Kit lens II

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Remember the article I wrote in praise of kit lenses, including the Sony FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6? Yeah, about that…

I tested my lenses on the Sony A7RV body, to see if they’re up to snuff. Let’s just say that I’m starting to get what some people were talking about. The 28-70mm is consistently less sharp than all the other lenses I tested, and while in the centre I would say it meets the minimal requirements for resolution, toward the sides and especially in the corners it is much worse.

The cause of the problem is obvious. The new body magnifies the image more, demanding more resolution from the optics. It used to be that the 35mm format was very easy on the lenses, unlike the four thirds or APS-C, which basically pull the same resolution out of a smaller circle, and a lens needs to be really great to be critically sharp on a smaller format. Basically, an APS-C body with a 24MP sensor will pull as much information from the smaller APS-C circle, that a 24MP full frame body will pull from the bigger 35mm circle.

The Sony A7RV body with 61MP pulls 26MP from the APS-C circle alone, and continues to make those demands across the 35mm frame.

I’m usually not all that obsessed with image sharpness at 100% magnification; it’s like viewing film under a microscope. It is expected that the lenses won’t draw a perfectly sharp image from centre to corners at full magnification, so the criterion is image that is good enough for printing big enough. Basically, I decided that the 28-70mm lens is the only one of my lenses that would create problems when printing big, and since my use for a lens in this range is landscapes from a tripod, which means sharp stuff that is most likely to be printed big, I decided it’s time for an upgrade. The good news is that the FE 16-35mm f/4 Zeiss and the FE 50mm f/1.8 are just fine, even though I tested the Zeiss at 35mm, which is its “softest” focal length. I didn’t even test the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro; not only is it one of the sharpest lenses in the world, but also the closeups are generally more tolerant of magnification, because they lack the high-frequency detail such as grass, leaves or pine needles, that require sharpness on the landscape shots.

The actual reason why I finally decided to replace the 28-70mm is not this test, but the results from the last time I used it to actually take pictures, and I was shocked to find that almost nothing was sharp, and that was on the A7II. It looked as if the image stabilisation introduced some kind of an optical defect that looked like some kind of haze that blurred out the high-frequency detail, and the photos were not usable. It performed much better on the tripod, but still noticeably worse than the other two lenses I compared it with, and I decided it’s giving me too much trouble with inconsistency and I’m just done with it. I can’t rely on it to just consistently produce images to a certain standard, and instead it varies between quite nice and fucking awful, and that is simply not acceptable.

What did I replace it with? Initially, I considered the FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II and the FE 20-70mm f/4 G, but then decided against them both. The f/2.8 GM is excellent, but its strongest point is versatility as an all-around lens for everything, and this makes it quite heavy and super expensive. I don’t need f/2.8 aperture for a landscape lens that will be used at f/8-f/16 apertures. As for the 20-70mm f/4 G, it is much better suited for my needs, but it tries to overlap with the 16-35mm too hard and I’m not sure I need that. I ended up going with the FE 24-105mm f/4 G, simply because this is an excellent range for the intended purpose, and it is widely used and highly esteemed by landscape photographers, so I don’t expect to have issues with the lack of resolution. Sure, something will always be sharper, but I don’t need this to be the sharpest lens in the world, I just need it to keep up with my other glass and not create a blurry mess at random unpredictable moments. The FE 24-105mm f/4G is a workhorse lens relied upon to produce predictable results by many photographers and that appealed to me, because I need something that just works, and not create problems.

Camera or lens?

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I keep encountering the conundrum of whether to upgrade camera or lenses first, and there’s occasionally a comparison of a high-end camera paired with a low-cost lens, against a low-end camera paired with a high-end lens, as if that’s a dilemma anyone is actually having.

I had a similar problem lately, when I decided I want to buy the FE 100-400mm GM lens, because I wanted to make a certain profile of pictures with it, but I of course understood that the autofocus on my camera isn’t capable of utilising the lens properly, and there’s our solution: camera and lens need to be seen as a unit that is combined to produce a certain result. This means that you can’t have bottlenecks that limit the effectiveness of the system as a whole, for instance you can’t have only one part of the fast autofocus system, because both camera and lens need to work together.

Also, the realistic conundrum isn’t whether to get the most expensive lens and pair it with the shittiest possible body, or vice versa. Realistically, it looks more like “should I get the 70-200 f/2.8 or 85mm f/1.8 for the portraits”, because “cheap lens” is often a fast prime, and “expensive lens” is often a zoom, where the cheap lens might actually give you better results; also, with the body it’s “do I need faster autofocus for portraits and weddings”, because that’s where the difference in price is today. If you’re shooting macro, you don’t need a body with the best autofocus, you need a great macro lens and, probably, additional lights. So, basically, the answer is to see what you actually need, where the bottlenecks of your process are, and then remove those bottlenecks. Someone else will have different problems to solve, and different money pits to fill. Sometimes the solution is counter-intuitive, for instance getting the expensive new camera body and cheap used lenses of otherwise very high quality, which looks like putting cheap lenses on an expensive camera, but in this case price is not an accurate measure of quality obtained. In any case, the lesson is to avoid formulaic thinking when solving practical problems.

