A Sea of Air II

Another go at video, this time shot with an Olympus 24mm f/2.8 and an Olympus 50mm f/1.4, entirely at f/2.8 and f/1.4, mounted on a Canon 5D Mk II. The subject is Salisbury Cathedral, with a guest appearance from Emily Young's "Lunar Disc I". Emily Young sang on the very first Penguin Cafe Orchestra album, and painted the cover, and so in my book she's alright.

The music is wildly appropriate. I recorded it back in 2007; the clip here is a minute-long excerpt from the second part of a much longer piece.

The clips were processed with VirtualDub. I didn't bother with MPEG Streamclip this time, because I have found a way - thanks to the mysterious "Ares" - to open the 5D's videos directly into VirtualDub. The clips and the music were then assembled with Windows Movie Maker whilst simultaneously watching the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Mighty Jack.

A Sea of Air

The weather in the UK circa February is not usually very photogenic. It is neither bright and sunny enough for bikinis, nor snowy enough for fur boots. Instead, it is grey and dull. Fortunately this Sunday there was a burst of sunshine, and I took the opportunity to have a go with my 5D MkII again.

This was shot predominantly with an Olympus 21mm f/3.5, the slower and cheaper of Olympus' two 21mm lenses. The f/3.5 is a tiny ultra wide angle lens that I will write about at some point. It's sharp in the centre, decent in the corners but only at f/8 and f/11, has a problem with deep purple fringing around the edges, but in its favour it appears to have very little distortion. Also, it's tiny. It has a 49mm filter thread, which is problematic because all the filters I have vignette. This is minimised when shooting video, because the 5D crops off the edges, but it's still obvious, especially in the final shot. Did I mention that it's tiny?

The third shot was taken with a Zenitar 16mm fisheye lens which I use all the time. As before, the video was converted into an editable .AVI by MPEG Streamclip, and then the individual sequences were processed with VirtualDub to make them black and white. And run at twice the speed. The clips were sequenced with Windows Movie Maker, and the soundtrack was something I composed ages ago, with the original version of GForce's M-Tron Mellotron recreation.

The Mellotron was a tape playback keyboard that was heard on hundreds of psychedelic records from the 1960s, plus lots of electronic stuff from the 1970s - Planet Mellotron is the definitive online guide - and M-Tron is essentially a re-recording of the Mellotron's original tapes, wrapped into a VST instrument. Best of all, it's reasonably priced. Unlike most audio software, which costs hundreds upon hundreds of pounds.

Contax Zeiss Planar 1.7/50 T*

It's just struck me. You can't fight fire with fire. It's just silly. More fire makes the fire bigger. It is fire. It's just silly. I wish someone had pointed this out earlier.

Still, down to business. A while back I had a look at the Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/1.7 T*, but I was never happy with the resulting post so I deleted it. It is a laborious and tedious process to accurately focus on a distant target through the optical viewfinder of a digital SLR. Laborious and tedious are two words which are not in my vocabulary. I don't even know how to spell them.

T* is Carl Zeiss' code for the special multi-coating they use, which is purple, as you can see:

Now that I have a camera with Live View, I can really nail this sucker. I used a cheap generic eBay Contax/Yashica - EOS adapter and I had to hacksaw off the back of the lens in order for it to work properly on my 5D; the rear portion of the lens assembly (but not the optical elements themselves) fouled my 5D's mirror.

It was a manual focus lens when it was new, and remains manual focus today. As always with adapted lenses I had to operate the aperture manually as well. In common with my Contax 35-70mm the 50mm has an unmarked click stop slightly stopped down from wide open, which I surmise is Zeiss' way of telling me that f/1.7 is for emergencies and that I should really think of it as an f/2 lens.


Carl Zeiss Planar 1.7/50 T*

The lens actually has "1,7/50" written on it, because it was designed in Germany, which is in Europe, where they use commas instead of periods to indicate fractions. In fact the lens was designed in West Germany, back in the 1970s, or at least this particular version of the Planar design was designed in etc. The basic arrangement of the lens elements dates back to 1896, when Germany was just called Germany, or that blasted country if you were British. Carl Zeiss founded the company in 1846, and it survived after his death in 1888 to be a market leader in the optical field. But it was not alone. During the 1920s rival optical werk Leica released a cute little rangefinder camera which went on to be a big popular success, and Zeiss decided to compete with their own rangefinder, which they called the Contax. The name meant nothing; it was made up.

