I'm Roger and I am the founder of Lensrentals.com. Hailed as one of the optic nerds here, I enjoy shooting collimated light through 30X microscope objectives in my spare time. When I do take real pictures I like using something different: a Medium format, or Pentax K1, or a Sony RX1R.
Lenses and Optics
If you read much that I write, you know I love’s me some wide-aperture prime lenses. I like the narrow depth of field that isolates my subject, and the ability to shoot in low light. More than anything else, though, I love a nice sharp lens with superb resolution and excellent contrast. A lot of people […]
Lenses and Optics
There is a statement often repeated about zoom lenses, which I have assumed to be generally true, or at least historically true. “All zooms are sharper at one end than the other.” I also hear a lot of people saying they bought Zoom A because it’s sharper than Zoom B. Is that sharper everywhere? Just […]
Lenses and Optics
A few people were more than a little amused that I, the ultimate pixel-peeper, wrote an article demonstrating that all lenses and all cameras vary a bit; that you can’t find the ultimately sharpest lens. Each individual copy of a given lens is a little different from the other copies. A single copy will behave […]
Lenses and Optics
A funny thing happened when I opened Lensrentals and started getting 6 or 10 copies of each lens: I found out they weren’t all the same. Not quite. And each of those copies behaved a bit different on different cameras. I wrote a couple of articles about this: This Lens is Soft and Other Myths […]
History of Photography
For those who missed all the excitement, in Part 1 of this series I discussed that almost all modern SLR lenses derive from one of 6 types of lenses that were basically in use by the 1920s. Part 1 covered the first three lenses: the Symmetrical, Double Gauss, and Petzval lenses. Those three lenses give […]
