Why don't artists obsess over sharpness in the way that photographers do ?

I love this place.

Discussions about "photographers obsess over sharpness and resolution when artists don't seem to even have to think about it"

Anyone want to talk about hyper-realists like Chuck Close or photorealists like Ralph Goings and Richard Estes? No obsessing over sharpness or resolution?
 
jan normandale said:
I love this place.

Discussions about "photographers obsess over sharpness and resolution when artists don't seem to even have to think about it"

Anyone want to talk about hyper-realists like Chuck Close or photorealists like Ralph Goings and Richard Estes? No obsessing over sharpness or resolution?
Click to expand...

As I said before, in painting it has always been respected because doing it implies an incredible amount of work for years.

Cheers,

Juan
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
As I said before, in painting it has always been respected because doing it implies an incredible amount of work for years.
Click to expand...

And in photography it doesn't? All the time aligning your enlarger head and baseboard so that you don't have to print at f/64 and kill your sharpness by diffraction? Not to mention all the time spent hanging around on gearhead forums discussing with photo nerds about MTF curves of Leica glass, and all the money spent buying various versions of the 35mm Summicron and the time spent shooting photos of brick walls and dogs with them.
 
Yes, in photography sharpness is considered too... Sometimes too much, even in the opinion of lots of photographers and some RFF members. To me, sharpness means enough sharpness to tell the story, and if the story told is having problems because of low sharpness, I wish it didn't happen that way... But if the image works and the viewer can perceive the image, a bit more or less sharpness doesn't worry me too much especially if the scene shows fast shooting was the case. Of course if there's a lot of time (as with non fleeting scenes or in the darkroom) there's no reason for losing sharpness on purpose, unless that's the unusual look desired for a series of images, and that's not my case. But yes, some of my images are a bit below my (very good) lenses' optimal possible results and I don't care at all.

Cheers,

Juan
 
Why aren´t the photographers concerned with brush strokes, pigments etc. while the painters obviously are? It is the craft part of the art and sharpness doesn´t make sense outside photography (do you want "sharper" sculpture? what does it mean?).
 
Is it true to say that sharpness is like sex..................................its only important if you are not getting it?
 
I wouldn't say that is strictly true - look at the works of Jan van Eyck, or the Hyperrealism genre in painting......
 
rxmd said:
And in photography it doesn't? All the time aligning your enlarger head and baseboard so that you don't have to print at f/64 and kill your sharpness by diffraction? Not to mention all the time spent hanging around on gearhead forums discussing with photo nerds.....
Click to expand...

Well to be nerdy we need something to be nerdy about. I'll have a bash but without sums or anything as its too early in the morning.

As anybody who has used large format cameras or enlargers knows diffraction at f64 isn't nearly the same level of problem as diffraction at even f22 on a 35mm camera. Diffraction is caused by light hitting the edges of the aperture blades. And as the lens is closed down this becomes more of a problem proportional to the size of the opening that the light is coming through as the angle of the light increases. So on a 35mm lens you have a tiny hole for the light to get through at f22, and the proportion of disturbed light is large. With a large format lens (say a 150 mm) even at f64 the hole made by the aperture blades is going to be something like the size of a 35mm lens at f5.6, so the proportion of disturbed light is small. This applies equally to enlarger lenses.

So f64 can be used without incurring the same level of unsharpness caused by diffraction in smaller formats.

As a side note to the ongoing discussion, if you look at enough Ansel Adams prints in the flesh (not books) you will see they are not all as critically sharp as you may imagine some of them to be, even from the same time period. This leads me to think that AA had a broad concept of sharpness, something aimed at, but if it fell a fraction short (imperceptible at normal viewing distance), then the primary goal was still 'a good photo'. He used technical mastery to aid in expressing what he wanted to say about the landscape, and I think if you put expression first whether the photo's are intentionally soft or intentionally sharp you are doing the right thing.

Steve
 
Last edited:
Sharpness is ridiculous concept. Perhaps only for landscape and architecture but even then barely.

The importance of the emotional layer in a picture is so overwhelming that sharpness is like a fig compared to the sun. If you ever obsesses about sharpness it's because you don't understand the importance of the emotional. Sharpness is something you can buy off the shelf, that's why you have connected in your head with sharp = good picture, but that is a losers way of thinking. As long as you put any sort of importance into sharpness you still haven't truly grasped, in your bones, how important the emotional factor is in a picture, how it moves you.

Like Juan said, Ansel Adams, for christ sake, didn't bother with sharpness in any particular way at all, neither did HCB. A boring sharp picture will forever be a BORING sharp picture, but Robert Capa's V-Day pictures are as lousy as they come, nothing is in focus or is sharp but it is one of the best pictures ever recorded.

