Friday, 10 July 2020
After a day of rain yesterday, I managed to get to Huntingdon and have a walk along the River Ouse in order to try the new 50mm lens. The weather still wasn’t good but I managed to get a clear 15 minutes, or so between showers.
I was certainly impressed by the sharpness of the lens and the nice “bokeh” it produces when used wide open at f2.0. (Bokeh is defined as “the effect of a soft, out-of-focus background that you get when shooting a subject, using a fast lens, at the widest aperture, such as f/2.8 or wider.” Simply put, bokeh is the pleasing or aesthetic quality of out-of-focus blur in a photograph.)
The only lens I can compare this with, from personal experience, is the Leica 50mm f2 Summicron. The Zeiss appears to compare well for sharpness and is, to my eyes, no better or worse than the Summicron. The colours produced by the Zeiss appear to be more saturated than the Leica 50mm, but I found the Zeiss needed more contrast during processing. Both lenses are excellent (as indeed they should be) and I have no doubt that comparable images can be achieved during processing.
Difficult to appreciate with the small images below, but the one on the left was taken at f5.6 and on the right at f2.0, to show the out-of-focus background.