Israel and America struck Natanz nuclear facility in Iran.

In return, Iran struck Dimona, probably hitting scientists and technicians who work there, but not the nuclear reactor itself.

America and Iran are exchanging ultimatums as to what will happen if the other side doesn’t bend over.

Panic is starting over fuel prices.

Me, I’m testing the new Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN, on the Sony A7RV because A7CR is still in the mail. It’s good that I bought it, because A7RV isn’t a light camera by any means. It isn’t big, but it’s heavy, quite on par with something like the Olympus E-1 dSLR which was basically made of aluminium ingot. A7CR is closer in size and weight to Olympus E-410.

The problem with using a wideangle as your walkaround lens is that everything is sharp, which means you compose scenes where one actually gets to see the whole scenery. That’s what you actually want when you’re a tourist and you want to show where you were, but when you take pictures of your back yard as I usually do, things get repetitive very quickly, as you take pictures of the same things again and again.

There are only so many times you can pull this off.

The lens itself is, as expected, sharp, with excellent colours and contrast, very resistant to flare and chromatic aberrations, and does everything great. It basically produces the same image quality as my Zeiss 16-35mm f/4, only stuck at the middle of its range, and much smaller and lighter.

This was in the town of Hvar; it did everything great, but I noticed that I was too accustomed to using 50mm and longer lenses; all the compositions I initially saw were details and cutouts, and 24mm was initially a shock. I recovered better than Biljana did with her RF 16mm f/2.8, after using nothing wider than 35mm for years. Ultrawide lenses are definitely a thing of their own, and an acquired taste. Yesterday, I continued testing it in nature, while Biljana returned to the 105mm macro.

As you can see, it’s essentially like using the iPhone main camera, only with image quality that would not fall apart on a big screen or a big print. It’s obviously not something I would use every day, because the most interesting parts of the scenery are the small details that catch the light, and not the whole thing. Still, there are things that work great with a wide angle.

And that’s exactly what this lens is for, because normally I would have something longer on the camera – 50mm to 135mm – and when a wider scene appeared, I’d photograph it with my phone, because of course I didn’t take the Zeiss with me because it’s heavy for something to carry around just in case. Well, this lens is for just such cases; it captures the image width of an iPhone, only with the resolution of 4×5″ large format Velvia scanned on a Heidelberg drum scanner. And it’s pocketable. And there are no stupid lens flare artefacts that are a standard thing on an iPhone.

Do I want to use a proper camera and a proper lens to emulate the look of an iPhone? Well, there’s not necessarily that much wrong with the iPhone image, if you want everything to be sharp. I captured many good images with that camera, but the problem arises when I come home and see what that image looks like on a big monitor, and detail falls apart, shadows fall apart, and the whole thing looks overprocessed in the worst way. But the 24mm image itself is definitely something that sometimes works great.

The answer to “can’t you just do it with the iPhone?” is of course I can, and on downsized pictures for the web you probably can’t see the difference, but I can. Also, with proper equipment, I can at any point make huge prints for an exhibition. With iPhone pictures, that would not work so well.

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.