"Boy with frog", Charles Ray, Venice
Contax 50mm f/1.7, Canon 5D MkII

Leica and Zeiss tussled throughout the 1930s; the Second World War curtailed their access to foreign markets, and although Leica survived the war relatively unscathed, Zeiss was smashed to bits. The company was based in Dresden, which was bombed to buggery by the RAF a few short weeks before the war ended. The burned rubble was then overrun by the Soviets, who were not in a pleasant mood. They took what remained of Zeiss and moved the tooling back to the Soviet heartland, where it was used to make a range of Kiev cameras. The Dresden factory was also put back to work producing lenses and cameras, and many of the personnel were moved to West Germany, where they founded the Carl Zeiss AG that survives to this day. It's a long and complicated story that has overwhelmed my brain capacity, and is summarised extremely well at the Zeiss Historical Society here.

By the 1970s things had settled down a bit. The West German Zeiss had come to the conclusion that it had no future as a camera manufacturer, and so the company came to an arrangement with Kyocera of Japan whereby Kyocera would use the Contax brand name for their posh, Japanese-made Contax RTS range of SLRs. I imagine there was a fair amount of soul-searching at the time amongst Zeiss executives. This article by John "Your Arsenal" Lind does a much better job of summarising this than I. The first lot of lenses for the Contax RTS system were made in Germany, and then production moved to Japan, where it remains to this day. The Contax RTS system was killed off in the early 2000s, in favour of the short-lived, abortive Contax N autofocus system, which was killed off in 2005 along with the Contax name, which still belongs to Kyocera although the company doesn't use it for anything. Which is a shame, because it sounds wonderful. There are nonetheless continual rumours that Zeiss is on the verge of buying the name back, and it will be interesting to see what they do with it.

Zeiss itself continues to make a range of lenses for most popular modern camera mounts; they are amongst the best lenses available for any system and are priced to match. The 50mm f/1.7 was, in its day, the entry-level kit lens that came free with a Contax RTS body, and they are available for less than £100 on the used market. Mine is serial number 6503975. How old is it? I have no idea. I'm tempted to say 1975, but I have no idea. Some time between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s.

Yet more of Venice
5D MkII / Contax 50mm f/1.7 ~ f/8

The f/1.7 has been more thoroughly reviewed by SLR Lens & Camera review. Zeiss still has the MTF data sheet for the 50mm f/1.7 online, here. Looking at the MTF data, it seems that the lens is sharp in the very centre of the frame, not quite so sharp in a band around the centre, sharper again in a band towards the edge of the frame, and then not quite so sharp at the extreme edge. And indeed this is the case in real life, as we shall see.

For the original version of this article I used the inner sleeve of Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express. Now another electronic album from Europe, similar period, but stereotypically French rather than stereotypically German. Here's what the vignetting looks like on a full-frame 5D Mk II, at f/1.7 and then f/2.8:

It's actually a double album that combines Oxygene and Equinoxe into a single gatefold. As a child I loved both albums, Equinoxe in particular, but I knew that I had to keep quiet about it, because Jean Michel Jarre was one of the least fashionable musicians of them all. Nowadays he is still not very fashionable but I feel the time has come to openly admit in public that I own these two albums. For the next test I will shoot my original first pressings of Mr Fingers' Washing Machine and Adonis No Way Back and I will regale you with tales of how me and my friends scoffed at Phuture's Acid Trax because it was just a watered-down, commercialised bastardisation of the acid house sound we had grown up with.

I was - disillusioned is not the right word, surprised is too neutral - to discover that 80% of what I loved about Jean Michel Jarre's early sound actually came out of an electric organ stroke strings synthesiser, the Eminent 310U, run through a phaser pedal, as in this video on YouTube of a man's naked arms playing Oxygene Part One. All those publicity shots of Jean Michel Jarre plugging cables into his ARP 2600 were nonsense.

But back on topic. For this test I took the lens to the local car park, and shot it alongside my Canon 50mm f/1.8. I used this lens because everybody has one and everybody knows what it's like. The Zeiss was mounted on a Canon 5D MkII with a generic eBay adapter. All the following were treated to the same unsharp mask settings of 150, 0.5, 0, which is very mild.

Here is the scene, and yes I realise that it's tilted. I should really have put the tops of the buildings across the middle of the frame, but in my defense I was very, very drunk:

The centre of the frame at f/1.8 - f/1.7, Canon on the left and Zeiss on the right:

The Canon lens looks a tiny bit sharper, and the Zeiss lenses has noticeable purpleness. Now the satellite dish half-way across the frame at f/1.8 - f/1.7, Canon at the top and Zeiss at the bottom:

As before the Zeiss lens has a purple glow, and the Canon lens looks a bit sharper. Canon's MTF chart for the 50mm f/1.8 suggests that the lens degrades gracefully from the centre outwards, speeding up towards the edges, rather than degrading and then getting better and then degrading again as per the Zeiss MTF chart.

