Originally posted by kain Thats an amazing shot normhead. Is there any loss of detail at f/22 by diffraction when that image is at 100%? Also curious, natural light or flash?
I shot this at various F stops, 2.8, 5.6, 11, 22 I believe. It's hard to remember exactly because M lenses don't record the F stop in the EXIF. While not quite as sharp as the f 5.6 image, the 22 was by far the superior image, because it got all the block of wood in focus, so just evaluating on what the image looked like, the F 22 appears to be much sharper than the 5.6 image. The small DoF in the 5.6 image is less than 5% of the total image and is just completely un-acceptable in this shot.
I am honestly baffled by the current antipathy towards ƒ16 and ƒ22. There is a crowd of propagandists for whom narrow DoF and razor sharpness is the be all and end all. That's just inappropriate for landscape photographers. Ansel Adams and many other of his generation were part of the ƒ64 club. They shot almost everything at ƒ64 on 8x10 film cameras. The competing narrow DoF faction hit it's peak in the early 30s and for the most part has been in decline ever since, except perhaps with portrait photographers, and their subset, wedding photographers.
I almost always use natural light. I'm trained in lighting in both commercial and portrait, but very rarely use artificial lighting. I'm not against it. Just natural light has the potential to be better IMHO.
This image was taken in the late afternoon sun, and even after white balance was applied it still retains much of it's late afternoon glow. I'd also ascribe some of it's appeal to the old glass used to take the photo. Glass makers used to pay more attention to the way lenses rendered an image, than to the absolute sharpness that seems to be the goal today. As a result, many lenses today produce razor sharp, detail rich, very technical images... but can't match the 77, the 31 or even the 21 ltd in terms of producing an attractive image. You go to these old lenses, and though the absolute sharpness may not be there, you get a more traditional kind of image. Oh and it looks much better large than it does reduced to 1024.