If you still don't understand the enormously importance of the emotional, compositional element in a picture and STILL try to compensate by having a sharp picture because you can get that via a software or buying new lens off the shelf, then that is the reason you why will never be an important photographer. A flickr shooter at best, something to show on the projected screen when there is a family gathering and people pat you on the back giving you endless compliments.

Don't worry if we can see your wives celles on her skin when you take a portrait picture of her, worry about what her eyes are saying to us, we are human beings after all.

Over and out.
 
I find this a very strange thread. Yes, I have read it all - twice in fact.

Am I not right in saying that the received wisdom is to spend the money on the glass? Yes a decent body for the lens to fit on is nice but, what of that glass? Think about it...

Al
 
I think this craze over sharpness has gotten slightly out of hand since the introduction of photoshop and artificial sharpening.
 
Neare said:
I think this craze over sharpness has gotten slightly out of hand since the introduction of photoshop and artificial sharpening.
Click to expand...

Neare, the reason I started using film was that I was thoroughly brassed off with the time spent in front of a PC doing post processing.

Al
 
250swb said:
Well to be nerdy we need something to be nerdy about. I'll have a bash but without sums or anything as its too early in the morning.

As anybody who has used large format cameras or enlargers knows diffraction at f64 isn't nearly the same level of problem as diffraction at even f22 on a 35mm camera. Diffraction is caused by light hitting the edges of the aperture blades. And as the lens is closed down this becomes more of a problem proportional to the size of the opening that the light is coming through as the angle of the light increases. So on a 35mm lens you have a tiny hole for the light to get through at f22, and the proportion of disturbed light is large. With a large format lens (say a 150 mm) even at f64 the hole made by the aperture blades is going to be something like the size of a 35mm lens at f5.6, so the proportion of disturbed light is small.

So f64 can be used without incurring the same level of unsharpness caused by diffraction in smaller formats.
Click to expand...

Then I'll go nerdy now, because I think you've got your math wrong ;) And I'll try to do it without mentioning sharpness too much so that people don't think I'm obsessed.

The problem with diffraction is that it turns rays of light into little discs; if these diffraction discs get too large, the image goes all fuzzy. I think on this we'll probably agree.

The size of the diffraction disc is actually independent of the focal length and only depends on the numerical aperture value; in other words, the diffraction disc at f/22 is always the same size, whether on an 12mm lens or on a 240mm lens, in spite of the apertures having wildly different diameters. If you look at the formula for the airy disc, you find that it's not only the physical diameter of the aperture that matters, but the focal length as well. Your observation that the aperture of a lens of short focal length at f/22 is much smaller geometrically than that of a long lens is correct, but then the focal length of the two lenses is different, too; in the formula for the airy disk, you have the focal length in the numerator and the diameter in the denominator, so the two cancel each other out and it's only the numerical aperture that counts.

This has a number of interesting consequences. For example, it means that on an APS-C sensor it doesn't make sense to stop down very far, because the airy discs quickly become larger than the pixel pitch of the sensor (beyond f/11 or so depending on the sensor) - I recently saw the calculation for f/22, where the airy disc is 15 µm in diameter, while on a 14MP APS-C camera the pixels are 5 µm wide. In the words of the poster there, it's like when someone gives you a 3mm felt-tip pen and tells you to fill in individual boxes on 1mm graph paper.

The primary reason why this matters less in large format is not that the lenses are physically larger or have longer focal lengths, but that the negative is larger. When making, say, a 30x40" print, the enlargement ratio from 35mm is about 30x, from 4x5" it's about 8x. So if you have a picture taken at f/64, the fuzzy discs gets enlarged either 30x where they turn the whole print into goo, or 8x where they are still manageable. In other words, a 4x5" negative simply has much more room and reserves for detail.

In enlarging it's somewhat similar - it's the ratio that counts. When enlarging 35mm negatives, it's very easy to reach enlargement factors of 10x or 20x. For 8x10" prints from 35mm film, the ratio is about 8x, from 4x5" negatives it's 2x (in other words if all you produce is 8x10" prints, you can basically print 4x5" negatives through the bottom of a bottle and they will look OK). When switching from large format to 35mm, it all suddenly becomes critical. In other words, you can print 4x5" negatives with your enlarger lens set to f/22, while if you do the same with 35mm negatives you get slightly mushy-looking prints - the diffraction discs are the same, only they get enlarged much more. So if you don't want the enlarged diffraction discs to turn your whole print fuzzy, it's a good idea not to stop down too far. This, in turn, means that you have little depth of field reserves, so you need a good enlarging lens, and a negative holder that holds your negatives flat, and you need to spend time to align your enlarger head and baseboard so that they are parallel.