Now the bottom-right corner at f/1.8 - f/1.7, Canon at the top and Zeiss at the bottom:

In contrast the Zeiss lens is noticeably better in the extreme corner. At this aperture neither lens shines with glory but the Canon lens shines less. Again, this fits the MTF chart, and it's interesting to compare it with 16-9's test of the Zeiss-designed Contax 17-35mm (scroll to the bottom), an autofocus lens from many years later, which has a similar MTF curve. Perhaps this is a Zeiss thing.

Let's move on to my second-favourite aperture, f/2.8. The aperture of professional zoom lenses. An aperture which costs hundreds upon hundreds of pounds if you want to do it right with a general-purpose zoom (tip: save some money and buy a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8. No-one will know the difference from looking at the images). For a fast prime f/2.8 is nothing. Here's the centre, again Canon on the left and Zeiss on the right:

As far as I'm concerned both lenses are as sharp as can be at f/2.8 in the centre, and if you just look at the brickwork you can't tell where one lens ends and the other begins. To my eye Zeiss lenses have a characteristic look - contrasty and blues tend to be a bit purple, but in a good way. This image at Flickr is a good example.

I won't include any more centre crops because the two lenses don't seem to get any better at narrower apertures; I surmise they are either outresolving the 5D MkII's sensor, or the subject doesn't have any more detail to record. Nonetheless here's the Zeiss at f/5.6, at which aperture it is apparently one of the sharpest 35mm-format SLR lenses ever made:

At f/2.8 the Canon lens still appears a little bit sharper in the mid-frame (Canon at the top - Ethel Merman at the bottom):

But again in the corner the Zeiss lens is better:

Let's look at f/5.6, Canon at the top and Zeiss at the bottom:

The Canon lens is again slightly sharper to my eyes. The corner:

Again, the Contax lens is sharper in the corner. At f/5.6 it is essentially sharp across the entire frame, whereas the Canon lens is soft in the last few hundred pixels.

And now f/8. The satellite dish doesn't get any sharper so I'll only show you the corner, which looks like this, Canon at the top etc:

At this point the Canon lens almost catches up although again it's not quite as sharp. Here's the top-right corner also at f/8, Canon at the top as before:

With this mass of straight lines the Contax lens stands out as noticeably sharper. Judging by the depth of field markings on the lens, at f/8 everything from about four metres to infinity is in focus. The Canon lens doesn't have depth of field markings.

What can I conclude? Neither lens has any obvious optical defects; CA is minimal and there's a little bit of barrel distortion but it's nothing of great significance. Both lenses are as sharp as can be in the middle from f/2.8 onwards; the Contax lens is generally sharper in the extreme corners, and at f/8 is sharp as can be across the entire frame. The Canon lens is for most practical purposes no worse, although pixel-peeping reveals that it's never as sharp in the corners. Oddly the Zeiss lens has a zone of relative softness around the middle of the frame, like a ring doughnut, but soft rather than sugary.

On a practical level the Canon lens wins, because it has autofocus and auto-aperture. During these tests I shot two sequences with the Canon lens; one with Live View autofocus and another with the manual focus ring. In practice the Live View autofocus was absolutely perfect, the manual focus wasn't quite as good, because the 50mm f/1.8's manual focus ring is terrible and jerky. The Zeiss lens is mostly metal and the focus ring is superb. If you're going to use it on a tripod and you need absolute sharpness at 50mm, or you're prepared to use magnified live view to focus, the Zeiss lens is the better of the two, and not much more expensive either.

But what about bokeh and all the other lovely-dovey things that people look for in a lens? I have no idea, I'm British. I'm not interested in that kind of soft arty sentimental nonsense. The bottom line is that the Zeiss lens is sharp in the extreme corner of a full-frame image at f/8, the Canon lens is almost as sharp but not quite, so the Zeiss lens wins.

Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Series E vs Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1

This is the umpteenth in a series of short articles about lenses from the past. Initially I concentrated on 50mm lenses, because 50mm lenses are sweet. Today I am going to look at a pair of telephoto zoom lenses from long before you and I were even born; the early 1980s. "I have to push, I have to struggle." Back then the Vietnam War was the coolest war of all, and the Second World War was old-hat. It's hard to over-emphasise how cool the Vietnam War was, in the 1980s. Even in Britain it was cool. The music; the hairstyles; the helicopters; the guns. Jimi Hendrix was much cooler than Glen Miller. Platoon and Rambo: First Blood Part II were far cooler than A Bridge Too Far and Ice Cold in Alex. But I digress.

The two lenses have a small following and are widely available on eBay for pennies.

