focus. Also, everything along the left edge is unsharp. I have just "won" and am waiting to receive a 20mm/1.5 SOM Berthiot that I paid $340 and this picture makes me a bit worried.
My usual questions:
- Are the pictures you show full format or cropped?
- Any software vignetting correction?
- Lens opening
Thank you in advance for your answers
Kind regards
Peter
Hi Peter. I don't think I have great news in regard to some of the OOF issues from this lens and others. I'm noticing that, with the SOM anyway, that when shot wide open the center is sharp as it should be, but from there it get's soft or smeary ( a word? ). Since I just noticed this I will pay more attention to the details of my shooting.
I've been thinking that it would be a good idea to take some pictures of a white wall to show how different lenses vignette with different ratios and aperture settings. The Kern 10 and 16 do vignette so I shoot them in 16:9 and it helps some. I'll post a comparison picture before and after cropping to show how much vignetting.
As for cropping and vignette fixing, and aperture. If I crop for web I use 600x900 pixels either orientation, and I try to crop out the vignette, but I'm not too concerned now about being perfect. I don't use any software to fix vignette. Yesterday I was shooting mostly 2.8--a few completely wide open. Those three shots above were 2.8 as it was too bright to shoot wide open. A few were stopped down, but those are still on my hard drive.
Kern 10/1.6 full, and cropped with a little usm.