Current sensors are so good: are fast lenses even necessary any more?

Evergreen States said:
This is pretty much my view. I welcome innovation in sensor technology, image stabilization and lens design. Most photographers do not need anything faster than ƒ/1.4. Many can do more than well enough with ƒ/2 or ƒ/2.8. Fast lenses were originally a way to provide photographers more shooting opportunities when film speeds were much slower than what we have today. The first Kodachrome had a blistering ISO of 10. Sensor technology has gotten good enough so that fast lenses are not necessary for most of the lighting conditions a person will find themself in. The halcyon years of Kodachrome were captured at ISO 64. Now sensor manufacturers are touting the ability to go down to ISO 64 as innovation in order to maximize dynamic range. The conditions which generated the need for super speed lenses have long since passed. Not to mention that, at many useful portrait distances, shooting at ƒ/1.4 won't get you enough of a person's face in focus for a typical portrait. Shooting spontaneous action wide open can be difficult if you care about getting things in focus, so that limits their utility for street photography.

However, new advancements in autofocus technology which automatically track objects can make it easier to nail focus on moving subjects at wide apertures. Old super speed lens designs performed poorly wide open and were only there for emergency uses when the softness was an acceptable compromise for getting the picture at all. Now many new lenses are far sharper wide open than those older lenses were stopped down. Many photographers who have more money than talent will shoot boring, repetitive pictures of background blur but you also have creative photographers who gain access to the same tools and make breathtaking work. While we've seen a real decline in varieties of film and darkroom papers available and seen some of the finer film equipment slip back out of the realm of affordability, digital imaging technology offers us an embarrassment of riches. It's up to us to pick up the tools and bend them to our visions, or to use their unique properties to see the world in unique ways.

So while most photographers do not need anything faster than ƒ/1.4, I'm still grateful that faster lenses than that exist. As Frederich Hayek said, "The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use."
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Evergreen, thank you for your thorough report on the technological development that has made possible the fantastic sports and wildlife photos we see in the media. Thanks to Sony, a new era started with the evolution of autofocus.
You have a fast-moving subject you want to isolate from the background, like a freestyle swimmer. With the Sony A1's 30 frames/sec of 50MB images and stellar autofocus (or A9III, or eq. Canikon), you get shots with enough pixels to crop if needed. Others are coming along.
It is silly to say, "Nobody needs a fast lens."
Nobody needs a racing car, a private airplane, or a Gucci bag, either. But I am not to judge them or their choices.

The 50mm f/1.2 GM wide open is impressive.


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Perhaps not necessary, but still desirable. I often shoot in lighting situations where f1.8 at 1/800 requires ISO 6400, resulting in a full frame file that, while still acceptable for web use, has a fair bit of noise, lower dynamic range and colour 'depth'. When I'm able, I'll get a Sigma 50mm f1.4 or even f1.2 DG DN and see how that goes.

My favourite combination is the M9 with Zeiss Distagon 35. Wide open, it is super sharp with no glow/haze, and the subject separation is my desired look. The M9's usable ISO tops out at 1600 in a pinch. I've shot the Distagon 35 with a Panasonic S5 at much higher ISOs and it is like seeing in the dark.
 
johnsonjj22 said:
Salgado apparently rarely shot at widest aperture, saying something to the effect of "it's not how the human eye sees"
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That is an interesting comment as in some ways there are similarities and in some ways they are vastly different. Our vision is stereo not a single point in space. A photo is taken at a specific aperture, ISO, shutter speed and focus point our vision is dynamic and is constantly adjusting the iris and focus point as we shift what we are looking at and slowly adjust the sensitivity of our eyes. Eyes don't seem to have an adjustable 'shutter speed' but different people have fairly different visual processing speeds. That is why some people see rainbows on DLP projectors and are really bothered by strobing effects on the tail lights of some cars and buses, due to the dithering LEDs, and others don't see that at all.
 
Archiver said:
Perhaps not necessary, but still desirable. I often shoot in lighting situations where f1.8 at 1/800 requires ISO 6400, resulting in a full frame file that, while still acceptable for web use, has a fair bit of noise, lower dynamic range and colour 'depth'. When I'm able, I'll get a Sigma 50mm f1.4 or even f1.2 DG DN and see how that goes.
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The Sigma 50 1.4 DG DN is a very nice lens. The upcoming 1.2 version looks good too and is only slightly larger than the 1.4 version. If it is anything like the 35mm DG DN 1.2 it should be great and will probably makes the 1.4 cheaper on the used market.
 
Archiver said:
Perhaps not necessary, but still desirable. I often shoot in lighting situations where f1.8 at 1/800 requires ISO 6400, resulting in a full frame file that, while still acceptable for web use, has a fair bit of noise, lower dynamic range and colour 'depth'. When I'm able, I'll get a Sigma 50mm f1.4 or even f1.2 DG DN and see how that goes.