The first is a Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Series E. It's the lens on the left. It dates from the first few years of the 1980s and is a constant-aperture, manual focus zoom lens for Nikon SLRs, although in this article I have mounted it on a Canon 5D MkII with an adapter. There's something obscenely bestial about the word "mounted". It's impossible to think of the word "mounted" without thinking of the least civilised of the two sexual positions. The sexual position that foreign people and cavemen use.

The best article on the internet about the Nikon 75-150mm Series E is this article by Thom Hogan. From that article I learn that the lens was made for Nikon by a company called Kiron, which sounds like an anagram of Nikon although it is not. The Series E range was Nikon's budget range, although the lenses were apparently generally good, and the 75-150mm f/3.5 has a minor cult following consisting of Thom Hogan's article and a few dozen posts on Photo.net. Series E lenses were differentiated from standard Nikon lenses by their relatively lightweight, mostly-plastic construction; in practice, from the mid-1980s onwards all lenses were made of plastic, and so presumably Nikon saw no reason to continue the Series E range, and so it died off. The 75-150mm is however made of metal. It feels cool to the touch.

The second lens is a Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series One. It has a similar specification to the Nikon 75-150mm but it is a totally different design. Vivitar's lens is larger and heavier and older, dating from the mid-1970s, although it was sold for years afterwards. Mine was manufactured in 1982 and is for the Olympus OM mount; it was also sold for all the other popular mounts of the day. There's that word again, "mounts".

The best article about the Vivitar 70-210mm is this one, by Mark Roberts. I learn that there were several different versions of the lens. Mine is the second version, and was made by Tokina of Japan, but more of that later. The Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 and the entire Series One line was an attempt by Vivitar to go up-market and compete with own-brand lenses from Nikon and Canon and so forth. Ultimately the attempt was not a success, although it earned a lot of attention, and I surmise that the Nikon Series E range was created in part to compete with the threat from Vivitar and other third-party manufacturers. Google Books throws up this review of the Mark I version of the lens, from the June 1973 edition of Popular Mechanics, which goes ga-ga at the macro capability.

Vivitar still exists and sells Series One lenses nowadays, including a version of the Cosina 19-35mm that I have already written about, but the modern Series One range is rubbish. The "ur" Series One range has a mild cult that consists of a few dozen posts on Photo.net and forums here and there. The range had a number of interesting designs, including a 24-48mm f/3.8 zoom at a time when most zoom lenses only went as wide as 35mm, plus an apparently excellent 90-180mm f/4.5 Macro zoom, and an also apparently excellent 90mm f/2.5 Macro. And a 35-85mm f/2.8, all of which are no doubt widely available on eBay.

Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Series E
One thing worth pointing out is that the focal length changes as you focus the lens. This is apparently a characteristic of zooms in general - I can't say with authority, I'm not a scientist - but it's particularly noticeable when focusing the 75-150mm. Here's an example shot at 75mm, f/3.5, with the closest focus at the top and infinity at the bottom. Notice in particular the guitar neck in the bottom-right corner, and also the relatively mild vignetting:

As you can see there's a substantial difference. Perhaps because of this the lens was marketed as a 70-150mm by Kiron and Vivitar, who also sold versions of the design. To complicate things Vivitar also sold a 70-150mm f/3.8 of a different mechanical design, which is illustrated on the left here. Is it optically the same? Dunno. There was also an Olympus 75-150mm f/4, but this was an entirely different lens altogether.

The lens is well-made, out of metal, with a single zoom / focus ring, but apparently all copies of the lens had a flaw whereby the zoom / focus ring quickly became very loose, and my copy is no exception. It zooms and focuses without resistance, which means that in practice (a) I have to be very ginger when focusing and (b) I tend to use it at 70mm and 150mm only. With a constant aperture of f/3.5 it's not bad for portraits at the longer focal lengths, and the background blur is nice. There's a more thorough evaluation of the lens' background blur here, by Rick "Dangerous" Denny, and here's a short clip of the genetically gifted Mellie D shot at the wider end of the zoom, f/3.5:



Here are a couple of examples taken from the centre of the frame, shot with a Canon 5D MkII using live view to focus, from a distance of about five feet. The first is shot at 70mm, f/3.5 at the top and f/8 at the bottom. Once again it's Iker Spozio's cover image for Electrosonic, which is a handy subject because it has a lot of fine detail and it is pleasing to the eye. There's no sharpening, either at capture or RAW development or in post-processing. They are 100% crops of a 21mp original:

And here is the same subject at the 150mm setting, f/3.5 on top, f/8 at the bottom, as before:

Wide open at f/3.5 the lens suffers from chromatic aberration but is otherwise pleasing to the eye; at f/8 there is nothing wrong with the image quality. Scroll down for some real-world examples of the corner quality.

