The lack of 3D information in modern corrected lenses?

Corran said:
Mind posting an example? I can't think of anytime this has happened for me. I find the 3D-ness to be almost entirely a product of DOF/sharpness of a subject in front of a blurry (if even slightly) OOF background (such as the photos I posted).
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Or with that corny 'beating the sun' (flash) technique so popular among techy digital camera users.
 
the way things are these days, there are literally millions or billions of photos with the 3d look that were taken with highly corrected lenses. this guy is just being contrarian to drive traffic to his site.
 
There's little question in my mind that older Leica Glass does enhance the 3D illusion. But I don't think it preserves any 3D information, nor that more highly corrected lenses lose that information. Binocular vision only facilitates our perception of depth out to a distance of about 20 feet. Beyond 20 feet, we depends on various cues to interpret depth, as opposed to directly seeing it. Two of these cues are texture gradients (things that are farther away look smaller); and superimposition (if something is partially hidden by something else, it must be farther away). And so on.

So what does this have to do with lenses? My guess is that the way an image is rendered by a lens that has less well corrected aberrations, is probably generating something that the eye interprets as depth: probably it is a false cue, but for whatever reason it works.

So what could that be? Maybe this: Old Glass tends to render the OOF background blurrier than modern glass, which, although not really resolving OOF detail, tends to preserve the outlines of OOF objects. Our eyes can only focus on one distance at a time. We don't often realize this, but it's true. So a face or a fence or a wineglass that we focus on look sharp, and everything in the background looks blurry. If a photo is like that, we interpret this as 3D. If the photo was taken with modern glass that won't let the outlines of objects that are supposed to be OOF, be OOF, then the photo looks flat.

How does that sound?
 
Is "3D Pop" really important (for the majority of anyone's photos) or is it one of those lens properties that people obsess way too much over?
 
jsrockit said:
Is "3D Pop" really important (for the majority of anyone's photos) or is it one of those lens properties that people obsess way too much over?
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Now that it has been established that Bokeh does not exist, something else is needed. And here comes 3D Pop...
 
Finally read this article. It's a bunch of hooey. The examples shown don't demonstrate anything.

I love modern lenses for their accuracy, resolution, lack of flare and CA, and their clean imaging properties. I've not seen a modern lens yet that made my images seem flat due to its design—only things that cause that are my poor rendering work or assessment of the light.

I love older lenses for their aberrations and peculiarities that produce pleasing results I find difficult to obtain in rendering. Aesthetically pleasing imperfections, if you will. They're just as likely to cause flat appearance with poor lighting or bad rendering as the modern lenses. The aberrations and flaws often mask it, but it's really no different. They can't achieve in a technical sense what the modern lenses can, no matter what I do, but they can make very pleasing photographs nonetheless.

G
 
Godfrey said:
Finally read this article. It's a bunch of hooey. The examples shown don't demonstrate anything.

...
I love older lenses for their aberrations and peculiarities that produce pleasing results I find difficult to obtain in rendering.

G
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I can make anything work for me, and I too like goofy, otherwise I would not have bought a new Lomo Petzval 85 from CameraQuest. :)

That lens defines goofy.
 
The science is mostly tosh with a (very small) sprinkling of truth. The evidence presented shows nothing in support of the flaky theory. Even the only side-by-side (Mickey Mouse) shots are hard to distinguish, not accurately cropped and use a fixed FL lens versus a zoom (and no indication if they were taken at the same f-stop). I'm reminded of various other fields nowadays, where technical advances have made things (relatively) trivial yet some die-hards insist there must be some aspect or other that science alone cannot explain.

I think it's often the case that modern gear is not built to last whereas older stuff may well be but the technical performance of modern gear usually blows the older stuff out of the water. In a field like photography, where artistic interpretations and subjective assessments are the norm, it's ridiculous to start pigeonholing lenses with terms like flat and 3D and further, trying to define the delineation in the number of elements! Lenses can produce pleasing or awful effects, it's all in the eye of the beholder or the the composition and lighting, be that an old-school lens or modern.
 
Godfrey said:
Finally read this article. It's a bunch of hooey. The examples shown don't demonstrate anything.

I love modern lenses for their accuracy, resolution, lack of flare and CA, and their clean imaging properties. I've not seen a modern lens yet that made my images seem flat due to its design—only things that cause that are my poor rendering work or assessment of the light.

I love older lenses for their aberrations and peculiarities that produce pleasing results I find difficult to obtain in rendering. Aesthetically pleasing imperfections, if you will. They're just as likely to cause flat appearance with poor lighting or bad rendering as the modern lenses. The aberrations and flaws often mask it, but it's really no different. They can't achieve in a technical sense what the modern lenses can, no matter what I do, but they can make very pleasing photographs nonetheless.

G
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Very well put.

If you know much about photography it doesn't take long to figure out Ken (Angry) Wheeler is full of BS. He obviously is desperate for attention and likes to hear himself talk. Obviously he impresses himself.

As to the differences in lenses, several years ago I posted a number of scans from B&W prints that I made. Some were from large format and some from 35mm. Some with vintage lenses 100 years old and some with modern Leica glass. No one could pick out or tell me with any certainty what lens shot what image or even tell me what was large format or small format. People don't like to take this kind of test because it disproves the notion about much of lens character.

I'm not denying there are differences. I dislike the current asph leica glass because I think the images look plastic. As mentioned in the quoted comment, some flaws are aesthetically pleasing.

