The Online Photographer

Interesting bunch of comments about shooting wide open on April 4th. The responses were far more varied than I expected, and the reasons given were more varied as well. That thread bears rereading in its entirety.

I suppose I'm a child of my times when it comes to shooting wide open. I like lenses, and testing lenses was a side-hobby related to photography for me (but only related; you don't have to know much at all about lenses to be a photographer). Naturally I wanted to get the most out of my lenses. Various pieces of advice were common at that time, for example, that every lens is at its best stopped down two stops from wide open. Thus, an ƒ/2 lens yielded its best performance at ƒ/4. While that was a decent rule of thumb that wouldn't lead anyone far wrong, it was far from a universal, hard-and-fast fact. For instance, some spherical ƒ/1.4 lenses reached their peak performance three, four or five stops down. It was also a rule of thumb that slower lenses were better wide open than faster ones, and that they were often better wide open than the faster lens was when stopped down to the same aperture. However, Lewis Baltz (d. 2014), who was identified with the New Topographics movement—and who was apparently part lens geek—made a series of photographs of the built and Man-altered landscape with a 35mm Leica mounted on a heavy tripod, trying to maximize sharpness, and he discovered (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) that an ƒ/1.4 Leica Summilux-M of his day, stopped down to its optimum aperture, was sharper than an ƒ/2 Summicron-M at any aperture, even though it was worse at the wider apertures. But as is the way of such things, that's a specific case, not a general rule. Personally, I noticed that most 35mm lenses (small format, in those days, even called "miniature" early on) were best at ƒ/8, to as close an approximation as could matter. I liked getting the best from my lenses, so I would research or test what the optimum aperture for my specific lenses were, and then "tend toward" using that. Lacking specific tests I tended to shoot at ƒ/8 and depart from it only as needed, which, to be fair, was fairly often. Respecting the overarching rule:

The best aperture to use is the one that suits the picture.

In other words, if you know that diffraction softens lens sharpness at ƒ/16 but a particular picture needs front-to-back sharpness and the only way to get it is to shoot at ƒ/16, then you use ƒ/16. And so on. Finicky little constraints that chase maximum quality are pointless if you're using an aperture that is wrong for the picture. Similarly, the fact that the picture would be sharper on a tripod wouldn't matter if using a tripod meant that you missed the picture.

There was a time when aperture was a useful "sharpness adjustment" tool. I recall a Pentax 85mm ƒ/1.4 that was absolutely marvelous in this respect—wide open the overall image softened very nicely. Then it sharpened up progressively all the way to ƒ/8 as you stopped down. Perfect for portraits, for example, which suited the focal length as well. Often you don't want portrait lenses to be hard-sharp, a fact which has been more or less lost on whole generations of hobbyists.

Countless times in my life I've seen forum messages to the effect of, "I want to do some portraits. What's the sharpest medium-telephoto lens?" Wrong question, though a common one.

Portraitists a hundred years ago weren't chasing sharpness. A
spread from Motion Picture Classic magazine*, February 1916.

There was a time when portrait photographers chased the lenses—most of them large-format lenses—that offered just the perfect degree of un-sharpness according to their tastes. Some had lenses custom-made; some would keep the identity of their lenses secret from their competitors, treating it as a trade secret. If you've ever explored those classic old-time Hollywood portraits, shot on things like tailboard cameras, you know what those lenses looked like. When I was young, that had mostly died out, but there were people still advertising in the classifieds in Shutterbug magazine who knew all about the arcana of those magical old portrait lenses, all of them unsharp to some degree and in some desired way.

When 35mm SLR cameras became a thing after 1959, large maximum apertures took on another use—they let in more light to help with focusing. Groundglass screens were dark in those days, which you might not realize when shooting in daylight. It became all too apparent when shooting in low light, however. An ƒ/2 Summicron was fast for a rangefinder lens, but maybe not fast enough when you were trying to focus on the groundglass of an early SLR. Lenses with a speed of ƒ/1.4 became a popular product that everybody had to have.

Of course it was impossible to suggest that people use the widest aperture only for focusing. And of course if a lens had an ƒ/1.4 maximum aperture, people would use it, mainly because films were so slow in those days. It was no accident that "fast" Kodachrome II (ASA 25) and Kodachrome X (ASA 64)come out in 1961, two years after the first viable SLR, the Nikon F, arrived. (Kodachrome II and Kodachrome X were replaced by Kodachrome 25 and Kodachrome 64 in 1974.) Candid photography and freedom from tripods was becoming ever more popular, and "speed," in both lenses and films, became ever more important. Pentax, the dominant camera manufacturer of the 1960s, would go on to produce over two million SLRs in the decade, and its loss-leader ƒ/1.4 Super-Takumars—there's a long lineage of them, under many names—were the company's flagship lenses. The biggest band of the decade, the Beatles—especially Ringo—were big Pentax fans. There are numerous photos showing them with Pentaxes, and even a picture of a stage setup with a giant "Beatax" camera in front of Ringo's drum set as decoration, although that was used for only one performance. Liveright recently released a book of photos by Paul McCartney from 1964, although it's probable that not all of them were taken with an SLR.

[To Be Continued...]

Mike

*I got rather lost in the articles in those old magazines while searching for old rights-free images. I particularly enjoyed one charming article called "How I Became a Photo Player." At least in Motion Picture Classic, motion picture actors and actresses were referred to as "photoplayers."

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Featured Comments from:

Ned Bunnell [Ed. note: Ned is a past President of Pentax USA]: "Not sure if you know the story behind the Beatles and their Pentax cameras. They arrived in Tokyo in June 1966 to play their first and only concerts in the country at the Nippon Budokan. The marketing manager of Pentax met them at their hotel and presented each of them with a Pentax Spotmatic SP. I was told it was meant as a gesture to welcome them to Japan. The Spotmatics would surely have been successful without this connection to the Beatles, but in hindsight, it was pure marketing genius. I can’t imagine what it would cost today for Pentax to have Taylor Swift carry around the new half-frame film compact, when that’s released later this year."

Tom Burke: "I went to the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London of the Paul McCartney photos. In the exhibition it was said that he used a Pentax 35mm SLR. No lens details, but to my eye the images looked like they were taken with a 50mm."

Mike Plews: "In 1987 Mark Meyer published Classics: U.S. Aircraft of World War II which is one of the best photo books of old warbirds ever. In my opinion it is just fantastic. In its notes Meyer wrote that he shot the book on Kodachrome, much of it at the magic hour. He said he could only do this because he had a 35mm ƒ/1.4 Summilux-R on his Leica. He needed the extra aperture to make Kodachrome work for him. In order to give him a proper platform they took the bubble off the tail gunner position on a B-25. Thirty years later and I am still jealous.

"You can find used copies of this masterpiece online for as little as $10. This isn't an airplane book with nice photography. It's a first-rate fine-art photography book with airplanes. He made these images wide open with slow film and no image stabilization; an awesome achievement. I spent much of my career shooting air-to-air from all manner of aircraft and Classics: U.S. Aircraft of World War II just messes me up. My two cents on shooting wide open."