the last word

Over on Digital Photography Review, a poster whose opinion I respect said something like: “Why are you thinking about buying really expensive lenses; you won’t see any difference unless you’re making five-foot prints.” I’d heard that before. I’d also heard that you could tell the difference between images from good lenses at screen resolution. Who… [Read More]

Three from this morning, exposed as the fog burned off.  

Sometimes we over-compartmentalize. For example, I remember a conversation at a cocktail party years ago: Me: “What do you do for a living.” He: “I’m an IC designer.” Me: “Digital or analog?” He: “They’re all analog.” I took his meaning. To you non-EEs out there, what he was saying is that, even in digital IC design,… [Read More]

More than a year ago, I wrote a post on lens adapter tolerance, bemoaning the fact that all the adapters that I’d tested were too short. I followed that up with a post about how, at least in the case of Novoflex, this was on purpose. As I continued to purchase adapters from various manufacturers,… [Read More]

I used to do a lot of underwater photography. Whenever I was on a dive boat and the crew asked us where we wanted to go next, the non-photographers tended to opt for someplace new. The photographers wanted to go back to a place we’d already dived. Ruth Bernhard used to make repeated suggestions that photographers… [Read More]