Every now and then I watch a review of some lens and then the reviewer says it has “that something”, “the look”, “soul” or some other stupid bullshit that people use when they can’t define what they are talking about but still want to be taken seriously.

At some point I started interpreting such statements as “the lens is shit”, and that usually turns out to be exactly right. When someone can’t define why something is good, it probably means it’s shit in a way that reminds them of his faded-out family photos taken with a similar camera, that was also shit.

Also, there are terms like “micro-contrast”. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

“Micro-contrast is the ability of a lens to capture subtle tonal variations and details within an image, enhancing the richness and vibrancy of colours and transitions between light and dark areas.”

Yeah, that’s also known as “resolution”, defined as the ability to distinguish between pairs of black and white lines. Subtle tonal variations and details… What is that supposed to mean? The colours aren’t muddy because the lens is sharp and apochromatic, meaning the photons of different wavelengths go where they’re supposed to. Lenses are physics, not bullshit. In physics, when something happens, there’s an actual phenomenon causing it.

I hear that shit regularly whenever something from Zeiss or Leica is reviewed. Oh, it has “that something”, it has the “3d pop”, it has “micro-contrast”. Then you put the image from a Zeiss lens next to some other lens and they look the same and then you think “what the hell are those guys smoking”. I don’t know, but it’s not doing them a great deal of good. “3d pop” is a combination of sharpness, contrast and depth of field. Contrast is usually a function of resolution and anti-glare coating. In case of Zeiss, I think the coating might actually suppress the dark tones, boosting contrast at the expense of tonal gradient, which is, interestingly, the only actual characteristic that I can attribute to Zeiss lenses that isn’t complete fiction. Other than that, yeah, they are sharp. So is almost everything else today. They are contrasty and have good coating. So does almost everything else. I actually prefer the coating on the Sony GM lenses because it doesn’t suppress tonality in deep shadows as much as T* coating seems to, and for some reason the images from the Zeiss lenses feel “cooler”, while the Sony lenses feel “warmer”, and it’s not a white balance thing or a colour cast. I’d say it has to be caused by the way T* coating deals with wavelengths; what is reflected, what is transmitted. It’s a very subtle thing, and that’s how you get the impression of micro-contrast; if you have a bush with light and dark parts of the leaves, and the dark parts are suppressed, you get the impression of increased contrast in the details, which can create the impression of three-dimensionality in the image. However, that might be the last thing you want if you’re shooting portraits, and it actually seems to boost extreme colours at the expense of gradient, which is also not something you might want in portraits.

Sony A7II, FE 16-35mm f/4 Zeiss Vario-Tessar

Sony A7RV, FE 24-105mm f/4 G

So, basically, “that something” the Zeiss lenses have is the Zeiss badge, which makes the reviewers go ape shit with hyperbole. The coating suppresses the shadows, giving you contrast and cooler tone at the expense of tonal gradient. That’s great if you want it and shit if you don’t, but it’s not some mystical, magical property.

The reason I love the GM lenses so much is partially because the coating seems to do the exact opposite from T*; it doesn’t suppress, the way a polarizing filter would. The tonal gradient across the spectrum is preserved, and when you combine that with extreme sharpness, apochromatic design and incredibly smooth rolloff into bokeh, you get a combination properties that “clicks” with me so much that I basically went out and bought all of them.

Sony A7CR, FE 35mm f/1.4 GM

But it’s not a GM feature. Sigma Art lenses are doing the same thing, for the most part. It’s a function of extreme sharpness, modern coating and excellent bokeh. Put those properties together and the result appears magical, but it’s just good optics; more than just good, in fact. You can say they have “that something”. Yeah. Something is somethingating into quite a bit of somethinglings that somethingiggulate.

It’s not that I hate normal lenses. OK, I do, but it wasn’t always the case. My first lens was a 35-70mm f/3.5 standard zoom with 1:4 macro capability. Then I went to a digital equivalent of 28-105mm on Four Thirds; a very similar but even more versatile standard zoom lens.

Minolta X-300, MD 35-70mm f/3.5, Kodak Gold 200 print film

When we count the years, I used exclusively standard zooms from 1984 to 2003, when I bought used Minolta 50mm f/1.4 and 135mm f/2.8 Rokkors, and a 28mm f/2.8 Vivitar.

