Boris,
I have a Canon 10D kit with Canon 20/2.8, 28/1.8, 50/1.4, 100/2, 70-200/4L and 300/4L IS lenses. I used them for a year and a quarter before buying a Pentax *ist DS kit. I also used the 50/1.4 and 100/2 extensively with a Canon EOS IX (APS film) body for a year before that. They are very fine quality lenses, all premium priced/quality built: I was never dissatisfied with them. (A Canon 22-55/3.5-5.6, on the other hand, is a lens I bought for $40 in mint condition, and it was barely worth that money. I used it for a short time until I had better options, none of the images from it are useful as anything but snapshots.)
I bought my *ist DS kit, at first concentrating on older Pentax prime lenses and then acquiring a few zooms and new primes ... what I use most are the FA28-105/3.2-4.5, the A50/1.4, the F100-300/4.5-5.6, the A24/2.8, the M85/2, and the DA14/2.8.
The Canon lenses in my estimation are very very good: good resolution, contrast, oof rendering. If I can fault them at all, they are almost too "ordinary" in their rendering qualities ... Like some of the Zeiss lenses I've owned in the past, their rendering is so accurate in many cases as to be boring. This set of Canon lenses (excepting the 20/2.8, which isn't truly sharp until f/4-4.5) tends to be sharper than the Pentax lenses in that group when wide open.
But that does not say that the Pentax lenses are inferior. The 28-105 is incredibly good for a modestly priced zoom, the A50 and A24 are superb with rendering that I like more than nearly all the Canon lenses, the Pentax 14 is at least a match to my old Nikkor 20/3.5 AI-S (same field of view) and approaches my old Elmarit-M 24/2.8 ASPH (which *used* was 3x the price!). The F100-300 is probably the poorest performing of that set of Pentax lenses, particularly wide open ... no match for the Canon 70-200/4L or 300/4L at all ... but even it has lovely rendering and excellent sharpness/contrast when stopped down to f/11 or so, *and* it only cost me $80.
So ... No, I don't think that the gear is the critical factor in the quality of my photo work. The exposure, focus, the composition idea, and how well I realized it in my preparation for print/web are the critical factors. The evidence to me are my PAW pages from 2003, 2004 and 2005... and the prints I've made of those images in sizing up to 11x17 and 13x19. Not all but a lot of my 2003/2004 photos were made with the Canon kit (i believe they're all marked on the site), where nearly all of the 2005 photos were made with the Pentax. While my aesthetics and ideas continue to evolve, and sometimes I don't quite make exactly what my previsualized ideas were, I see nothing in these sets of photos (and in the many hundreds of others I've not posted) that indicate to me I am going the wrong way by choosing to work with Pentax equipment.
Godfrey http://homepage.mac.com/ramarren/
On Apr 27, 2005, at 7:46 AM, Boris Liberman wrote:
Hi!
Recently I met a person who uses EOS 20D and couple of L lenses - 17-40/4 and 70-200/4 both being L lenses.
We looked at each other's photos and I was very impressed with the way the L lenses produce very plastic, very 3D images. He on the other hand pointed out that few of my works were very good while actually spoiled by rather poor optics that I have.
Notably, of course, he was "attacking" my FA 28-70/4 and F 70-210 zooms. Indeed, a cheap $100 zoom cannot really compete with $750 monsters from Canon :).
However, this made me concerned, in a sense that it could be some other of my lenses are not on par with modern quality.
This guy also mentioned that to him I appeared as if having outgrown most of my gear, so that now my lenses were bottleneck in my further deveplopment as a photog...
Although flattered by this comment, I am very unamused.
I went to pbase.com and looked up some considerable number of shots made by Pentax gear. I saw rather bad shots made with Limited lenses as well as some excellent shots too.
I do admit that I am after plasticity of my lenses. It is what makes the picture look really good. So here are the lenses I find questionable:
K 24/2.8 M 35/2.8 Takumar Bayonet 135/2.5 Of course two zooms: 28-70/4 and 70-210/4-5.6
I am unsure about that Sigma 18/3.5 that I recently bought.
The lenses I am sure are excellent are:
FA 50/1.7 M 50/1.4 F 85/2.8 soft (truly unique) Tamron 90/2.5 SP (thanks Joe Wilensky!)
I don't seem to have anything left unmentioned.
I have some particular questions to add to this little rant:
1. Is there any of the "questionable" lenses above that are actually very good?
2. What things I should be aware of to improve plasticity of my images?
3. If I indeed have to replace all/some of those "questionable"
lenses, what would you recommend?
My plan was to stop my enablement and do some extensive shooting. It seems it is falling apart somehow...
-- Boris
