Originally posted by georgweb Avoid the specular highlights :-) Seriously, I would either try to frame the background and blur it in pp (which of course does look overdone many times), or try to shoot full open as much as possible. All that is more academic than practical, I know.
I do shoot wide open quite often - in fact, stopping down is a relatively new thing I picked up recently when I started trying out macro
But I do appreciate the increase in IQ from stopping down. Am trying for a 16 bladed aperture lens, to see how it performs. Will keep your advice in mind, thanks for the pointer!
Originally posted by georgweb Miguel & Nyghtfall, how would you judge your 2.8/60 performance in the mid-to-infinity department ? Reason for it, I am suspecting this lens to be a copy or a close friend of its Zeiss brethren, which is said to have eye-bleeding near performance (like your lenses obviously) but not so great inf. performance.
My experience with this lens would differ from miguel's. Not sure how you would define mid to long distance, but here are some pictures below I took with the mamiya 60mm
about 1.5m away:
about 4 - 5m away
this one should be at infinity focus. I PP'ed the colours to wash them out, nothing to do with the lens.
I find the lens still very sharp wide open at mid - long distances, and in fact there's little need for me to stop down, since I don't need to increase the DOF which is paper thin at close focusing distances.