I'm just asking.
I've lived my whole life amongst Homo sapiens—you might be able to relate. "Humans or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus Homo. They are great apes characterized by their hairlessness, bipedalism, and high intelligence." That's from Wikipedia.
That last bit startled me when I read it. Being an editor by trade, I would quibble with that. Maybe I read too much about politics. I would at the very least insert the word potentially in front of "high intelligence." My own formulation along that vector is that we are extremely clever but at the same time extremely unwise. I would not call that "intelligent." It's too big an umbrella. Our stupidity is nearly as stupendous as our cleverness. And hairless? They obviously never saw Sam's Uncle Jake at the pool. That man must have had hair on his tongue.
Anyway, back on track, and hopefully it's not too late for that: Homo sapiens are addicted to more. They want bigger, and then bigger; they want riches, and then greater riches; they want to win, and then they want to win some more; and so on. If something hasn't been done yet, inevitably there will be humans vying to be the first. Our very interest in things sometimes seems to be a function of this competition for more: we're only interested in something so long as it can be a field for competing for the best, most, or first. Then when somebody or something "wins" and/or the competition gets absurd, we get bored and move on. "Fastest automobile" is no longer an interesting competition. Although it continues to exist, it doesn't grab the public's imagination or attention. To keep it more relevant, the goal had to be demoted to World's fastest production car. Climbing the World's highest mountain, now that it has become all but commonplace, is no longer a way to achieve fame or renown outside of one's own circle of friends and acquaintances. Last year, by best count, 861 people "summited" Mount Everest.
Even the "benchmarks" of arbitrary goals command our attention. Consider this snippet from an article about the fastest car: "It wasn't that long ago that the notion of reaching 200 miles per hour in a car, on a road, seemed basically impossible....once that threshold was crossed, the automotive world immediately began eyeing the next triple-digit benchmark: 300 miles per hour." Three hundred! Oooh and aaah, now that would be impressive. But now who, outside of a small community of motorheads, remembers which production car was first to reach the heady benchmark of 321.869 kilometers per hour? (Another way of saying 200 miles per hour.) And, as I was already asking at age 15 when I started devouring car magazines in study hall, why would anyone care?
"You discussed sharpness and detail on the internet," John Krumm wrote after the monochrome sensor post the other day, "which can lead to everyone squinting at JPEGs and arguing." I did. For the record: Converting a color file and using a monochrome sensor are two ways of doing similar things. There are slight differences of process and result. Take your pick. It doesn't matter which you choose. Either way is more than good enough.
In the photography hobby, profession, and pastime, as in most things, there's often a tendency to skip right to the first/fastest/most/best competition. All of my life in photography, "sharpest" has been a persistent preoccupation that never ceases. Which is sharpest? Is it sharper? It isn't sharp. Venture the comment that something is very sharp and immediately many people will revert directly to the first/fastest/most/best status/prestige race. Tell a man his lens isn't sharp and you might wound him. You've insulted his dignity! Suggest that something is sharper than another thing and people will demand proof, or more rigorous comparison; there might have to be a disorienting reshuffling of status and prestige. If a matter is settled, then we males join the team: we proclaim fealty to the paragon of whatever, and hero-worship it or them. We attach it to our own identity. And if something has achieved a settled reputation for first/fastest/most/best, even if just in some people's minds, you'd better not suggest it isn't, because you will provoke them into a stance called "defending." What do you mean Novak Djokovic/LeBron James/Lionel Messi etc. isn't the Greatest Of All Time™? Don't you know he did this, that, and the other thing? You're obviously an idiot. That's the proper label for those who obstinately refuse to accept the accepted status ordering: idiots. Opprobrium is heaped upon that widespread species of primate. If we were our primordial distant cousins the monkeys, we would fling dung at them.
20/what?
The Nikon D3 came out in March of 2007. The Sony A900 followed it in September 2008. The A900 was the first "full-frame" camera to have a 24-MP sensor. The D3 had only 12 MP, but it was one of the first cameras to retain very good image quality at high ISOs. I tested the A900, and John Camp sent me his D3 to try for a few weeks. My conclusion was that the A900 saw into the distance farther than I did and resolved detail better than my eyes could, and the D3 could see in the dark better than I could. Both cases were better than any film could do. I even created an illustration to try to reproduce how I saw a certain dark scene versus how the camera did. Here's a clip from that post:
[Snip.]
So there it was. The race was over. The competition was done with. Cameras could see farther than I could and in lower light than I could. I wanted a camera to be a recording device, so all I needed from it is that it should see approximately as well as I did. That was my standard.
I know other people have their own standards, and I'm not arguing with them. I'm not saying my standard is right, only that it's mine.