Essentially, my entire photography thing was an intimate detail, and all I wanted from equipment was to photograph that well. Since I didn’t have the money for specialised lenses, I used the standard zoom, and for the most part it did fine; in effect, it did the job of a macro lens I didn’t have.

Olympus E1, ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5

Then, when I moved to the Canon EF system, I decided I had two realistic options. Either continue the trend and buy a standard zoom lens, or force myself to learn other aspects of photography. So, I chose the latter and bought everything but the standard zoom. Sure, I eventually figured out that I actually need one, so I bought the cheapest one, the EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5, very much used, and made in 1987. I wanted to force myself not to use the standard zoom for everything.

That’s when I started learning landscape photography and other stuff that’s not closeup. It worked, and I developed my own style of creating atmospheric shots with everything in focus and everything in the frame, with a diagonal fisheye and a 17-40mm ultrawide.

Canon 5d, EF 17-40mm f/4L, CPL

So, now I had two aspects of my style: atmospheric with everything in the frame and sharp, and a closeup shot of a detail that conveys the feeling.

Canon 5d, EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5, macro extenders

Both aspects are extreme; essentially, either almost everything visible, or almost nothing visible but the detail I happened to notice somewhere in the grass. What’s missing? The normal, typical perspective. Or, to be honest, the kind of lenses and perspectives that were supposed to be normal for photographers were extremely uncommon for me. To me, it’s either light through the petals, or the whole scenery.

Or is it?

Recently, I understood that for someone who almost never used a “normal” lens, or at least doesn’t use it in a normal way, I have a pretty good collection of all-time favourites made with 50mm, and with normal perspective.

Soligor SR-300MD, MC 50mm f/1.4 Rokkor-PG, Kodak EB2 slide

This made me rethink the 50mm and the “normal” perspective. It’s not that I hate it. I hate that it is neither macro nor ultrawide, but when it works, it really works. So, I’m revisiting it lately, but of course in moderation. I have the safeguard of still mostly using the 50mm as a stand-in for macro, in its closeup capacity, but I’m trying to find other subjects for it as well.

Sony A7RV, FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

I’m pretty stubborn in a sense that I’d rather keep doing things my way, than copy someone else’s style and methods if they don’t click with me. If everybody uses a 50mm because they were told that’s the way, I’ll use a 90mm macro because I like what it does more. However, it’s not that I don’t like what I’m getting with a 50mm. As I said, some of my favourites are made with a 50mm. I just have to find a way of doing my own thing with a normal perspective; that is, neither really wide, nor focused on a tiny detail torn from the surroundings. It’s difficult, because the usual reason why I go for the detail is that everything else looks like a mess, and when it doesn’t, I usually go for a wideangle.

But when a 50mm works, it works not because it’s a dramatic perspective of either great or small; it’s because it captures peace and serenity of the normal.

I know it must be confusing to people when I talk about lenses; for instance, I want to have the subject sharp and background blurred, and I use all kinds of lenses to achieve that. Can’t it be done with just one lens?

Well, no. Let me illustrate.

FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM

This was taken with a 100-400mm telephoto zoom. The subject is sharp and defined, while the background falls off rapidly and is completely blurred. I use it for shooting at longer distances, where the subject is a bird or a butterfly that would be spooked and fly off if I came any closer. You can’t make this shot with a shorter lens, unless the butterfly is half dead and doesn’t really respond, which actually does happen.

FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM

This, however, is an example of something that is definitely not dead, asleep or comatose – it’s a hummingbird moth in flight, and it’s all over the place. You need a long lens, and you need it to be reasonably fast in order to be able to freeze motion, while keeping the ISO values reasonable. Wide apertures also help to blur the background, but here the focal length and the fact that I’m as close as possible do most of the work.

FE 135mm f/1.8 GM

This is different subject matter entirely; dew drops on the cobweb suspended on a pine branch in the dawn fog. In order to cut the depth of field at that distance, you need both longer focal length and aperture. A fast 135mm lens does the trick very nicely.

FE 135mm f/1.8 GM

Similarly, in order to freeze two butterflies in flight, at the same time, you need both longer focal length and aperture; you’re working at telephoto distances, but you need almost-macro outcomes. This requires both aperture and focal length.

However, sometimes you need to get much closer, and magnify a (mostly) static subject. That’s what a macro lens is for.

FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro

But let’s say you want to put your camera into a bush and get the 3d impression of the whole thing, while still cutting the depth of field. That’s where a fast 35mm lens becomes useful.

FE 35mm f/1.4 GM

You are getting a slice of the environment, where you see enough, but intimacy of the narrow depth of field is still preserved.

And then, of course, you have lenses whose purpose is to get everything sharp, like the 24mm or even wider, but they are not what we are interested in right now.

One can now ask whether, for instance, something could be shot with a slower but longer zoom, instead of a fast but shorter prime. Yes it could, because there are overlapping scenarios where multiple optics would work equally well. On the other hand, when things get outside the scenario where a certain lens still works, for instance it gets dark, the other lens is still within its optimal functioning parameters.

FE 135mm f/1.8 GM

You see, fast lenses not only reduce the depth of field; they also see in the dark.

There are also intermediary scenarios – the space between 135mm and 35mm that were used as examples is pretty large, and can be filled with either 85mm or 50mm primes, or a mid-range zoom. A zoom would have a more versatile focal length, but a prime would have more versatile aperture, being able to work in light conditions where you can see the stars in the sky when shooting hand-held.

In essence, you can improvise a lot, using lenses for scenarios they weren’t designed for, but where they still work just fine, but you do want to have as many tools in your toolbox as the finances allow. 🙂

I’ve seen lots of YouTubers making incorrect and incoherent statements about what “G” means on the Sony lenses. They guess it’s “great” or whatever. No.

“G” is designation of Minolta autofocus lenses for the Dynax/Maxxum/Alpha series in the film era, and it means “Gold”. It had the same function as the red ring on the Canon L lenses – here, the “L” is equally nonsensical and originally meant “Luxury” but everybody forgot it and it’s just “L”. Similarly, it’s just “G”.

Minolta G lens; AF APO 80-200mm f2.8 G

What it actually means is that Sony bought Minolta and “G” essentially means that the lens is rooted in Minolta legacy, and, more precisely, it’s their high grade lens lineup. They also have a regular lineup without any particular designation, a Zeiss lineup with the Zeiss logo and naming scheme, and the ultra high grade lineup, the G Master series, which has the G logo in an orange rectangle. Essentially, the G Master, or GM, is a sub-series of particularly fancy lenses within the G lineup, and you can read them all as something based on the Minolta legacy of excellence.

Sony GM lineup

So, that’s what it means. Canon had a similar way of grading EF lenses; they had the ordinary series, the USM series with the golden ring on the lens, and the L series of lenses that were also USM, but had the red ring on the lens. Another difference between the mid-range and high-range is the aperture. A mid-range lens will have reasonable aperture, for instance the 85mm f/1.8, while the L lens will be 85mm f/1.2 or something; a leap from the reasonable and good enough, into the state of the art. Sigma, too, has the Art series which has extreme apertures, and the Contemporary lineup, which has more reasonable and practical designs for less money and weight, but maintaining excellent build and image quality.

So, essentially, it’s a naming scheme. In Minolta times, G meant top of the line, but Sony started with that and then they decided they want to separate the ultra high end designs into a special category, and they made the lenses with G in the orange rectangle. That’s all there is to it. G means Minolta. GM also means Minolta, but on steroids.

90mm G macro

I recently caught myself calculating 35mm lenses, fields of view and depth of field, in terms of the 4/3 format, which is weird because I usually think in terms of the 35mm format. I did, however, use 4/3 for quite a while, and with standard zoom lenses, the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 and m.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6, and I don’t tend to use walkaround zooms on 35mm, so when I wanted to know how something would look, I calculated it in 4/3 terms.

So, what’s the calculation? Let’s say I used the 14-54mm at the long end and wide open the most, that’s 54mm f/3.5. There are two ways you can translate this to 35mm terms. The first is the crop: if you take a 54mm lens at f/3.5 and crop the central part with the factor of 2, you’ll get the same picture. Or you can take a 108mm lens on 35mm and stop it down two stops, to f/7.1 if I’m not mistaken, and you’ll get the same pitcture.

But what happens if you use a 54mm? Or something in the general range; 50-55mm, and you stop it down to f/3.5. You will get picture that’s significantly wider, the equivalent of 25-27mm on the 4/3 format, but with the depth of field of 54mm on 4/3.

