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The Most Important Developments in Photography
In my last article I listed the three most important developments in photography. Then someone pointed out that I’d made an error. I mean, I may have misspoken. Wait, I mean I was less correct than I might have been. I listed the invention of the camera first (that part is pretty hard to argue…
Reflections on Reflections. Coatings: The Most Important Part of Your Lens.
Reflection is an interesting word with many meanings. To a philosopher it means careful or considerable thought on a subject. To an anatomist it means a structure that bends back along the path it came from. To a narcissist it’s their image in a mirror. To a photographer it usually means subjects…
The Gear Head Pixel Peeper Quiz
I admit it. I am a card-carrying gear-head pixel-peeper. But I have an excuse (well, at least now I do): gear is my business. There was a time, before I got honest with myself, when I thought I was a just a photographer who was really interested in the tools of my craft. Eventually, I came to admit…
Roger’s Under $50 Photographer’s Christmas List
As usual, I’m supposed to write a Holiday article this time of year. And subtly suggest that a Lensrentals.com gift certificate would make the perfect gift for everyone on your list. So, OK, we’ve covered the gift certificate thing. That’s good since last year’s Holiday article was an epic fail…
Sharing a Good Read
One part of my job that gets to be a job sometimes is reading. The writing I do requires a lot of research reading. Making purchasing and troubleshooting decisions for Lensrentals requires a lot of research reading. So when I received a copy of Steve Simon’s book _The Passionate Photographer: Ten…
Stop it Down. Just a Bit.
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…
Are Zooms Always Sharper at One Extreme or the Other?
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?…
The Limits of Variation
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…
Notes on Lens and Camera Variation
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…
Lens Genealogy – Part 2
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…
The Rapple 4000 (or Roger designs the perfect camera)
I had an epiphany of sorts this weekend. I took home the new Schneider 50mm f/2.8 Super Angulon. For those of you not in the loop, this is a 50mm tilt-shift SLR lens made by a company that is best known for it’s Cinema lenses (along with filters, glass, and some other stuff). The point is the lens…
58 Lines by 36 Photographers
I loves me some quotes, so I thought I’d gather up my favorites and share them. I tried to get to 88 lines, wanting to pay tribute to the ultimate 80’s cult band, the Nails (or the less classic “88 lines about 44 Simpsons“). But when the dust settled I only came up with 58 that I thought were…