On Thu, 27 Jan 2000 ALEXSCIFI@xxxxxxx wrote:
<much snipped wisdom>
> * My own personal observation based on some 16x24 enlargements
> and innumerable slides, is that the OM 100F2.0 is something
> "special"!
Amen, brother Alex. We have to judge lenses by how they work for us,
through our own eyes.
> So to use an analogy from audio, numbers are nice, but the proof of the
> pudding is in the listening!
You're preaching to the choir here.
And regretfully, the West (US and Europe) have
> lagged some 10-20 years behind Japanese aesthetic trends in audio (tubes,
> single-ended designs, horns, etc.). The same appears to be true in
> photography. Only Mike Johnson's Phototechnique makes a regular mention of
> "bokeh". I have yet to see it taken into account in any other American or
> English publication.
The marketing guys have (certainly from the looks of the opinions
expressed on this list) done their work, and now photographers trust
graphs of waveform distortion and MTF curves more than they do their own
eyes and those of people they respect looking at their own prints or
slides.
I close with yet another quote from Ansel Adams:
" Photographers have been led to make a fetish of equipment,
and are falsely encouraged in superficial concepts and
methods, resulting in unfortunate misconceptions of the basic
potentialities of photography. "
Further on, he says: " It is my observation that the manufacturers
lean towards defining photography in terms of equipment and
materials, when they should really define their products
in terms of photography. "
from _American Annual of Photography_, Vol. 58, pp. 13-14, 1944
*= Doris Fang =*
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