I promised a follow up for the initial Zeiss Pancolar story that I posted a couple of days ago.
This time I went to the countryside and followed a hiking path through forests and meadows. I had a chance to try Zeiss out on more distant subjects and landscape. My impression is that it has a very interesting rendering. It is sharp, but not that sharp as the modern 35mm Ltd or 12-24 f4. What looks interesting for instance is how grass comes out. It looks as if from a painting. It is easy to distingush individual leaves or flowers, but they lack the sharp edges that I often get with my 35mm lens. What I also found out was that there is something special on how the out of focus dark areas are rendered. Again, there is not a sharp border, but instead the transition form light to dark looks more gradual and soft now (i.e. the shadows in the distant forest). In the case of the photo that I post below, the sun was rather strong, allthough shining through clouds. Since the "dreamy" look of the lens I suppose it would be excellent for early morning shots, photos from fog, rain or sunset.
All in all, I'd say the Zeiss Pancolar f1.8 is an excellent portrait lens and a superb close up lens (take a look at the mouse photos in my previous post). I also quite like how the landscape shots came out, but they are probably not everybody's cup of tea and I guess pixel peepers wouldn't be 100% satisfied.
I will post some kind of review also in the lens review section soon.
ps.
A rather stupid thing happened to me, while I was taking this photo. I was concentrated on framing the shot, metering, etc. and did not really notice anything taking place around me. There happened to be an orchard with young apple trees, all in full blossom, just behind me. I heard some tractors working there, but did not relly bother to look around, until suddenly I was totally sprayed over with some kind of an insecticide. I was totally like
, especially since I found out that my lens had aquired another layer of coating. So I started to panically clean the lens and only afterwards felt that this spray had quite an impact on my lungs as well. Spent half an hour coughing there. Before taking the shot I remember myself wondering, why there are so many dead bugs on the small road...
Have a nice evening/morning/day,
Urmas
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