Originally posted by jsherman999 So, if a wizard appeared and touched all your lenses with a magic wand that changed their optical properties such that the light transmition stayed the same with regards to it's effect on shutter speed, but reduced their DOF control capability by 1.3 stops - you wouldn't care?
Your 77mm f/1.8 Limited is now a 77mm f/2.8 in DOF capability. No biggie?
Does he *tell* me that he made the change? Frankly, I doubt I'd notice for some time. Subject separation is as much about distance between the subject and the background as it is the DOF.
Quote: There are more than a few folks who were pretty angry that Pentax made the DA 35 f/2.4 instead of an f/2, because of that half-stop in DOF capability. With FF vs aps-c, we're talking 1.3 stops. Some people might really hate that wizard.
I bet most of them wouldn't notice, either. See, there's this thing about the way the human mind works. We're really good at discrimination, but really bad at identification. When you put two things side by side, we're really good at picking out tiny differences. But when you show 'em to us one at a time, we're not so good at identifying them. People are *always* convinced that they are far more discriminating than they really are.
Also, we like things that cost more better than things that cost the less. Particularly when *we* pay for 'em.
Take 24 images shot by excellent photographers, 12 APS-c, 12 FF. Shuffle 'em together, split 'em randomly into two piles, tell people that one is FF and the other is APS-c, and people will start telling you how they can tell which is which - *convinced* that they can.
Quote: Atkins laid that out - his bullet points took into account what happens when you get at the smaller apertures and neared hyperfocal distances. If your shooting scenerios are matching that, you have a point. I haven't run into it much.
Indeed he did. It means you cannot achieve the same DOF simply by stopping down. Like I said, you gotta get a shorter lens and crop for the same FOV.
Your answer sounds the same as the one I've been offering, essentially. "If your shooting scenarios are matching needing that 12 inch DOF instead of 18 inch DOF, you have a point."
Quote: Not when lined up against each other, equivalent FOV + equivalent aperture. See my example.
Not when you pick a
specific scenario designed to maximize the difference and place specific restraints on the usage. You have to change lenses and/or change positions to get a similar shot.
Quote: Almost any images taken out of context can be indistinguishable, especially because you don't know what it took to get that image. See my DA 35 f/2.4 vs FA 31ltd blind-test analogy.
Some things are visible... contact prints have a 'look' that little else can match. Polaroids are easily identifiable. Some films are easily identifiable. I demonstrated to a skeptical client that I could tell the difference between Kodachrome and Ektachrome from his vacation photos once. Some lenses. Catadioptric lenses, for instance. It's usually easy to distinguish quality lenses from crap lenses, but not always so easy to identify the lens - check out the "guess the lens" thread; there's as much forensic analysis (which lenses are in his sig?) as there is identification - and the percentage isn't high.
FF and APS-c don't fall into the category of 'easily identifiable'. You've got to CREATE visible difference, on purpose.
Quote: More control over DOF is objectively better, especially when artistic/aesthetic sensibilities are paramount. Doesn't make the whole format better for everything, though. If someone said that, it wasn't me.
.
But what does "objectively better" mean, if it doesn't mean "for everything"? That's been my beef, all along. You can't say (rationally) that a format is "objectively better" without answering the question "at what?"