the last word

A few days ago, I posted a flare comparison of a Zeiss Otus 55 mm f/1.4 lens on a Sony a7RII with and without a 3-stop Hoya ND filter.  Questions arose about the filter I used.  Michael Demeyer said: I would also expect the quality of the filter to matter. For example, the Zeiss filters,… [Read More]

For about 20 years, from the mid-fifties to the late seventies, I routinely used what I called “finger filters”, either haze or UV. Coincidentally, about the time I got serious about making art and buying multi-kilobuck Zeiss and Schneider lenses, I stopped using the filters. There were a few exceptions. I bought a Nikon 300… [Read More]

The is the sixth in a series of posts about the Voigtlander 65 mm f/2 Apo-Lanthar macro lens. The series starts here. I screwed up the last landscape comparison that I tried to do between the Apo-Lanthar and the F-mount 55 mm f/1.4 Zeiss Otus, so I redid the test this morning. The scene with… [Read More]

I recently had cataract surgery; two weeks ago on my left eye, and yesterday on my right. So for two weeks, I got to walk around comparing the colors with the treated versus those with the untreated eye. Cataracts are known to block short wavelengths to a greater extent than long ones, so I expected… [Read More]

The is the fifth in a series of posts about the Voigtlander 65 mm f/2 Apo-Lanthar macro lens. The series starts here.  We proved here that the Apo-Lanthar has a flat field for distant subjects. I received a request to look at field flatness at 1:2. It’s taken me several days to develop an alignment… [Read More]