However, there is a reason why it's worth putting all this effort into aligning your enlarger head that has nothing to do with sharpness, and this is the grainy look of film. Let's say you print from a film with moderately coarse grain (say, the grain is 10 µm in size) and you print it at f/22, where the size of the airy disc is 15 µm as above. In this case, diffraction kills the resolution of your film to the point that you can't discern individual grains any more, no matter what the print size, because diffraction mushes them together into grays. So if you want to see grain in your prints, print at lower apertures.

This is consistent with my own darkroom experience. It's a real eye opener when you do this enlargement properly once in your darkroom and start printing at f/8 instead of f/16, only to find out that your 35mm prints look completely different and much crispier and better.
 
Last edited:
rxmd said:
Then I'll go nerdy now, because I think you've got your math wrong ;) And I'll try to do it without mentioning sharpness too much so that people don't think I'm obsessed.

The problem with diffraction is that it turns rays of light into little discs; if these diffraction discs get too large, the image goes all fuzzy. I think on this we'll probably agree.

The size of the diffraction disc is actually independent of the focal length and only depends on the numerical aperture value; in other words, the diffraction disc at f/22 is always the same size, whether on an 12mm lens or on a 240mm lens, in spite of the apertures having wildly different diameters. If you look at the formula for the airy disc, you find that it's not only the physical diameter of the aperture that matters, but the focal length as well. Your observation that the aperture of a lens of short focal length at f/22 is much smaller geometrically than that of a long lens is correct, but then the focal length of the two lenses is different, too; in the formula for the airy disk, you have the focal length in the numerator and the diameter in the denominator, so the two cancel each other out and it's only the numerical aperture that counts.

This has a number of interesting consequences. For example, it means that on an APS-C sensor it doesn't make sense to stop down very far, because the airy discs quickly become larger than the pixel pitch of the sensor (beyond f/11 or so depending on the sensor) - I recently saw the calculation for f/22, where the airy disc is 15 µm in diameter, while on a 14MP APS-C camera the pixels are 5 µm wide. In the words of the poster there, it's like when someone gives you a 3mm felt-tip pen and tells you to fill in individual boxes on 1mm graph paper.

The primary reason why this matters less in large format is not that the lenses are physically larger or have longer focal lengths, but that the negative is larger. When making, say, a 30x40" print, the enlargement ratio from 35mm is about 30x, from 4x5" it's about 8x. So if you have a picture taken at f/64, the fuzzy discs gets enlarged either 30x where they turn the whole print into goo, or 8x where they are still manageable. In other words, a 4x5" negative simply has much more room and reserves for detail.

In enlarging it's somewhat similar - it's the ratio that counts. When enlarging 35mm negatives, it's very easy to reach enlargement factors of 10x or 20x. For 8x10" prints from 35mm film, the ratio is about 8x, from 4x5" negatives it's 2x (in other words if all you produce is 8x10" prints, you can basically print 4x5" negatives through the bottom of a bottle and they will look OK). When switching from large format to 35mm, it all suddenly becomes critical. In other words, you can print 4x5" negatives with your enlarger lens set to f/22, while if you do the same with 35mm negatives you get slightly mushy-looking prints - the diffraction discs are the same, only they get enlarged much more. So if you don't want the enlarged diffraction discs to turn your whole print fuzzy, it's a good idea not to stop down too far. This, in turn, means that you have little depth of field reserves, so you need a good enlarging lens, and a negative holder that holds your negatives flat, and you need to spend time to align your enlarger head and baseboard so that they are parallel.

However, there is a reason why it's worth putting all this effort into aligning your enlarger head that has nothing to do with sharpness, and this is the grainy look of film. Let's say you print from a film with moderately coarse grain (say, the grain is 10 µm in size) and you print it at f/22, where the size of the airy disc is 15 µm as above. In this case, diffraction kills the resolution of your film to the point that you can't discern individual grains any more, no matter what the print size, because diffraction mushes them together into grays. So if you want to see grain in your prints, print at lower apertures.

This is consistent with my own darkroom experience. It's a real eye opener when you do this enlargement properly once in your darkroom and start printing at f/8 instead of f/16, only to find out that your 35mm prints look completely different and much crispier and better.
Click to expand...

Well errm yes, except you seem to be magnifying every value but ignoring the simple fact that the thickness of the aperture blades doesn't increase with the focal length and the format it is designed for, they stay the same (ish). So proportionally the thickness of the aperture blades is less of a concern as the focal length and the format increases, so reducing diffraction at smaller apertures in large format lenses compared to 35mm.

Steve
 
I like an image to be as sharp as circumstances allow by making sure my cameras are focusing correctly and my scanner is delivering it's full potential ... beyond that it's in the hands of the gods and I accept whatever the final output may be! :D
 
I like my Vermeer to be sharp and my Turner to be moody, and as a glasses wearer, I generally prefer my vision with them on.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom