There’s a term I keep hearing on photographic forums, describing lenses: “too clinical”.

When I tried to establish what it meant, it turns out it means, basically, that it’s good. The flaws are corrected, sharpness is excellent, and so on. One would expect this to be a good thing, but then I understood what they meant: there are no optical artefacts to cover their arse. You can’t pretend you’re an artist because the lens creates an artificial sense of nostalgia caused by flawed optics of yesteryear. If you remove optical defects, and one’s “art” disappears because the underlying “too clinical” image is revealed as empty and pointless, it’s not a lens problem, it’s a photographer problem.

Taken with a very clinical lens on digital

I guess that’s the other side of the coin from people who think their pictures will stop being shit if they bought better lenses and cameras. There are people who make claims such as “double Gauss design is crap”, which shocked me immensely, as it is one of the best lens designs and some of the best work in the history of photography was produced by it. The reason why it’s “crap” is because the corner sharpness is quite poor wide open and remains weak until f/8 or so. There is also lots of chromatic aberration inherent to the design. Crap? Absolutely not. It’s a compromise that allows a 50mm lens to be small, light and cheap, which makes it one of the best optical designs in history. It leaves room for improvement if you make the lens big, heavy and expensive. Then you can have perfect corner sharpness at f/1.2.

People are exaggerating things greatly. In reality, yes, you can produce great work with flawed optics, and you can cover poor work under optical flaws and call it “character”. Sometimes, optical flaws can actually improve the image, for instance chromatic aberration can create “rainbows” on water droplets, and spherical aberration can introduce a “glow”. Sometimes, those effects can hit just right. I worked with flawed optics for decades, so I know how that works. Sometimes it’s wonderful, sometimes it ruins your image. In general, I prefer not to hide behind “character” of lenses. If you remove all of that and my photo is shit, then this is the truth of the situation: it’s just shit. Putting “character” on it just obscures the reality. I had that many times – tried to fix a photo in post, adding all kinds of effects, and it was still shit.

Sometimes, optical flaws actually help, but I wouldn’t make it a strategy.

Also, all the talk about colours is driving me crazy. I’ve seen a guy stating that default Sony colours are terrible, but with tweaking they can be made to look as great as Fuji colours, and then he shows some terrible crap with a greenish sky, that looks like a faded colour print that’s been kept near a stove since 1980s. I understand that those people in their 20s don’t actually know what film looked like when it was current; they know it only from the degraded, faded out stuff, and Fuji apparently panders to this illusion, creating jpeg profiles for their cameras that look like faded out or poorly processed film, because that’s what people think film is. If they processed film correctly, it would look “digital”. Also, I suspect lots of people making those claims about colours might be completely or partially colour blind. I shot film when it was actually good, and default Sony colour profiles are very film-like, and have been ever since R1, where the default profile looks very much like Kodak E100G, or, in amateur version, EB2 and EB3. The early profiles for A7II had very exaggerated greens, which in fact looked quite like Kodak EBX, or E100VS. The current profiles for A7RV look very film-like; the standard profile looks like E100G, and the vivid profile looks like Fuji Velvia, with its increased magenta tones. All in all, you can be sure that if I like the colours from it so much that I bought the second camera with the same sensor, there is very little room for improvement.

Fuji Velvia 100, Canon EOS 3, EF 85mm f/1.8

How can I be sure what film looks like? Because I made scans when it was current, and I checked them against the fresh slides on the lightbox. I know exactly what it looks like. Film looks “digital”, but when you would remove flaws from digital; make it sharper, less grainy and so on. It was very revealing when my son told me that, to him, 4×5” large format looks “digital”.

Today’s digital cameras are both very much film-like, and also much better than small-format film. I see it as a great thing. Also, the “clinical” lenses? Back in the day, those would have been called “dream lenses”. We did what we could with what we had, but this stuff we have today would have been seen as too good to be true, and if someone like Leica or Zeiss had made something like that, it would have cost a fortune. Only a few stellar designs from the past, such as the Zeiss APO Makro Planar, can compare with modern designs. Back in the day, we didn’t call them “clinical”, we called them dream lenses that everybody wanted, and only a few could afford.

Very clinical lens.

I have a problem with reviewers of photographic equipment.

Whenever they review inexpensive equipment, they intentionally portray it in the worst way possible, because if they actually put in an effort and tried to get the best possible results out of a camera or a lens, the results would most likely be excellent, far beyond the ability to discern between an expensive and a cheap lens, and then one would be justified in asking what is the point of buying that ten times more expensive lens, which wouldn’t sit well with equipment manufacturers who sponsor the reviewers. So, when they review an entry level camera, they make nondescript snapshots, and when they review professional-level equipment, they put in an effort and make very good pictures.

I actually did an experiment once, between 2012 and 2016: I used an entry level camera with an entry level lens, Olympus E-PL1 with the m.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 collapsible kit lens. This means I used it both hand-held and on a tripod, with a polariser and ND64, working with a very meticulous methodology for landscape photography. The results speak for themselves.

The problems arise when you want to print big, because yes, that lens is actually soft. However, you can obviously produce good results with it if you actually take photography seriously while using it. The problem is, apparently, that people don’t follow correct methodology when using cheap equipment, because “why bother”. As a result, you get reviews of kit lenses that produce pictures that look like shit, followed by a strong suggestion that a serious photographer should not bother with those, and should rather upgrade to “something serious”.

This has an unfortunate consequence of people overspending on equipment, and, if they don’t have the money, they feel they are missing out on “real photography” because they can’t afford professional gear.

This is an unexpected position from someone who actually has professional equipment; however, I know what I bought it for. When I went to the Plitvice lakes, I used almost exclusively the 24-105mm f/4 lens, and it worked great; everything was absolutely sharp. Getting everything sharp is actually super easy and inexpensive. The snobs make it sound like it’s some great achievement, but it’s not. For the most part, the expensive lenses are needed when you want almost nothing sharp.

For getting everything sharp, you need knowledge of theory, meticulous technique, and willingness to work very slowly and patiently. Yes, you need good equipment, but in this case “good” can be had very inexpensively. An old 4/3, APS-C or 35mm camera with 12MP of resolution or more. A decent kit lens. A tripod. A circular polariser and a ND filter. Wired release. Some money to go places where there’s something worth photographing. That’s it.

Sure, when you have specific things you want to do, there are lenses and cameras that answer those questions, but in order to even get to the point where you have those questions, just throwing money at the problem isn’t going to improve anything.