I'm going to have a sandwich and then write about the Vivitar 70-210mm, which has a longer range and is pretty much as good as the Nikon lens but, as I have said before, it's larger and heavier.

Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5

"I hunger!" So said Sinistar in the classic arcade game of the same name. I never enjoyed it because it was too hard. Same with Defender. My Vivitar 70-210mm is for the Olympus OM mount, and I bought it for my OM-10. It's really too big and heavy to carry around so I have barely ever used it, which is why there are no lovely photographs of nice sunny Italy further down the page.

As before, f/3.5 at the top, f/8 beneath. Firstly at 70mm. The purple cast is an example of longitudinal chromatic aberration and goes away when the lens is stopped down:

And then at 150mm:

And finally at 210mm, which isn't pretty:

Tonight you will have a nightmare that Delia Derbyshire is coming closer to you.

My impression is that the Vivitar lens - this particular Vivitar lens using one particular Olympus OM - EOS adapter - is at least as sharp as Nikon's lens from 70mm to 150mm, and indeed it is very sharp at 150mm, but that it falls apart at 210mm. When stopped down to f/8 at 210mm its performance almost but not quite reaches the same level as its performance wide-open at 150mm. Perhaps it gets better at f/11. I do not want to shoot a non-stabilised manual focus lens at f/11.

The Vivitar 70-210mm is a big, heavy, well-built lens that's a bother to carry around in a bag. In contrast, the Nikon 75-150mm is very small and light, and no problem to pack when traveling. And so on a practical level I take that lens with me instead. In theory something like a Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS is much more sensible, and indeed if you have the money Canon will sell you any number of expensive, white-coated telephoto zooms.

But for something small and robust, and for less than £50 £100 - articles like this tend to bump up used prices! - Nikon's 75-150mm is very handy. Here's a boring but detail-packed shot of Bergamo taken with this lens, from the old town, at probably f/5.6, with a full-frame Canon 5D:

And here's a 100% crop from about 75% along from the left, mid-way up, with light unsharp mask:

You can make out the offices of what I'm 99% sure is Reggiani Tessile SpA, judging by this news article at Bergamonews.it. While I'm in an enthusiastic mood, here's a shot of what I surmise to be Blevio, taken from the top of the lighthouse at Brunate, which overlooks Como and its lake:

That was at 75mm, probably f/5.6 or f/8. Here are a couple of 100% crops, with mild unsharp mask, first from the top-right and then from the middle. The top-right crop is blue because of atmospheric haze:

At 75mm it can fill up a full-frame Canon 5D. Here's the same arrangement at 150mm, probably f/5.6:

See the small boat on the lake? And the little church steeple just below it? Make a mental note of those.

As you can see the zoom range isn't eye-popping. The image quality at 150mm in the corners isn't all that good, but it's still dead sharp in the middle. From a range of 2km along and about 1km up I can see plastic chairs, a giant toothpick, and what appears to be a man floating in a swimming pool. Perhaps it's a dead body. (EDIT: Actually, I think it's a lilo). I can see the wake of boats on the lake. On an APS-C camera the lens would be a kind of 100-200mm f/3.8 that is sharp to the edges at f/5.6.

You see the building with the green roof, on the left, in the last crop? After a shufty on Google I managed to find a view of this building from the lake itself. It's in picture number five, top-middle. You can make out the church steeple and the waterfront buildings in the larger image that I asked you to make a mental note of just now. Judging by that page Italy was not immune to the construction boom of recent years, and it has to be said that although the lake and the houses are very picturesque, they do look jammed-together.

The lens has a naturally contrasty look, and I have no problems with the overall colour rendition, viz this photograph of a strange European roller skate car:

What was it doing there? Was it helicoptered up the mountain? Did it drive there under its own power?

To complete things I subsequently took the Vivitar 70-210 to the photogenic Bradford-on-Avon. Here's a shot of the Holy Trinity church, which has what appears to be a surprised chicken on top of its mast. I believe this was at 70mm or thereabouts, probably f/8:

And here's a 100% crop from the middle-upper-right. The image was shot at ISO 400 so that I could have a good high shutter speed:

It looks relatively soft, but bear in mind that these images were taken with a Canon 5D MkII, which has twice the resolution of the 5D I used for the shots of Bergamo and is thus harder on the lens. Furthermore the files seem a bit softer, at a pixel level, than those from the original 5D. Did I take any shots at 210mm? Did I heck.