 

Sheep

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That boring sheep from the last article started me on a train of thought, because a piece by Bach crossed my mind, “Sheep may safely graze“. Here are the lyrics:

Sheep can safely graze
where a good shepherd watches over them.

Where rulers are ruling well,
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy.

What a comforting thought that is: the people in charge will do their job well, so that normal people can mind their own business – have jobs and families, have a pint of beer with friends after work, know that if there’s a genuine danger the government will raise the alarm, and it won’t just release a bioweapon and then enforce vaccination with an experimental gene therapy drug intended to reduce their number and fertility, or launch a war against a country that’s deemed to be too independent and successful and it needs to have its wings clipped, and if millions die, even better for the environment; the closer we are to no life on Earth, the closer we are to the goal of zero carbon emissions. How comforting it would be to think that the international groups running the global governments aren’t attacking agriculture in order to reduce the amount of food produced, with the goal of raising the food prices so that all the poor people would starve, and middle class would be reduced to poverty, and only they, the super rich, would remain as the new feudal elite of the world, owning all the real estate and running all the governments.

This is a Christian thought, originating from the epistles of St.Paul, who stated that every form of worldly government exists because God allowed it, basically meaning that the government is installed by God, and people need to obey it because by doing so they obey God. Interestingly, this goes completely against Jesus, who stated that the world is under the power of Satan, the Prince of this world, but I can see how the people in power must have liked the idea that Christianity will robe them in the mantle of Divine authority, and so this notion became the cornerstone of medieval politics.

The Augustinian imagery of civitatis Dei would be a flock of sheep representing the faithful Christian people, with the shepherd representing the Church, and sheep dogs representing the worldly powers that maintain order, guarding against the wolves, the outside evils that threaten. The Holy Spirit permeates the entire society, from the shepherd to the sheep, making them all obedient to the Lord in their respective roles, and traveling safely through this world while Satan roars in frustration beyond the fence in the dark.

There’s also the evangelic image of sheep representing a soul faithful and obedient to God, where sheep are the good entities that need to be able to mind their business of grazing safely while the shepherd and his dog keep guard from wolves and thieves. It’s a nice image, because, again, it makes it sound as if people just need to remain faithful to God and they will be protected.

It also creates the material for the enemies of God, who ridicule the faithful people, because the sheep are not protected because anyone truly cares for them; they are protected because they are useful as a resource, for food and clothing of those who keep them. Essentially, while the sheep think they are being protected, they are merely being kept for the dominant predator who keeps them, and the wolf is just unwanted, weaker competition.

But no, that’s not how things actually work, and the evangelic image is actually misunderstood, or stretched too far, because the metaphoric God’s sheep, the ones obedient to the will of God, don’t feel like sheep grazing on a meadow. They feel like tigers and dragons, like lords of their respective domains, they are the angels and heavenly powers, through whom God’s imperium is distributed, and the fact that they are fully obedient to God in fact means that they also embody the sovereign power that is no longer merely transcendental in God, but invested through them. They can create worlds, cast judgment upon souls and see the judgment being executed, forgive sins, and ease burdens. The sheep of God is the angel with the flaming sword, whose power is such that you would shit yourself on sight.

Those more deserving a comparison with the flock of sheep are those walking the wide and well paved path through life – basically, grazing on a meadow in front of a slaughterhouse, being marked and assigned various uses by their worldly owners. Those on the narrow path leading to salvation can no longer be perceived through this imagery, because they are something else; not the sheep of the world, but not yet truly the sheep of God either; rather, they are God’s sheep in training, passing through various trials and dangers, and if they remain faithful, they get to be trusted with power and authority of God.

And no, they are not calmly grazing. Their alert sight scans the world, and their power glows in their eyes, ready to be released in glorious and terrible ways at any moment, if the will of the Lord flows through them into action. Having survived all the trials Satan invested this world with, and having kept faith throughout, makes such beings incredibly alert, wise, hardened and sharp minded, as their will is honed to cut through all illusion, evil and sin. Their armour is dented and the hilts of their blades are well worn, and their will and love shine like the Sun through and above all clouds, bringing happiness and safety of God’s indomitable power.

The problem

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The problem with science is that people assume it works on data and analysis, while in fact it works on money, and data and analysis are merely PR instruments for obtaining money. Essentially, if you want to get money as a scientist, you need to serve as a mediator that presents the interests of the people with money to the general populace that will accept your arguments as the truth, believing it’s based on facts, evidence and rational analysis, peer reviewed and all that. In reality, the measurements are cooked up, the analysis is cooked up, and there’s almost never any kind of peer review. Yeah, those are the actual facts about the state of science today, which has been so thoroughly compromised by both money and ideology, that I basically can’t trust any of it at this point, and I only pay attention to scientific research if it comes from China and Russia. Everything in the West is a clown show. In the meantime, the “trust the science” people: