The blurring of the background seems to be twisting — this is not a post-processing effect, this is a lens drawing / Photo: flickr.com [ad_1]
In addition to focal length, aperture, focusing speed, each lens also has a pattern. The lens pattern is a bit like a ghost, or like true love: everyone has heard of it, many people talk about it, but few can say exactly what it is. Let’s take a look at this article in detail and with examples.
The picture is not directly related to either the focal length, or the aperture ratio, or the manufacturer, or the price. This is not some magical feature that only expensive lenses have. One of the most characteristic and recognizable drawings of the Soviet Helios is the famous twisted bokeh.
The blurring of the background seems to be twisting — this is not a post-processing effect, this is a lens drawing / Photo: flickr.comWhat is lens pattern
Sharp lens for landscapes and subjects, soft lens for portraits
Blur character (bokeh)
Calm bokeh and nervous bokeh
Twisted bokeh and other creative effects
What is lens plasticity
Is it possible to change the pattern of the lens
This term is difficult to give a precise definition, so it is often used randomly. The design of the lens depends on the optical design: on the number of lenses inside it, on how light passes through these lenses, how it is refracted and scattered.
The definition of drawing includes:
- sharpness or softness;
- plastic;
- background blur character.
Interestingly, if you turn on the bore, drawing is a bug. At the dawn of photography, the main task of the creators of technology was to develop a lens that would minimally distort reality, transmit it as accurately as possible. Due to the imperfection of technology, this could not be done, the lenses still gave slight distortion. Which, in general, form the same pattern, unique for each lens.
Modern optical designs allow the transmission of reality with less distortion, for which some people consider them devoid of pattern, boring and inexpressive.
But let’s talk about everything in order.
The first thing that determines the lens design is whether it is sharp or soft. All lenses can be divided into sharper and softer ones. Moreover, it is impossible to say for sure that one is better and the other is worse. For macro photography or a subject, the sharpness of the lens will be a definite plus, for portrait photography it may turn out to be a minus. A sharp lens will emphasize all the small details: wrinkles, pores on the skin, hairs. And there are chances that all this will have to be retouched later, especially when it comes to super-large portraits.
This also works the other way around: if you need to convey as accurately as possible, for example, the texture of a leather wallet for a catalog shoot or the antennae of an insect, then the softness of the lens will become your enemy. Most likely, the image sharpness will then have to be further raised.
Read also:
What is sharpness and how to raise it in Photoshop, Lightroom and online
Sharp lenses are especially useful when you want to show maximum details in the photo / Photo: unsplash.comIn terms of sharpness, primes are usually sharper than zooms. This is due to the great complexity of the optical design and the mobility of the lenses of zoom lenses. In addition, macro lenses will be sharper.
The sharpest lenses include Sigma AF 50mm f/1.4, Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L II, Canon EF‑S 24mm f/2.8, Nikon 85mm f/1.4G, Fujifilm XF 90mm f/2, Sony 50mm f/1.4, Sony FE 90mm f/2.8 Macro G OSS, Olympus 75mm f/1.8.
As for the softest lenses, there are somewhat fewer of them. However, there are special models with a soft prefix: for example, Canon EF 135mm f/2.8 Soft focus or Pentax SMC FA Soft f/2.8.
Another important part of the lens design is the nature of the background blur. The nature of the blur or bokeh will be prominent on relatively fast lenses. If you shoot at closed aperture values, there will be no background blur. Accordingly, there will be no blur character.
Bokeh can be calm, it can be nervous.
Calm bokeh and nervous bokeh
The nature of bokeh is easiest to show in the pictures with the evening lights of the city, gone into blur. In a spherical ideal in a vacuum (which, as we know, does not exist in nature), the lights will blur into a calm, even circle. Without any jumps in brightness. That is, the edge is not brighter than the middle, not dimmer, and there is no stroke around the edges.
On the left, the spots are not rounded, the stroke is clearly visible along the edges. Bokeh is more nervous. On the right, the nature of the blur is more calm / Photo: unsplash.comIn practice, the more calm the bokeh, the less the background will distract from the main subject.
On the left is a shot on Nikon 50mm 1.8 d, on the right — on Fujifilm 35mm 1.4. With plus or minus the same size and similar shooting parameters, the background looks a little different / Photo: flickr.comThese two shots demonstrate the difference between nervous bokeh and calm bokeh. Looking at the details, the background in the image on the left looks more contrasted and overloaded, it has more details, due to this there is more mess, and it is more distracting from the model. In the picture on the right, this contrast is less, the model looks more well separated from the background, and the background itself is more uniform.
One could attribute this to the slightly larger aperture of the Fujifilm lens, but no. The picture on the right was taken in crop, on the left in full frame. The crop just takes a stop of aperture, so the level of blur in these pictures from a technical point of view is absolutely the same, although the bokeh looks different.
However, around what kind of bokeh character is preferable, a lot of copies are broken. The fact is that most more or less modern fixes have a calm bokeh. And many adherents of warmth, filminess and lampness find such a lens pattern boring, overly technical and inexpressive.
But here we really enter into a swampy abyss of taste, from which everyone has to look for a way out. Some people like a more strict and technical calm bokeh, someone — more nervous, creating more connection between objects and the background. However, there are a number of bokeh types that are very far (but thus very interesting) from calmness, which are worth talking about separately.
Twisted bokeh and other creative effects
The famous twisted bokeh of Helios-40 and 44 is probably familiar to everyone who is interested in photography. This feature of the lens pattern shows itself interestingly when shooting portraits at an open aperture.
The whole world is spinning around you / Photo: flickr.comIt is interesting that this effect just arises due to the imperfection of the optical scheme of the lens. In Helios, the front lens is somewhat smaller than it should be for smoother bokeh. This was done to reduce lens spherical aberrations, and interesting twisted bokeh was a side effect.
Another interesting type of bokeh is soap bubbles. It is typical for the Meyer-Optik Trioplan F/2.8 lens.
The lens allows you to create a very interesting artistic effect on open apertures / Photo: meyer-optik-goerlitz.comA similar effect is also produced by reflex lenses, such as the Samyang 500mm f/6.3. These have a small mirror in the center of the front lens. Because of this, the bokeh takes on the characteristic look of a donut or crescent.
The pattern of such lenses is difficult to confuse with something else / Photo: flickr.comPlasticity is the most vague and hard-to-define term of all that has to do with lens design. Plasticity is the ability of a lens to create the illusion of volume on a flat medium.
It has to do with dynamic range and determines the ability of the optical system of the system to work with close tones. Plasticity (also called micro-contrast) determines how soft or sharp the transition from darker areas to lighter ones will be.
Connoisseurs consider Leica and Zeiss ZM lenses to be the best in terms of plasticity. Also, some 7Artisans lenses and many Soviet lenses are classified as plastic.
The lens design can be changed. But not much. For example, an overly sharp lens can be made softer (for example, for a female portrait) by using a soft filter.
As for bokeh, changing its character is difficult, but it is easy to change the shape of the bokeh. Change the circles, for example, to hearts or stars. Read more about this here.
[ad_2]