Hong Kong through a 50mm - Page 2

Beautiful work as always, please keep these threads coming I really enjoy them.

WOW, Fantastic shots..

Definitely going to add you as a contact on Flickr, so I can see some more of your stuff

Those are some beautiful pictures!

Wow, definitely a place that i would want to visit at least once in this lifetime.

Lovely photos.

Great shots, makes me want to visit again =D

seriously 50mm? what sup with the corners...

Fantastic shots. Thank you for sharing. I love the one with the kid in the fountains.

Except that on a 10D (or 30D) it would be a nofty eighty, Which is what I think Ray was alluding to with his 5DII and 85mm.
I've been contemplaiting the 85mm L myself, and I don't even own a DSLR. That's one seriously sexy piece of glass.

Great work Ray, not too woohoo about the vignetting, but that's just a personal opinion.

Yes with the crop factor I suppose it is quite 'zoomed in' ~ you can always go with a 30mm for quite cheap, even the 30mm f/1.4 is well priced for what it is. The 85mm F1.8 is nice, expensive though... I had the Canon 70-200mm L which I bought used for $500, produced some lovely images, great bokeh at that length.

i'm talking about the corner fall off. 50mm don't fall off like that

He already said the vignetting is done intentionally in post processing.

If you think this kind of artificial corner fall-off is offensive, Ansel Adams used to add these effects to some of his prints in the old days as well. He explains that it is done so that the eye would naturally concentrate on the center of the image because of this light fall-off.

The image stabiliser is the best function of these little digicams. They really let you take photographs which wouldn't otherwise be possible (tripods etc).

The crop factor (effectively 75mm then?) doesn't work for me; it looks way too claustrophobic. Hong Kong is in a way anyway lol. The crop factor on the lens seems to augment that.

I'm not a fan of the PS post-processing look Raymond. You'd be better ditching the faux vignette look. It just makes your images look fake compared to shooting on decent Fuji Provia film and a traditional pre-computer optical lens with a light fall off which obeys the cosine rule. The 50mm Leitz Summicrons (adapter required) offer similar, although you would be better off with a cheaper Zeiss 50mm f1.5 Sonnar, adapted to the Canon via a EOS-L39/Leica M mount. Unfortunately your contrast range in the images are too overblown for my monitor.

These are nice fun shots of Hong Kong in any case. I'm glad I'm out of Hong Kong for the monsoon season and breathing volcanic ash instead

Vignetting as a traditional optical technique in darkroom printing, obeys the cosine rule for light fall-off from image axis (corner to centre).

There is no equivalence in traditional optics vignetting; Adams' relied on lenses, which barely had sufficient coverage for many of his chosen formats (10x8, 6.5x8.5 inches) and using British lenses, like the Taylor Hobson and Cooke or Ross lenses, optical covering power was a limitation at the imaging stage. Adams' reliance on extensive darkroom hand-burning in techniques was a technique of print-production in line with the aesthetics of the F64 west coast movement: not just waving a photoshop wand at 5% and relying on a computer algorithm to generate a vignette on an image.

The modern Canon 50mm f1.1 (full coverage on 35mm) has none of these inherent problems at a digital crop factor (even smaller than 35mm).

Adding in the digital vignetting, is an act of ape-ing traditional film emulsion techniques. That is why some find it offensive. It 'pretends to be like traditional film and optical darkroom work: but is not. It's just photoshop. You might as well add in a red sunset filter or a 6 point star burst filter too then.

Anyone who is skilled at reading an image can tell the difference. A teenage Flickr crowd can not. Some of us get offended, because there is a mass digital movement to try and cheapen traditional silver emulsion photography and its techniques, by trying to make out that digital is as good.

Digital isn't film photography: it's a different medium altogether. Digital photography isn't even photography these days. It's mostly post-photography digital editing in photoshop relying on your computer.