Originally posted by jsherman999 If it's a shared experience, it lends some credence to it being partially inherent in the lens. If it weren't, it would be a completely random experience. We tend to see a soft consensus on what lenses have this special group of attributes.
This is fair, but part of what I was getting at is that some of those things are *completely incidental* to the images and their quality. Like the weight of the lens, or how the focusing ring feels under your fingers. For instance, it can be demonstrated that in nearly every culture, people associate weight with a feeling of quality for many items. But the weight of a lens is incidental to the image quality it produces.
Quote: "every image look good" contains a bit of hyperbole. In the past I've said "
Anyway, my most dusted lens IMO is my 77ltd. I can just point it at anything and it looks interesting." I should have said "interesting to me," because a shot of a salt shaker for example is not going to be interesting to 99% of viewers.
Well I certainly won't tell you what's interesting to you!
That's kinda what I was getting at, though... "interesting to me" != "better image because of lens".
Quote: Sometimes the 'intangibles' are just objective attributes that are just hard to define (and quantify) on the spot. Here's how I described pixie dust before - if you read carefully, everything in there can be seen as relatively objective:
I have actually seen that done somewhere, with impressive results. I'm glad you said 'most' folks, though, because that's a very subjective attribute.
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Mmm... I'll be happy to work with your definition, as long as we keep 'em on rational grounds. But those things should also be *visible*.
Here's the thing. I frequently go to flickr and go to explore, pick a random date, and start looking through images. There are millions of truly breathtaking images of all sorts out there. If pixie dust happens to exist out there in any quantities that matter, it's in the eyes of photographers, because there's no correlation between breathtaking image and camera
or lens.
So even if I grant you that pixie dust as you described is *absolutely true*, I still don't see it affecting the final image in any way that can be seen, obscured by the vision of the photographer...
Really, that's my point. "Pixie dust" seems to be shorthand for "I like this lens" - a collection of objectively measurable things distributed in a subjectively pleasing fashion. But *that* isn't what makes the images magical. *You* do. Get a good lens, take some pictures, and don't sweat over whether or not your lens has any pixie dust in it...