Idle thoughts on over-use of shallow DOF with fast lenses wide open

I read a good thread on focusing the Hasselblad. Wide open you’ll so often miss focus, discovered when you see the print. You don’t pick the right point when focusing, or you sway a bit before tripping the shutter. Happens at f1.5 and f2 with a 50 or longer in 35mm too. As Chris Crawford said, for a portrait there needs to be more in focus - more than one eye or only the nose. Used wisely many people shot happily with focus shifting lenses, never discovering they had one, or even that there is such a thing as focus shift. That Zeiss C Sonnar still has some magic at f5.6. That’s my favourite aperture.

Out of focus backgrounds don’t always isolate the subject in a sweet plane, but often load a picture with unsettling unignorable blobs that rob the sharp subject of its primacy. There’s a Bonnard exhibition on in Melbourne right now. Wonderful looking at the domestic still lifes, tables set for lunch, or what’s left after lunch, and the detail of the view beyond the window. These paintings offer so much, and not all at once, with lots of discrete discernible content near and far. This aspect of the painter’s vision is retained in many of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. I wonder what his favourite aperture was. With so many not quite sharp photographs I presume he was going for depth of field clarity at the expense of stopping motion with a higher shutter speed.
 
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90mm F1.5 Mitakon, wide-open on the Z5.
Having used rangefinders since 1969 and SLRs since 1971, I'm totally blown away by how good focus peaking is for shooting moving subjects, wide-open, and pick the point of focus from anywhere in the frame.
 
Almost didn't respond as I don't have much interesting to say on this. If it works, it works. If it doesn't . . .
My internal algorithm is a little like those exposure charts for an Av or Tv setting on your camera. In general, I want the lens' best performance, which usually means stopped down a bit. But I will open the lens up if I can't get the shot I want between f:2.8 and f:5.6. Most modern lenses perform superbly in that range, and I stick to primes for most of my photography. If I want to isolate a subject, I tend to go for a longer lens, rather than a faster one? But sometimes only a superfast lens will do. I keep a C/V 35/1.2 lens on my M9 as my default, but I only use f:1.2 when there is no other choice.

Bottom line: you have to know what your lens is going to do when you hit that shutter button.
 
I'm as guilty as anyone of using (and admittedly, loving) fast lenses. RIght now my main squeeze is a Schneider-Göttingen 12.5cm f/2 Xenon lens for my Hasselblad 1000f, but I've also had both the f/1 and f/0.95 Noctiluxes, plus I have a few of the fixed-lens f/1.8 Nikon lenses for the Z7.

Contrary to what some might believe, it is possible to get pretty good results with the Noctiluxes. Two such examples, shot (as I recall) wide open:


Bob from Claunch by Vince Lupo, on Flickr


Mark by Vince Lupo, on Flickr

And here's another crazy lens -- TTArtisan 90/1.25 for Hasselblad XCD. This was shot wide open, or perhaps down like one click to f/1.4:


Chanticleer2022-3 by Vince Lupo, on Flickr

So I think it's possible to get pretty good results from these kinds of lenses (just be aware of your background and how it 'relates' to your main subejct). Two problems that I have with them are a) they usually weigh a lot more than 'slower' lenses, and b) I have to remind myself that there are other aperture settings available on the lens besides the widest one.
 
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One with the Nikon 50/1.8 on the Z7, shot wide open. The fact that one eye is fading out of focus doesn't really bother me:

Lee Z7-2 by Vince Lupo, on Flickr

Stopped down to f/5.6 it's pretty good too:

Gary by Vince Lupo, on Flickr

With that 12.5cm f/2 Schneider-Göttingen wide open -- I think it does nice things with the colours, plus I don't think the background is too crazy:

The Pond at Black Bear Loop by Vince Lupo, on Flickr
 
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Vince Lupo said:
I'm as guilty as anyone of using (and admittedly, loving) fast lenses. RIght now my main squeeze is a Schneider-Göttingen 12.5cm f/2 Xenon lens for my Hasselblad 1000f, but I've also had both the f/1 and f/0.95 Noctiluxes, plus I have a few of the fixed-lens f/1.8 Nikon lenses for the Z7.

[Snip]

So I think it's possible to get pretty good results from these kinds of lenses (just be aware of your background and how it 'relates' to your main subejct). Two problems that I have with them are a) they usually weigh a lot more than 'slower' lenses, and b) I have to remind myself that there are other aperture settings available on the lens besides the widest one.
Click to expand...
Vince: you always bring the good stuff! I love the level of detail in those photographs. Something about the wire-texture of the subjects' beards just yells out. Nicely done.
 
The use of a wide aperture for subject isolation, and its converse ...stopping down for more DoF... are just tools for a photographer's use. A wide aperture allows a shorter exposure time, when that is helpful; a small aperture allows more latitude in focus setting accuracy, when that is helpful. There's nothing wrong with ultra-shallow DoF, or deep DoF, or blur through subject or camera motion, or sublime sharpness through very short exposures. All of them have their place in the pantheon of imaging goals.

The only thing that can be wrong is that the photographer does not know to choose what suits the desires best for a given shot. And that includes not knowing what are the best performing apertures of any given lens. I think that a part of the problem is that we go too fast, we move too swiftly from one thing to the next, without thinking deeply enough about what it is we are trying to achieve. Or that we don't move fast enough to make choices that are needed while our subject has moved on from our first look. Or that we get lazy and let the equipment, with its minimal illusion of being smart, sort out what it has been programmed to think is the correct solution and we just accept that because we are distracted.

The making of photographs and art is a complex thing, and can (maybe should) consume all our attention. Without attention, it's just clicking a button and letting physics do its thing.

G
 
Benjamin Marks said:
Vince: you always bring the good stuff! I love the level of detail in those photographs. Something about the wire-texture of the subjects' beards just yells out. Nicely done.
Click to expand...
Benjamin many thanks -- I think the one thing I have to be mindful of (as I guess we all do!) is working in a kind of 'auto-pilot' mode in which I'm shooting the same way, with the same lens and at the same wide aperture. As others have mentioned here, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Gotta say though, those wide-aperture lenses come in handy in low light. This is with that 90/1.25 TTArtisan lens again.

Mark by Vince Lupo, on Flickr

And the grandaddy of fast lenses - the 100mm f/2 Ernostar on an Ermanox.

Jack 2021 Ermanox by Vince Lupo, on Flickr
 
Richard G said:
There’s a Bonnard exhibition on in Melbourne right now. Wonderful looking at the domestic still lifes, tables set for lunch, or what’s left after lunch, and the detail of the view beyond the window. These paintings offer so much, and not all at once, with lots of discrete discernible content near and far. This aspect of the painter’s vision is retained in many of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. I wonder what his favourite aperture was. With so many not quite sharp photographs I presume he was going for depth of field clarity at the expense of stopping motion with a higher shutter speed.
Click to expand...
I always thought that Bonnard's painting had a photographic aspect to them - they often look like they could also be photos. Very classical compositions. Turns out, he was a keen amateur photographer as well.
 
This whole thread reminded me of something I read in a book I stumbled upon recently:

IMG_7793.JPG

I'd never heard of Grace Robertson before, but this book is a lovely collection of photos from around Britain in the late 1940s through the 1950s (all taken with a Leica IIIb and a Summar, I believe). There's a 20-page introduction written by Ms Robertson at the start of the book, which tells a fantastic story of her buying the Leica at 18 (and the assistant on the camera shop insisting she should have a Rolleiflex with flash instead for "press photography"), having her prints criticised by Simon Guttmann, what it was like working with Picture Post, and how she turned down a position with Life magazine after doing some assignments for them. But the bit that sprang to mind was this:

"It is perhaps equipment more than anything else that has influenced the look of photojournalism - and not, to my mind, always to the good. The over-use of wide-angle lenses a few years ago led to a great many flat, muddled pictures where every element had the same weight, there was no separation between foreground and background, and distortion was an accepted feature.”
Click to expand...

I wonder if the "problem" is people are just reacting to decades of wide angle street photography, where people would use (and abuse) insane depths of field to work fast and grab shots quickly - regardless of how visually cluttered the resulting shot was. Cultures, philosophies, and art movements end up swinging wildly from one extreme to another, and I feel the oversaturation of those snapshot images made the "selective focus" of a 50/1.2 shot wide open seem more "artistic" and stand out more.

Also, for context, here's some of the shots Grace Robertson included in this book; it's lovely stuff (that really should have been scanned properly instead of being quickly photographed with my phone):

IMG_7795.JPG

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