[LensBeginner]

I've got my "sharp as a tack" lens...
Water by Paolo Del Lungo, su Flickr

800px crop
Water_crop by Paolo Del Lungo, su Flickr

It's the SMC-M 100 f/2.8. Here jpeg compression has dulled it just a little bit, and I've been moderate with the sharpening.

[tonksj]

From pin sharp to tack sharp to razor sharp, maybe now scalpel sharp, what next?

Woodworkers have a term for extreme sharpness - scary sharp

[Madaboutpix]

Super-high-res images and prints can have an appeal that is hard to resist. I, too, like my images to be sharp, even tack-sharp, where they need to be, and I sure have experienced that little adrenaline rush that you get from occasional pixel peeping. That said, nothing gets my adrenaline flowing as much as having achieved a real four-star keeper image that satisfies me on various levels, of which sharpness is only one, and not necessarily the most important.

Whenever I get tempted to start obsessing too much about sharpness, I remind myself of the old, deliberately provocative Cartier-Bresson quote* and of my own hunch that you hear more insane-sharpness rants from FF than from MF shooters, or I look at some sharp-as-tack images I shot years ago with a 15MP K-7. That usually serves to cure me.

* "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept."

[beachgardener]

scary sharp

sharper than sharp, sharpness beyond

[LensBeginner]

Woodworkers have a term for extreme sharpness - scary sharp

There was an old joke, very à propos talking about woodworking's professional hazards, where one would raise a hand with three fingers sticking out (let's say the thumb, the index and the ring finger) and say: "five coffes at the sawmill please!"

[Sandy Hancock]

And yet, to make a culinary comparison, I would rather slice with a sharp knife than a dull one.

[Fenwoodian]

However I'd rather hang the impressionist Van Gogh's starry night on my wall than a realistic watercolour of a rabbit on my wall. Sometimes the impression is more interesting than the actual thing.

.
Why can't one have it all? Why can't a photographer have BOTH a sharp/realistic subject AND an impressionistic/artistic background?


My ultimate goal in photography is to achieve a super sharp subject AND a creamy/abstract/impressionistic out-of-focus background bokeh. I'm so devoted to this combination of Ying and Yang that I've formed a Flickr Group devoted to it. Please feel free to check it out.


So as you can see from the many images posted to this Flickr Group, one can have both a sharp/realistic subject and an artistic background.

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Last edited by Fenwoodian; 06-23-2018 at 06:43 AM.

[Digitalis]

And yet, to make a culinary comparison, I would rather slice with a sharp knife than a dull one.

...or trim my beard with sharp scissors than ones that are so dull they just rip the hair out...

[Rondec]

To me, contrast and transitions from in focus to out of focus are more important than sharpness. Using pixel shift, I can get a lot of sharpness out of my lens, but I do feel as though the flower example at the beginning is a bit over sharpened for my taste.

(my own strawberry shot with the DFA 100 macro)



Fence Post in the Snow (FA 31)



Fenwoodian, I would just say that your strawberry photo is very nice, but probably suffers a bit from being shot at iso 1600 and doesn't have as good depth of field as it could have. As others have said, either focus stacking or stopping down more helps by increasing depth of field. But certainly sharpness isn't the be all or end all of making good images.

[Digitalis]

Why can't one have it all?

We can have it all - only if we are prepared to only work within the constraints of controllable parameters. FYI if you really want to embrace pedantry for sharpness: that SLR is going to limit you - that flapping mirror and shutter mechanism just introduces vibrations. You're better off using a mirrorless system with an electronic shutter* coupled with the motion freezing capability of flash. You are going to have to spend a lot of money on lenses, Cameras, Tripods**...and if you are producing prints their printers had better be calibrated, well maintained with absolutely no clogs in the print heads. And if you are just producing images for display than you have no control on what others see if they view your work on un-calibrated sub 8K resolution screens.


I have seen students spend truly incredible sums of money in pursuit for sharpness, and see their disappointment at the vanishingly small "improvements" their new Lens/Camera makes to their work..



* OR shoot a leaf shutter system with a high sync speed such as the Rollei HY6, Hasselblad H6D or Leica S2.
** which you should be using all the time.

[bertwert]

...or trim my beard with sharp scissors than ones that are so dull they just rip the hair out...

I would rather shave off my beard with a sharp razor than a dull one, that ironically ends up slicing my face open.

[Fenwoodian]

We can have it all - only if we are prepared to only work within the constraints of controllable parameters. FYI if you really want to embrace pedantry for sharpness: that SLR is going to limit you - that flapping mirror and shutter mechanism just introduces vibrations. You're better off using a mirrorless system with an electronic shutter*

A DSLR (like Pentax K-1) can be as precise as a mirrorless system if the DSLR user uses "live view and a viewfinder" (no flapping mirror). That's what I do 100% of the time.


Also, I'm not up on electronic shutters vs mechanical shutters.

You Tube

You Tube

. But I am happy with the sharpness I can achieve (on the types of subjects that I shoot) with mechanical shutters and larger-apertures/fast shutter speeds/tripod/remote-release. I've only used electronic shutters on Fuji digital cameras and never cared for them. In fact, I had an assignment to shoot the world championships of barefoot waterskiing. During the practice time, I thought I'd try an electronic shutter to achieve even faster shutter speeds - bad decision, as none of the photos taken with the electronic shutter were usable.

[aaacb]

The first thing that stands out to me is how flat lighting is in the picture that was the starting point of this thread (the flower). I'm sure it is entirely deliberate, and in a way it works together with all that fine detail.. "45.7 Mpx, which don’t seem like much" is a surprising statement, isn't that one of the highest resolution 35mm sensors?


The main lesson for me is that I could pay more attention to sharpening after downsizing. I never do it because I only downsize drastically to share on the web, and that's a lossy process in itself. I tried it just now on some picture of a flower that I have taken with the wr 100mm macro, f11,iso 100, and yes the final result looks better if I sharpen again after downsizing.

[Digitalis]

A DSLR (like Pentax K-1) can be as precise as a mirrorless system if the DSLR user uses "live view and a viewfinder" (no flapping mirror).

Isn't using a DSLR with MLU basically turning it into a mirrorless camera?

I'm not up on electronic shutters vs mechanical shutters

The difference is pretty clear - electronic shutters are massless and thus have zero inertia and no mechanical reliability issues. Although there are some image quality artifacts that can occur through the use of them, sensors with global shutters are still stuck in the pipeline.

[DeadJohn]

...or trim my beard with sharp scissors than ones that are so dull they just rip the hair out...

From your profile pic I didn't think beard trimming was a concern