I also find it interesting that flaws like flare, aberrations and softness in a leica lens make the lens "glow" and have "character" but in a Canon or Nikon lens it's undesirable and shows the lens is of poor quality.
 
The article is poetry and analogy, not science.

Yes, different colors of light travel at different speeds through refractive materials (like glass lenses), but there's no coherent line of explanation in the article.

That said, there certainly are differences in old vs new lenses. I think they have gotten better, and I disagree with the thesis in the article.
 
I've had people comment on the "3d ness" of a few of my shots. Usually posted on social media, and by people who I have no clue how much they know about photography and optics. It's usually just the composition (things in front of and behind the subject), the lighting, the angle of view, and other standard functions of ANY lens.

There are no lenses that make things look more 3d, only shot setups.
 
x-ray said:
Very well put.

If you know much about photography it doesn't take long to figure out Ken (Angry) Wheeler is full of BS. He obviously is desperate for attention and likes to hear himself talk. Obviously he impresses himself.

As to the differences in lenses, several years ago I posted a number of scans from B&W prints that I made. Some were from large format and some from 35mm. Some with vintage lenses 100 years old and some with modern Leica glass. No one could pick out or tell me with any certainty what lens shot what image or even tell me what was large format or small format. People don't like to take this kind of test because it disproves the notion about much of lens character.

I'm not denying there are differences. I dislike the current asph leica glass because I think the images look plastic. As mentioned in the quoted comment, some flaws are aesthetically pleasing.

I also find it interesting that flaws like flare, aberrations and softness in a leica lens make the lens "glow" and have "character" but in a Canon or Nikon lens it's undesirable and shows the lens is of poor quality.
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VERY GOOD points that I've also found to be true. "Leica glow" and "roundness" and "drawing" are all just junk pseudo-artistic babble with no basis in optical fact. But like arguing against UFOs or Bigfoot, it's not worth the trouble for people that are convinced they "see something."

The lens paradox I've always found humorous is 35mm photographers try to get penultimate sharpness onto a postage stamp sized negative. Large Format photographers try to get soft focus, or swirl aberrations (spherical, coma, field curvature, etc) onto a giant 8x10 negative. Switch formats, and everyone would be happy. LF for sharp, 35mm for soft.
 
goamules said:
The lens paradox I've always found humorous is 35mm photographers try to get penultimate sharpness onto a postage stamp sized negative. Large Format photographers try to get soft focus, or swirl aberrations (spherical, coma, field curvature, etc) onto a giant 8x10 negative. Switch formats, and everyone would be happy. LF for sharp, 35mm for soft.
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I get a kick out of the guys that shot tech pan in their 35's trying to make it look like 4x5. As an exercise I guess it's ok but practically why not just use a 4x5 or even medium format. At least with LF those of us into vintage Petzval lenses and soft focus we're going back to the roots of LF.
 
I think we're in the new age of (fill in the blank with your passion)_____________. It seems we can no longer pick up a cheap no name lens and make photos for the pure enjoyment of making images. It all about the bokeh, how sharp in the corners, how contrasty, the swirly effect, the softness or whatever you're into. It the same with wine. We can't just get a $7 bottle and drink it because it doesn't have the pedigree or the right nose or color or whatever. It's the same with bicycles, stereo and musical instruments. It seems we worry so much about the refinements and what we believe we must have to make that perfect image, music or whatever we forget how to enjoy things.

Just my observation. Honestly I'm just as content shooting with my 1960's Nikon and lenses as I am my new Leica and glass. It's about the content not the hardware to me and I'd much rather be out shooting rather than debating the finer points of (fill in the blank) _______ on the Internet. In fifty years I've only seen one or two lenses so bad I couldn't make the image I was after.
 
Corran said:
Mind posting an example? I can't think of anytime this has happened for me. I find the 3D-ness to be almost entirely a product of DOF/sharpness of a subject in front of a blurry (if even slightly) OOF background (such as the photos I posted).
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Hi, Corran. Haven't gotten to the point where I can post my own photos, but there have been a few threads that contained some I thought were particularly pronounced. If I get the time, I'll try to find them and point to them. Possibly find some flickr photos, too.

That is, if my courage lasts, of course. Right now, I'm trying to decide whether it's safe to come up for air.

Giorgio
 
x-ray said:
I think we're in the new age of (fill in the blank with your passion)_____________. It seems we can no longer pick up a cheap no name lens and make photos for the pure enjoyment of making images. It all about the bokeh, how sharp in the corners, how contrasty, the swirly effect, the softness or whatever you're into. It the same with wine. We can't just get a $7 bottle and drink it because it doesn't have the pedigree or the right nose or color or whatever. It's the same with bicycles, stereo and musical instruments. It seems we worry so much about the refinements and what we believe we must have to make that perfect image, music or whatever we forget how to enjoy things.

Just my observation. Honestly I'm just as content shooting with my 1960's Nikon and lenses as I am my new Leica and glass. It's about the content not the hardware to me and I'd much rather be out shooting rather than debating the finer points of (fill in the blank) _______ on the Internet. In fifty years I've only seen one or two lenses so bad I couldn't make the image I was after.
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In general, I agree, but not about the wine: between a 7$ and a 50$ bottle there's a HUGE difference. Much more than between a 1965 Nikkor and a 2015 Leica lens.
And it's not about the pedigree, it's the content: wine is not a tool, it's the final product (i.e. the picture in photography).
 
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