Filling more gaps

I’ve gone ahead and added an 85mm lens to my line-up, as discussed in my previous blog, and I’ve done buying lenses now… I think! I have a lens line-up which in theory should suffice and meet my focal length needs. I’ve charted the lens line-up that I now have, below.

After much deliberation about which version of the lens to choose, I picked up the cheapest “Good” second-hand 85mm f/1.8G available on MPB. While I was sorely tempted to go for the f/1.4G, I couldn’t justify the additional expense. I’m not a portrait photographer and while the 1.4G is widely recognised as a spectacular lens, I genuinely don’t think that, in my hands, the difference would be at all noticeable.

The f/1.8G lens has some characteristics that I wasn’t anticipating. I knew it was sharp but I was surprised to find that it’s sharp to the corners even at f/1.8! Massive bonus! 🙂 However, wide open and in bright conditions, the lens has an enormous amount of light fall-off to the edges. It’s much less noticeable when not shooting backlit subjects or when shooting in cloudy conditions but I found that quite surprising. However, as with the AF 24mm f/2.8, this is a characteristic that I find pleasing.

If I want to eliminate the fall-off, I can simply stop down the lens and by f/4 it’s completely disappeared. Use the slider in the comparison below to see the difference resulting from a change in the aperture :-

The effect of stopping down the lens on the background bokeh, however, is not so desirable to me. I like to maximise the blur (though not quite to the extent that I’m willing to break the bank on an f/1.4G!), and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve replaced my 24-120mm f/4 with a collection of faster primes.

All is not lost, though! With a single click in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), I can apply the default lens profile and it eliminates the characteristic vignetting instantly!

This option is perfect for me. I like the impact that vignetting can have on the overall image, and the fall-off is so gentle as to be almost imperceivable unless you’re looking for it. I frequently exploit light fall-off to draw focus, even sometimes adding a vignette to images in post. But on the occasions when the vignette doesn’t suit the subject or the overall image, it’s a one-click fix. I get to keep the f/1.8 bokeh and the edge-to-edge sharpness of the 85mm but eradicate the lens “defect”. I put “defect” in quotes because as far as I’m concerned it’s a characteristic rather than a “defect”, though I recognise that others’ mileage may vary on this.

I do have to mention a defect that I can’t ignore and I don’t consider to be an asset, however, and that is in chromatic aberrations. The lens does appear to suffer quite a bit from green and purple fringing in specular highlights. From the testing I’ve done so far, stopping down the lens doesn’t appear to improve things much either. It’s nothing that can’t be resolved in post but it’s an annoyance and something worthy of note.

I’ve only had the lens a few days so I’ve only had the chance to shoot it a couple of times now. Broadly speaking, I’m over the moon with the results so far. Truth be known, I wasn’t really sure if I needed a lens in the space between my 50mm f/1.4 and my 105mm f/2.8 but now that I have a f/1.8 lens in that space I’m already seeing that it’s a good fit for me. I might even consider photographing actual people with it! Don’t hold your breath for that, though! 😉

I’ll definitely be looking for opportunities to shoot this lens. I think, with autumn just beginning to take off, I’ll most likely have opportunities to exploit the lens’s colour rendition, its sharpness and its lovely shallow depth of field. I’m excited again, and it’s a good feeling! 😀