My favourite combination is the M9 with Zeiss Distagon 35. Wide open, it is super sharp with no glow/haze, and the subject separation is my desired look. The M9's usable ISO tops out at 1600 in a pinch. I've shot the Distagon 35 with a Panasonic S5 at much higher ISOs and it is like seeing in the dark.
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Topaz Antinoise or its replacement Topaz AI do an excellent job with high ISO grain.
Also, there are cameras with modern sensors.
 
AndyCapp said:
Topaz Antinoise or its replacement Topaz AI do an excellent job with high ISO grain.
Also, there are cameras with modern sensors.
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To a point, but they can't pull back detail that is lost to noise or built in NR if the camera applies that to high ISO RAW files. I find Topaz Denoise/Photo AI tends to add other artifacts to portions of the image too, esp. if you use the recover options.

Shooting high ISO and then using software to dial back the noise can also add a huge amount of additional workflow compared to a fast lens at low ISO. For example, I recently shot a fencing meet and took about 760 shots over the course of the day. Denoise takes about 43 seconds to process a file on my computer. If I was cranking the ISO and using software that would add almost 9 hours of additional processing time. As it was I was shooting f1.2 for about half the shots and had useable files right out of the camera.
 
shawn said:
To a point, but they can't pull back detail that is lost to noise or built in NR if the camera applies that to high ISO RAW files. I find Topaz Denoise/Photo AI tends to add other artifacts to portions of the image too, esp. if you use the recover options.

Shooting high ISO and then using software to dial back the noise can also add a huge amount of additional workflow compared to a fast lens at low ISO. For example, I recently shot a fencing meet and took about 760 shots over the course of the day. Denoise takes about 43 seconds to process a file on my computer. If I was cranking the ISO and using software that would add almost 9 hours of additional processing time. As it was I was shooting f1.2 for about half the shots and had useable files right out of the camera.
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Do I understand you correctly that one has to adapt to the situation at hand with the proper tools and methods?
Wow. I never knew that.
 
Looking at DR versus ISO, The Leica M11 is about the same as the Nikon Z5, and about 1ev better than the Leica M240. The M240 is over 10 years old now.
Not that much improvement.
 
Sonnar Brian said:
Looking at DR versus ISO, The Leica M11 is about the same as the Nikon Z5, and about 1ev better than the Leica M240. The M240 is over 10 years old now.
Not that much improvement.
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The M11 has a pixel binning feature which will improve dynamic range at the cost of resolution. Which of the settings are you using to get that measurement for comparison against the Z5 and M240? Supposedly 36MP will gain you a stop of DR over the full 61MP and 18MP will gain you two stops.
 
Sonnar Brian said:
Looking at DR versus ISO, The Leica M11 is about the same as the Nikon Z5, and about 1ev better than the Leica M240. The M240 is over 10 years old now.
Not that much improvement.
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I ran into the limits of the M 240 the other night taking a photo of my late uncle's favorite bar.

Nokton 50/1.5 wide open, ISO 6400 with the neon kicking it to 1/500th... just a data point.


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That's a very tough lighting situation for anything. One stop more DR won't help much as the neon is easily six to eight stops brighter than the surroundings.

For me, I found a watermark around the new, higher end cameras of 2012 .. Although there has been progress since, I haven't found most of the progress to be all that significant other than for resolution needs. The M10-Monochrom is one of the few cameras that has leapt beyond the ISO/DR hurdles ... I can get exposures at ISO 50,000 with it that I sometimes find difficult to distinguish from more pedestrian ISO settings (like ISO 800-1600).

G
 
Godfrey said:
The popular use of the term bokeh these days is really messed up.

Bokeh does not mean "the blurry mush of imaged items out of the focus zone at a large aperture". Bokeh is "the quality of the blur in the blurred portions of an image"... Bokeh is something you can evaluate at any aperture, in any scene, by looking at blurred portions of an image and evaluating whether they have a pleasing or harsh appearance.

Yeah, I'm shouting into the gale again... ;)

G
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While I love what the ZM 50 C Sonnar 1.5 offers in this regard, it is also the case at f5,6. And my next favourite lens Bokeh is with my 1951 50 Elmar 3.5. Which I mostly shoot at f5.6 if I can.
 
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Evergreen States said:
The M11 has a pixel binning feature which will improve dynamic range at the cost of resolution. Which of the settings are you using to get that measurement for comparison against the Z5 and M240? Supposedly 36MP will gain you a stop of DR over the full 61MP and 18MP will gain you two stops.
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I did not do the measurement- and the website does not run the numbers for pixel binning.

For the M11M, adjacent pixels could be binned. The M11- must have a good interpolation scheme, binned pixels are not adjacent.
 
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