Guy Mancuso
Administrator, Instructor
Btw great topic.
Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!
Well said IMO.'Clinical' does mean something and can be ascribed to some lenses. It simply means 'well corrected'. I am no optics expert, but in such a lens there is unlikely to be much by way of uncorrected spherical aberrations, which are responsible for 'glowy' lenses and I also understand can be associated with very pleasing out of focus areas. It may also mean vignetting is well corrected, limited CA and that resolution is very high across the field, with uniformly high contrast.
If you think though the above, it explains why a Sony Zeiss 55mm f1.8 produces a look that is very different to a pre-asph leica 50mm Summilux.... or a Canon 50mm f1.2L.
In subjective terms, I tend to associate very well corrected lenses with 'clinical', because they produce results that are very clean looking... resolution is darned good everywhere, as is macro and microcontrast, there is unlikely to be much tendency towards flare, colour is rich... all from fairly wide open. The result is a look that suits some subjects but may not be desirable for others. I think most people would agree that most people (most of the time) probably want a 'clinical' lens for urban architectural work (tho by no means all the time), whereas for female portraits, a less agressive look is often desirable, with a fall off in resolution at the periphery, a tiny bit of glow wide open etc. Clinical lenses can look rather like a scientific scan of the subject and provide too much information in too perfect a manner.
Personally, I feel some lenses are becoming too perfect and shots from the super high resolution 90mm Sony G for the FE mount is a good example. Detail and microncontrast are on steroids. There is no grace to the image. Yes, you can inject these things during PP, but the more perfect a lens is the harder it can be to produce finished images that lack the inherent aggressiveness in the lens.
So in summary, I don't think it is in people's heads at all and an optics wizard would be able to explain all of this much better than I can. Some people split hairs and fixate over nuances, for sure, but go shoot a 35mm Summaron on a Leica Monochrom and then a 35mm Biogon-C and try to argue that the word clinical does not fit one lens a lot better than the other.... or try a Canon 50mm f1.4 FD on a Sony A7 at f1.8 and compare it to the Sony 55mm f1.8.
IMHO, I would put vaseline on a 010 filter, but not directly on an elementYes, all it means that the lens is too good for person using it. Putting a bit of vaseline on the front element can bring character back to a clinical lens.
Personally the imperfect element exists between the viewfinder and the subject. I.e. Me.
- - -
+1
"Too perfect"? That's crazy talk. An oxymoron even. ... Modern lenses, whether they're designed by Zeiss, Sony, Leica or SK, are designed to match modern high resolution sensors, extracting every pixel of detail and microcontrast possible with modern optics..... They capture more accurately what I see in front of me. I can add softness and blur in post-processing. Or use Vaseline.
Joe
Czar of Sharpness
I don't think any accomplished photographer would process a picture as close as what they were seeing in reality: neither landscape or street/documentary. Even film has its own contrast curve, color profile, etc. And so is this whole B&W thing. Photography is not about reality. We are all dramatizing/romanticizing reality to convey our emotion/mood/view of the scene to the audiences. Garry Winogrand had his own style of shooting and "processing" his pictures. I think many photographers do not place much priority in post-processing his/her shots, citing that such endeavor is a waste of the photographic time. I think they just don't want to learn the craft or do not actually know how to do it properly.I'm not sure this is quite accurate, because the Leica S 100mm Summicron was supposedly designed to be a little gentler on skin than it might otherwise have been. Other lenses have been designed to 'back off a little' (Zeiss claimed the 85mm f1.4 ZE/ZF planar was designed to retain some spherical aberration at wider apertures so it was kinder on portraits), but there was a problem: this meant that when tested by reviewers, it showed more 'deficiencies' than more perfect lenses and it was rejected by many photographers who therefore thought it inferior. Manufacturers will make what sells and resolution and numbers sell, however, while there are many photographers exploiting super high resolution and micro contrast with great effect, there are just as many photographers scratching their heads wondering why they can't get their D810 and Otus to produce images that look like Garry Winogrand's
I guess the point I am try to convey is that its great to have options. Most colour landscape shooters want as much perfection as possible, but fewer B&W street and documentary shooters do, because the way the image is rendered has a fundamental impact on how it engages the viewer and how the viewer accesses the 'data'. In my view, it is not about 'looking back' or nostalgia - this is the simplistic response one often hears about why some people make their digital images look like film - but about accessing that data (and its volume). Ultra-clear imagery could be described as 'direct', whereas there is a lot of (particularly B&W) imagery that relies upon a greater degree of indirectness. Ultimately, we choose tools that achieve the desired 'data-viewer' relationship (and if we make this connection with the literal difficult, you can take the viewer somewhere other than the obvious). As cameras and optics spiral further into a numbers arms race, it is harder for photographers to find equipment that inherently offers 'less directness'.
On the subject of lenses showing more of what people see in front of them, I think we are at a point in technology where we are able to extract far more than can be seen or perceived with the naked eye. HDR is a classic example of this taken to an extreme (hence the polarised opinion). A great deal of colour landscape photography is also far more saturated and rich than the real scene ever was, so using 'reality' as an explanation for why super sharp super high contrast lenses is desirable may not resonate with everyone. A question: which is more 'accurate' to how we see (or even perceive) things: a shot on 100 speed 35mm colour print film using a point and shoot, or a perfectly processed, saturated and carefully manipulated 36MP colour digital shot, as turned out by most advanced amateurs today? This may seem absurd, but I'd be really interested to hear what other people think. For me its the Boots developed colour shot with the P&S. This is not to say one is 'better' only that more data does not necessarily mean 'more real' to the viewer. How many colour landscape photographers today produce work that is not more saturated and contrasty than reality?
As for working files in PP to reduce imperfection, I think its very much harder than it sounds. I suspect this is why some people still prefer film (or are returning to it), because to achieve that sort of look, its easier to start out with it in the DNA of your materials.
Regarding B&W and colour, I think they are mostly quite different and this is reflected in the materials/technology people desire. If you were to survey colour and B&W shooters, I suspect the latter would be (on average) less inclined towards massive resolution and perfect lenses. That's possibly because B&W is inherently 'indirect' and that is often exploited in many different ways by B&W photographers to create the relationship they want between viewer and image. The same improvements in optics that cause many super-colourful photographers to swing from the rafters are making some B&W digital shooters struggle.... and return to old glass and lower resolution cameras that allow them to create the indirectness they seek.
This is more or less what I was getting at with the original post. If a lens is clinically perfect... what's wrong with that?If you have a lens that gives "character" for some uses and then another that is more "clinical" than the first, I can understand. I have and do own such doubles. However, IMHO, with the advent of sophisticated software one can easily soften a "clinical" lens image, but not, when needed, easily sharpen a "character" lens image.