One of the Vivitar 70-210mm's big selling points at the time was that it had a quasi-macro mode. Older telephoto zoom lenses tended to have a relatively long close focus distance, and were useless for photographing plants, for example, whereas the 70-210mm has varying degrees of magnification depending on the model. My version, made by Tokina, goes to 1:4, but others went to 1:2.2 or 1:2.5. This is the absolute closest focus at 210mm, f/3.5:

Nice neutral background blur there. Manually focusing on a plant at close range on a windy day is almost impossible, and you just have to take a lot of pictures and hope for the best. The Mark One version requires a bit of jiggery-pokery in order to engage the macro range, whereas the Mark Two simply focuses very closely. In contrast, the Nikon 75-150mm can't go as close, and thus it can't blur out the background as effectively:


One more thing. The two lenses are designed in such a way that the rear element doesn't move when the lens is zoomed in and out. Modern zoom lenses tend to move the rear element into the body of the lens as they are zoomed, which leaves a big opening for dust and moisture. Neither of the lenses in this article - bought from different people at different times, each dating from before you or I were born - have any visible dust inside them, which is more than can be said for the modern Canon 24-85mm I used to own, which was dustier than Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

It boggles my mind slightly to think that the 75-150mm was Nikon's attempt at a low-price budget zoom lens. Apart from the sloppy zoom / focus ring, it's a solidly-build chunk of metal and glass of a breed that isn't made today.

Two Twenty Fours: Olympus vs Canon vs the Bubble of Babble

Olympus 24mm f/2.8 @ f/5.6, probably
5d MkII

It's not often that blog posts make reference to the works of Transvision Vamp. I remember, back then, Wendy James and her backing band were all over the place, and then they weren't. But what goes around comes around, and in my opinion the world would not mind a comeback. Also, America would get a chance to discover them for the first time. It could happen.

Canon 24mm f/2.8
Kodak DCS 560

I move away from the mic to breathe in. This is the latest in a series of little lens evaluations. Until now I have concentrated on the 50mm focal length, because 50mm is the focal length of ladies and gentlemen of good breeding and excellent taste. Longer focal lengths, beyond 135mm or so, are the domain of sports photographers and paparazzi, who are vulgar people. Oglers. They see women as prey, and men as threats to be destroyed.

Olympus 24mm f/2.8, 5D MkII

Conversely, focal lengths wider than 24mm are the focal lengths of architectural and landscape photographers. Lonely people who ply a desolate trade. They avoid the company of women and indeed human beings in general, in favour of their tripods and spirit levels and rucksacks and waterproof greatcoats. The only witnesses to their solitary triumphs are birds and wildlife, who are indifferent to human suffering.

Olympus 24mm f/2.8

A long time ago 24mm was a very wide focal length. The exclusive domain of prime lenses. But over the last few decades news photographers have pushed wider and wider, such as for example this photograph of a man about to shoot a deer. That's not a particularly wide image, but it's certainly striking. I should really include more examples, but humour me. Another one that springs to mind is the aftermath of John Hinckley's failed attempt to kill Ronald Reagan, which was documented in a series of images taken with a wide-angle lens, culminating in a shot of a badass-looking CIA agent with a wicked cool Uzi. It looks as if the photographer, back in 1981, used a single prime lens - I'm guessing a Nikon 20mm - and he got right up close, and probably stopped right down so that he didn't have to focus. When I think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think of ultra-wide photographs of soldiers, just a few feet from the camera, huddling against a wall, with dust in the background, probably taken with a Canon 16-35mm at 16mm during a mortar barrage. 24mm isn't wide any more, it's normal, although this does not preclude it from photojournalistic work. Canon's 24mm f/1.4 is apparently a marvel in this respect n.b. I am not a photojournalist.

Canon 24mm f/2.8, Montserrat

Today I'm going to look at two lenses. One is Canon's very own 24mm f/2.8, a prime lens that dates from the early days of the EOS system. It's one of the few things on this blog that's still on sale today. The only sustained piece of writing about it on the internet is a positive review at Prime Junta. The lens has been on sale since 1988 without being updated, and has a tiny niche. Canon sells a lot of zoom lenses that cover the 24mm focal range, but the 24mm f/2.8 has a unique combination of small size, good optical quality, a wide aperture, and it's relatively cheap, although not cheap enough in my opinion. The 24-70mm might be as fast and optically even better, but it is much more expensive and bulkier. Conversely, the 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 is generally cheaper on the used market and is not much larger, but it has barrel distortion at 24mm and isn't as good in the corners. The one copy I used to own had a tonne of dust inside the front element.

Of the other choices, the 24mm f/2.8 is faster than the 17-40mm f/4; much, much cheaper than the 16-35mm f/2.8; sharper than the 20-35mm f/3.5-4.5; much cheaper and smaller than the 24-105mm f/4 IS, with less barrel distortion, and so on and so forth. The old Tamron 24-135mm f/3.5-5.6 I used to own is cheaper on the used market, but much larger and with greater barrel distortion, and it tended to vignette in the extreme corners.

