The importance of lens rendering / look at slower apertures

[Andrew Reid]

Shooting with the new Sigma 45mm F2.8 for L-mount, I realised the same thing I did when I first shot anamorphic at F5.6.

Beautiful rendering matters, not just wide open, but at slower apertures.

This doesn't get enough attention!

Sometimes I want to see that background, and not have it completely creamed out, but neither do I want to give up the '3D' look or beautiful out of focus rendering and fall-off.

What is the best rendering lens at F4? I doubt you'll find answer on Google.

Let's test.

[zerocool22]

Yes I have the same feeling at times, especially when I am reading mags like american cinematographer, and read that a certain shot is shot at F5.6 (spherical) and actually watching the shot in the movie, I am sometimes amazed how good it looks. (Allthough I often blame it on the beautifull rendering of the Alexa as well though and access to amazing locations/set design)

[IronFilm]

1 hour ago, zerocool22 said:

(Allthough I often blame it on the beautifull rendering of the Alexa as well though and access to amazing locations/set design)

You can craft a lot of depth / "3D-ness" into a scene via fantastic set design and cinematography, and then using deep DoF only showcases that even more. 

[BTM_Pix]

10 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

 

What is the best rendering lens at F4? I doubt you'll find answer on Google.

 

No substitute for real testing of course but there is a way to mine Flickr using exif tags that can be useful.

If you use this link that I've just created

https://flickr.com/search/?exif_min_aperture=4&exif_max_aperture=4&exif_min_focallen=24&exif_max_focallen=24&sort=relevance&tags=cinematic

Then this will find all shots taken at f4 on 24mm lenses.

If you want to change the range to include shots from f4 to f5.6 then just change exif_max_aperture to be 5.6

Ditto if you want to change the lens range to be from say 18 to 50 then just change exif_min_focallen to be 18 and exif_max_focallen to be 50 etc

I've added the tag "cinematic" as whilst not being a very accurate description in many cases, it makes the search a bit more relevant as it at least shows what the creator was aiming for

If you just want to search for all images that match the lens parameters then just chop off the &sort=relevance&tags=cinematic off the end.

 

[IronFilm]

10 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

https://flickr.com/search/?exif_min_aperture=4&exif_max_aperture=4&exif_min_focallen=24&exif_max_focallen=24&sort=relevance&tags=cinematic

Then this will find all shots taken at f4 on 24mm lenses.

Almost never use Flickr myself, but there doesn't seem to be a way to sort them by number of favorites, comments, or views? Would be one metric for figuring out the "best performing" lenses. 

 

[BTM_Pix]

39 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Almost never use Flickr myself, but there doesn't seem to be a way to sort them by number of favorites, comments, or views? Would be one metric for figuring out the "best performing" lenses. 

 

I've a feeling you might end up with some less than optimum results if you sorted using those parameters.

Most of them not safe for work.

[kye]

12 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Shooting with the new Sigma 45mm F2.8 for L-mount, I realised the same thing I did when I first shot anamorphic at F5.6.

Beautiful rendering matters, not just wide open, but at slower apertures.

This doesn't get enough attention!

Sometimes I want to see that background, and not have it completely creamed out, but neither do I want to give up the '3D' look or beautiful out of focus rendering and fall-off.

What is the best rendering lens at F4? I doubt you'll find answer on Google.

Let's test.

Excellent question.

I've been trying to peel the onion and get to the heart of things in my cinematic lenses thread, but I still have many more layers to go I think.

When I did my big lens comparison I tried looking at how 3D each lens was.  I put the lenses up on the screen, closed one eye, and looked at the image through a short PVC pipe so that I couldn't see the edges of the image, and I asked myself how convincing a 3D image it created.  By only looking at it with mono vision it should have been a reasonable approximation of what the eye actually sees, and I made sure to evaluate the scene by only looking at the object that was in focus in the image, otherwise if you look around then the eye doesn't have to re-focus and the 'illusion' was broken.  

There were subtle differences between the lenses, but one overwhelming factor in this test was that if two lenses were at the same aperture (eg, 2.8, or 5.6) then the one with the slightly longer focal length had the advantage (eg. 58mm over 55mm, etc)  This, of course, means that the aperture was slightly larger and the background was slightly more out of focus.

I believe that there are queues that are genuine and that the people on here (and also real DPs doing real lens tests) who talk about it are genuinely seeing something.  Unfortunately I'm not seeing it, so it's hard to do tests and get more insight.

I'm very interested to see if there's anything new we can uncover.....

[IronFilm]

1 hour ago, BTM_Pix said:

Most of them not safe for work.

By default, when you're not logged in, then Safe Search is turned ON  ?

[BTM_Pix]

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

By default, when you're not logged in, then Safe Search is turned ON  ?

By default, I'm a deviant so Safe Search is always turned OFF  

[noone]

So far I have looked at a total of one lens for this.     For stills jpegs (I did shoot a video of the band but I deleted it by accident before I could look at it).

 

An ancient Canon 20-35 2.8 L (probably the most updated lens around with  17-35 2.8 L, 16-35 2.8L 16-35 2.8L ii, 16-35 2.8 L iii all following on).     This battered old thing is something I love more and more even though I usually prefer primes.   It might not hold up for high pixel count cameras now or for 8k video.    Both these are f4 (24mm and 35mm)   I do like how this lens renders at f4 to f8.