Fast Lens Only For Shooting Wide-Open?

[Ko.Fe.]

...
It occurred to me (however wrongly) that this idea, that fast lenses should only be used at widest aperture, might be born of a digital mindset?....

Lets analyze what open lens with big aperture gives. In short - it gives the look.
The look.
What else gives the look. Diana-Holga. Those are film cameras and I'm not sure if those lightleakers have any aperture blades at all.

So it is not digital mindset, but mind which thinks what gear has creative modes. Or person who purchased some f1.2 lens and it is only impressive wide open, would it be 7A lens or 8K$ Snobilux. 😀

 

[sepiareverb]

Then why are the apertures there?

 

[LCSmith]

Lets analyze what open lens with big aperture gives. In short - it gives the look.
The look.
What else gives the look. Diana-Holga. Those are film cameras and I'm not sure if those lightleakers have any aperture blades at all.

So it is not digital mindset, but mind which thinks what gear has creative modes. Or person who purchased some f1.2 lens and it is only impressive wide open, would it be 7A lens or 8K$ Snobilux. 😀

I confess not to have understood all of your post, Ko. Fe., but I will elaborate about why I thought it might be a digital mindset. With digital, one may shoot at 1.4, let's say, more easily and under more circumstances than with film where one is stuck with a single ISO and perhaps 1/1000s as the fastest shutter speed. That was my thinking regarding the digital remark.

 

[Contarama]

When I first started this hobby one of the 'magic' things for me was the occasional bokeh shot (with a film camera and little idea how I did it) Fast forward to my early digital days bokeh effects were just easier and faster to obtain, and accordingly became rote and boring to me most of the time. Maybe that easy quality of digital is why it seems so many folks are into wide open and bokeh. As far as speed I think a lot of that has always been about a desire to own the fastest the first the best. For the record fastest lens I own is a 1.8 and most of my snaps are in the mid aperture range.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

I confess not to have understood all of your post, Ko. Fe., but I will elaborate about why I thought it might be a digital mindset. With digital, one may shoot at 1.4, let's say, more easily and under more circumstances than with film where one is stuck with a single ISO and perhaps 1/1000s as the fastest shutter speed. That was my thinking regarding the digital remark.

Sorry, my ESL is even more complicated than my way of thinking.
On one of my birthday party, person who knows me over decade, made tost about how I will tell something and he needs to think for sometime to get it. 😀

If you want to keep it on gear level, not creativity, to me it is dead simple.

If I want f1.5 lens on film body I want it on non-cloth shutter camera.
In my case it is TTL metering Bessa. I could make exactly the same as on digital via vND filter, but I like my f1.5 with bw film. So, I just slap x4 or x2 contrast filter.

But 🙂 in real photography here it is, f1.5 lens, wide open, no TTL, cloth shutters on sunny days and two of them are with primitive FED-2 with 1/500 as the fastest one:










Films were 50, 100 and 400. Sunny f1.5 at all of them.

Film or digital, it doesn't matter, once you learn about filters use. It is not difficult, just screw, unscrew; digital, film is the same.