For the identical visual impression, something like the 24-105mm f/4 on 35mm would be the best approximation, only stopped down to f/5.6-7.1. That will cost you two stops of light to get the 4/3 image aesthetics. If you use the same f-stops, you get shallower depth of field.

If you’re using primes, let’s say the equivalent thing to Zuiko Digital 50mm f/2 macro would be 100mm f/4; you’d have to stop down the 35mm lens to f/8 to get the depth of field of 50mm Zuiko at f/4. You’d say this gives 4/3 the advantages in available light, but diffraction also hits you two stops sooner, so there really are no freebies.

What I was thinking is that I like the look of those high quality Zuiko lenses, crisp up close with creamy rolloff into bokeh, but often not so much background blur as to lose the definition of the background altogether. So I thought, what kind of a small and light, slow but crisp lens would I need on the Sony FE platform if I wanted to replicate that look. One obvious answer is the 90mm macro stopped down to f/7.1 or f/8, and that’s true; I really did get a similar look with that one:

That looks very much like the things I used to take with the E1 and 14-54mm, especially if I didn’t push for the extreme macro.

As you can see, that’s close enough, and it’s actually the look I normally prefer. The question, however, was how to get that with a small lens on the 35mm format. Both 90mm macro and 24-105mm zoom are chunky lenses, and I often prefer something the size of the Zuiko 50mm f/2 macro, which is quite pocketable, so the first thing I considered was the FE 50mm f/1.8, but this one has a completely different image look. Wide open and at the minimum focusing distance it’s hazy and blurry, nowhere near the crispness of modern designs such as the Zuiko. Its bokeh is lovely in those conditions, but the chromatic aberrations are nasty, and sharpness starts looking good from f/2.8 onwards. Also, it’s ergonomically quite bad, without the AF/MF switch, and with that terrible DC motor. And it doesn’t actually allow you to get all that close.

Then I considered the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 zoom, but its closeup performance is actually even worse. Hard pass.

The 50mm f/1.8 is not what everybody keeps repeating online. It’s not a beginner’s 50mm that’s not really good so you’ll want to upgrade as soon as money allows. In fact, it’s one of the best Planar designs that I tried. It’s mostly usable wide open, and becomes really good when you stop it down to f/2.8, and it’s so good it’s indistinguishable from much more expensive 50mm designs. When it works, it’s amazing.

Hazy, soft, romantic, low contrast.

That’s the look. If that’s what you want – amazing; that’s your lens. But I feel it’s not my cup of tea, really. I like the detail much crisper, and the image contrastier:

So it’s a frustrating lens for me, because when it works, I get amazing results with it, but when it doesn’t, it tends to ruin it for me. I didn’t actually replace it when I bought the 50mm f/1.2 GM, because that one is very heavy and it feels more like the wider 135mm f/1.8, than a replacement for the 50mm f/1.8. So, I went looking for something compact for the 35mm Sony that would have the aesthetics of the Zuiko Digital lenses – contrasty and clear, crisp detail, decent background blur that becomes quite good when you come close, and it needs to be crisp at minimum focusing distance, it needs to have the AF/MF switch on the lens, and hopefully the aperture ring. It also needs to be pocketable, because I’m aiming for micro four thirds dimensions here.

What I ended up considering were the Sony FE 50mm f/2.5 G, and Sigma 65mm f/2 DG DN. Sigma had better capacity for blurring things out, but it approaches the size of the 90mm macro, at which point it becomes moot. The Sony, however, is extremely pocketable, almost a pancake lens, and not only focuses close, but is very crisp up close. Its problem is the f/2.5 aperture, but it’s excellent wide open, and honestly, I used f/3.5 for years in these conditions and it was fine.

In the end, I ordered the Sony, mostly because the only copy of the Sigma available on MPB was sold while I was thinking about it, and the Sony was in a much cleaner condition.

So, it’s not that you can’t get small and light configurations on 35mm. It’s just that I usually prefer setups that are optically so extreme, they end up being very big and heavy. My favourite lenses, normally, are the 90mm macro and the 135mm f/1.8. Their combination of crisp detail and blurry background is unparalleled.

But sometimes I just want a tiny 50mm that’s optically brilliant, and I don’t feel like dealing with FE 50mm f/1.8 and its stupid shit.