Of course, it's a prime lens. 24mm and nothing else. Its optical quality at 20mm or 50mm is nil. There's a lot of talk on the internet about prime lenses. People say that the fact of having just one focal length forces the photographer to pay more attention to composition, but I am not convinced by this. It sounds like snobbery. Zoom lenses are wonderful. But the good ones are expensive and the cheap ones are either dire or slow. I bought the 24mm f/2.8 because I want 24mm, and I don't want to compromise on optical quality, but I can't justify the expense of a 24-70mm f/2.8, which I would never use anyway because it would be too big and heavy and precious to carry around. It is a lovely lens though.

On a crop-sensor camera the 24mm f/2.8 becomes a slightly wide 31-38mm, depending on the crop factor. I have used mine on a Kodak DCS 560, which has an APS-H 1.3x crop, and a Canon 5D, which has a full-sized man-sized sensor. The two most thorough reviews are at SLRGear -full-frame and crop - where they seem to have tested a slightly duff copy, and Photozone.de - crop only - where the lens gets a generally favourable although not stellar review. On an APS-C crop-sensor camera the lens doesn't have much of a raison d'etre. The standard 18-55mm IS kit lens is sharper at the 24mm setting and has image stabilisation as well. It's slower, but then again f/2.8 isn't all that fast anyway.

There is one more thing. If you have a crop-sensor camera, it's surprisingly hard to get a 24mm equivalent focal length in a general-purpose, non-ultrawide zoom lens. Canon's new 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS goes to a 24mm equivalent at the wide end and is apparently a very nice lens. Apart from that, the dust blows forwards and the dust blows back. Even in the land of Nikon there is the Nikkor 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 and that is that. If you want 24mm at f/2.8 and you have a crop-sensor camera you are out of luck, unless you buy e.g. a 16-35mm f/2.8 or 14-24mm f/2.8.

Olympus 24mm f/2.8

The second lens is a few years older. It is an Olympus 24mm f/2.8 for the long-defunct Olympus OM system. My copy was made in January 1985. Here's what it looks like, mounted on a totally bitchin' Olympus OM-10 which I have pimped out with the electric winder:

And here's a short video sequence I shot with it one year later, using a 5D MkII, extracted from a longer clip:



Like almost everything about the Olympus OM system the lens is tiny, well-made, but anonymous. It does not have a legend and would have vanished into obscurity were it not for this article at 16-9.net, where it is praised to the heavens. In this earlier article it is stacked against Canon's 24mm f/2.8 and a pair of lenses from Sigma and Yashica. The Yashica lens does not come across well; Sigma and Canon are neck-and-neck; the Olympus lens is convincingly better. My own informal findings are not quite so clear-cut, although there are so many variables at play that meaningful comparison is impossible. I used a different OM-EOS adapter on a different day with different copies of each lens and I am different. The only constant is love.

Olympus had a thing whereby they sold an expensive fast version and a reasonably priced slow version of their lenses, and sometimes an even slower f/3.5 version as well. The 24mm f/2.8 was the slower of the two OM 24mm lenses. The fast one was a 24mm f/2. This was apparently devised as far back as 1974 and still has an interesting specification today. Is it any good? I have no idea. I don't have one. No-one on the internet has one, or at least no-one who has one has posted 100% crops from the corner of a full-frame image at f/8.

Canon EF 24mm f/2.8, Montserrat

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Let us begin. On with the test. The next image you will see is the full frame at f/2.8 so that you can laugh at the vignetting on a full-frame camera. The images were taken a few minutes apart, and the framing is slightly different because the Earth moved slightly in its orbit. I used a Canon 5D MkII and I focused with Live View. The camera also has a legacy optical viewfinder, a throwback to a bygone age which I generally avoid.

I used daytime colour balance for both images. My overall impression is that Canon's lens is a little bit more contrasty. Both lenses vignette heavily at f/2.8. Canon's lens ceases to vignette significantly from f/5.6 onwards, whereas the Olympus lens vignettes until f/8. Modern Canon digital SLRs can automatically compensate for the EF 24mm's vignetting by using Peripheral Illumination Correction^[1], which brightens the edges of the frame, although I had that turned off. Most RAW converters will perform the same action on any image, assuming that you want to get rid of vignetting in the first place. Vignetting correction can result in noisy, posterised corners depending on the strength of the effect. Some people like vignetting. I like vignetting. It makes a plain picture look like a transmission from the past.

