Brian Legge
Veteran
I ran out of light while shooting a roll of Neopan 400. Given the bad weather that followed, I decided to shoot a comparison between a few lenses. Unfortunately I ran out of film before making it to far but thought the results may be of interest.
These were taken at 3.5 feet @ f/3.5. These represent the left half of the frame as I lost part of the frame for the 3rd shot when I hit the end of the roll.
Lens 1:
Lens 2 (ignore the distortion at the top center of the frame - processing issue):
Lens 3 (missed focus):
While I wasn't very successful here, I did learn a few useful lessons.
1) Make sure you have enough shots for the series of lenses you intend to test. 🙂
2) While I shoot primarily black and white and only really care about it, color film would have gotten different results as two the lenses have distinct casts when looking through them which didn't show up here. Interesting as I expected a slight different.
3) These lenses are really similar at 3.5! I really expected slightly more variation though testing at a wider aperture probably would have shown more.
4) I can't focus consistently enough with a Canon P to really do this. I'm glad the tape measure was there to make this obvious. Disturbing as I thought I could focus better with this camera despite a separating rangefinder. I'll use Barnack in the future for the additional magnification.
5) Even with a tripod in the same place, I had a slight amount of variation in camera position. I'll have to be more careful about that in the future.
6) I shot finder grain film than Neopan 400 at times. Perhaps Acros would have shown more differences? Off hand it looks like these lenses are almost entirely interchangeable in this scene.
These were taken at 3.5 feet @ f/3.5. These represent the left half of the frame as I lost part of the frame for the 3rd shot when I hit the end of the roll.
Lens 1:
Lens 2 (ignore the distortion at the top center of the frame - processing issue):
Lens 3 (missed focus):
While I wasn't very successful here, I did learn a few useful lessons.
1) Make sure you have enough shots for the series of lenses you intend to test. 🙂
2) While I shoot primarily black and white and only really care about it, color film would have gotten different results as two the lenses have distinct casts when looking through them which didn't show up here. Interesting as I expected a slight different.
3) These lenses are really similar at 3.5! I really expected slightly more variation though testing at a wider aperture probably would have shown more.
4) I can't focus consistently enough with a Canon P to really do this. I'm glad the tape measure was there to make this obvious. Disturbing as I thought I could focus better with this camera despite a separating rangefinder. I'll use Barnack in the future for the additional magnification.
5) Even with a tripod in the same place, I had a slight amount of variation in camera position. I'll have to be more careful about that in the future.
6) I shot finder grain film than Neopan 400 at times. Perhaps Acros would have shown more differences? Off hand it looks like these lenses are almost entirely interchangeable in this scene.