The two lenses performed equally well in the centre. I shot at f/2.8, f/5.6, and f/8, using live view to get the focus correct, with no sharpening at any point. The two lenses were good at f/2.8, slightly better at f/5.6, no better at f/8. Futura Medium.

I think it's fair to say that whatever difference you can detect between the two lenses is overwhelmed by individual sample variation, and of course the Olympus lens is twenty-five years old and may have been bashed to bits during its life, and was mounted on the camera with an adapter (the Canon lens was manufactured in November 2009). These are minuscule 100% crops of a 21mp original that would be tiny if the whole image was printed out, and bear in mind that I haven't applied any sharpening, either during RAW development or later on. That said, the Olympus lens does appear a tiny bit crisper.

Here is the extreme upper-left corner, Olympus first, Canon second, f/2.8, f/5.6, and then f/8:

My overall impression is that both lenses are mushy in the extreme corners. Whereas the Canon lens becomes progressively mushier, the Olympus lens abruptly transitions from sharp to mush. Both lenses were designed in the days of 35mm film, and my personal theory of the elk is that the lenses were designed in the expectation that no-one would ever see the extreme corners. The edges of 35mm slides are obscured by the slide holders, and the edges of negative images are typically cropped off during the printing process. If you demand ultimate sharpness across the frame I surmise that neither lens is up to snuff unless you crop off the edges, in which case the Olympus lens requires less cropping. For the purposes of this test I didn't stop down to f/11 and beyond (the Olympus lens goes to f/16, the Canon lens to f/22); 16-9's test suggests that the Olympus lens, at least, actually gets worse due to diffraction.

Both lenses suffer from a certain amount of chromatic aberration, shown here at f/8, Canon at the top and Olympus at the bottom:

Canon's lens is the more chromatically aberratious of the two. As with vignetting, this can be corrected with software - Canon's Digital Photo Professional can do it automatically for the Canon lens - at the expense of ultimate sharpness. Again, the Olympus lens appears a tiny bit crisper.

On a practical level the Canon lens wins easily, especially if you expect to use the lens hand-held in changing conditions. It has autofocus and an electronically controlled aperture. The Olympus lens is manual everything. Focusing a 24mm lens through the viewfinder of a modern digital SLR, with no manual focus aids, is hard. Doing so at f/8 is very hard indeed. Even if you use zone focus you will always doubt whether the image is precisely in focus or not. If you focus first and then stop down you will always doubt whether you knocked the focus ring when you stopped down, or not. Doubt will prey on your mind and there will be no joy in your life.

Olympus 24mm f/2.8

Having said that, the advent of Live View in the last few years has revolutionised this kind of thing if you use the camera on a tripod. For tripod shooting you would probably use manual focus with your autofocus lens anyway. Most implementations of Live View even allow for focusing whilst the lens is stopped down. In this context the Olympus lens is the better of the two, especially when you factor in the price. And it's smaller. Snobs used to mock Live View, but it has given a whole new lease of life to older manual focus lenses.

In summary then, if you're an action kind of person the Canon 24mm f/2.8 makes a lot more sense. On an optical level it's not quite as good as the Olympus lens, but it's a lot more practical. If you're a scientist / egghead type then the Olympus lens is the winner.

My copy of the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 skips in the middle of the last track on disc II, and I can't tell if this is because of damage to the CD or because the Aphex Twin willed it so. The disc most definitely skips. I can hear it skipping in the compact disc player. The skipping noise is not a sound effect encoded into the music. The disc does not appear damaged on the outside, but then again the same is true of many people.

EDIT: I haven't mentioned the Canon lens' build quality yet. It's solid; late pre-USM-period EOS, black plastic with a thin focus ring, whirring arc-form drive, 58mm filter thread, a bayonet hood that is sold separately, white face black shirt white socks black shoes. Unlike most of Canon's other non-L primes nothing on the outside rotates or extends when it focuses. It's larger than I expected, resembling a truncated Coke can. On a psychological level it feels tougher than the 28mm f/2.8, especially given that the front element is fixed in place rather than extending in and out.

Blokey at The-Digital-Picture stacked it up against Canon's two 24mm f/1.4 L lenses in this review here. To my eye the 24mm f/1.4s are sharper and contrastier in the middle at all apertures, especially at f/2.8. The 24mm f/2.8 actually looks to be better in the corners at f/8 than the original 24mm f/1.4 but not as good as the Mk II version of same. The 24mm f/1.4 MkI always seemed to get middling reviews - it was fast, great in the middle, not so great at the edges, overpriced for what it was, not nearly as good as the 35mm f/1.4 - and the MkII is apparently much better, but as the saying goes if I had £1,500 lying around I wouldn't spend it on a lens, I'd spend it on a holiday.