But I wonder—if you could quantify camera vision like human vision, how would today's best consumer cameras measure? Normal vision is 20/20—meaning, an object 20 feet away looks as sharp and clear to you as it does to the average person with good eyesight. If someone is 20/15, it means they see at 20 feet what that average person sees at 15 feet. That's very good eyesight. Most top professional tennis players have eyesight better than 20/20, and yet, still, some wear specialized athletic contact lenses during matches to reduce glare and increase contrast. If someone has especially sharp vision, they might colloquially be said to have an "eagle eye." (The Zeiss Tessar was originally marketed as the Eagle Eye lens.) Eagles have visual acuity as much as 3.8x that of humans, meaning their vision is about 20/5. (They also have both binocular vision and telescopic monocular vision, thanks to two focal points in each eye, but let's not go there.)
So I wonder, given top equipment and optimal processing, how much better do consumer camera systems (system = lens/camera/sensor/raw processing) see than humans do? Either the normal/ordinary human postulated in the foveal far-acuity tests using Snell charts, or the outlier best eyesight of which humans are capable? I'll bet the high-end camera system outstrips both. But if I'm taking a landscape, and I can distinguish single branches and twigs on trees with my eyes from 80 feet away, is it more accurate or less accurate to have camera system distinguish branches and twigs on trees 600 feet away? What I'm saying is that many photographs these days are so sharp they're unrealistic. The most common way of making this complaint is that when you take a portrait, you don't want to see the finest corporeal details: pores in skin, the texture of makeup, veins in the whites of the eyes, tiny hairs on the upper lip, the topography of blemishes. That's too much sharpness. It's accurate to what exists, but it's not accurate to the way we see another person with our eyes.
Sharpness and acuity are presumed to improve realism. But at some point they go too far and decrease realism. Consider the iPhone's Night Mode, which is so good at seeing in the dark that the dark no longer looks like the dark! Not for nothing did portrait photographers c. 1890–1930 seek out lenses with just the right degree of unsharpness. And I don't mean the Pictorialists here: I mean portrait photographers who expected their portraits to look normally sharp to normal people.
Better, or worse?
That said, back home on the ranch, it's no longer 2007–08, and my vision is not what it was then. It's now 20/40 when corrected—that is, with glasses on. I have Fuch's dystrophy, and need partial cornea transplants and implanted lenses: one eye done, one to go. My vision has been changing so continually that I seldom have accurate glasses, despite having to buy pair upon pair for years now like I'm some kind of low-key Elton John. My best, most up-to-date glasses right now correct for 20 inches, the better to see computer screens and framed photographs on museum walls. With no glasses on, my far acuity a.k.a. distance acuity is about 20/60. So now, yes, now I want my photographs to have "better vision" than I have. How much better? Tough to quantify. But it launches me down that slippery slope. Each stage is pleasing; you find good enough, and it's fine, then you go a little better, and you like it, then a little better, and you like it more, then a little better than that. The trouble is that pretty soon you have a camera system that sees 20/2, has microcontrast ten times that of the human eye, color transmission like no human ever had even right after cataract surgery, and the pictures at their worst (at least enlarged onscreen) can look like some kind of freakish stylized superexaggerated saturated Martian X-ray concoction. The real light, the real color, the real atmosphere, and the thing itself are all getting lost. The shadow of the true and the real that gives photographs their magic gets further away and more fugitive.
I'm not suggesting anything can be or should be done about this. Here's an exercise: try to correct a few photographs to match your vision of a scene, the way you see if with your eyes, like I did in the first illustration above. Is that different than what falls out of your camera? Also, if you're tempted to say some version of, "I want all the information I can get, I can always make the file worse if I want to," no, no one does that. We're humans and we want more and more and more and more. But as our photographs start looking less and less like we ourselves experience the world, doesn't that mean that at some point along the way our camera systems have in a sense started seeing worse?
Just asking.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Gert Visser: "Hi Mike, this is my first reaction on any post of yours. You touched something with me here. When I started photographing some 20 years ago sharpness was all. Detail sharpness I mean, leaves and grass and so on. But experience grows. Now detail sharpness is not so important anymore. Overall sharpness the same. What is important is if the photograph as a whole is pleasing to the eye. That means (for me) that desired sharpness is dependent on the subject and the mood of the photograph. That is so for landscapes and portraits alike. Sharpness can destroy the mood and thus the message I want to convey. It makes the use of sharpness less automatic and more thoughtful, resulting in more pleasing photographs. Nice to have sharpness, and sometimes even nicer not to have it. One thing more to ponder...."
Tom Burke: "I don’t think so. Then again, I love sharpness, detail. Put me an art gallery and I’ll head for the Dutch Golden Age art, followed by the English Pre-Raphaelite/late 19th-century stuff (think Millais/Rossetti/Waterhouse/Alma-Tadema), then maybe Flemish Renaissance (Jan Van Eyck, etc.), and finally Italian Renaissance. All full of fine detail. You won’t find me looking at Impressionist art. I understand that people love it, that it is regarded as one the greatest art movements ever, but it just doesn’t speak to me. Then I might look at Cubism (especially Braque) or Surrealism. I think I see in detail. I look out of the window and that’s what I spot—the way the sunlight illuminates each leaf on the tree, and the back-light through each bit of blossom. And I want my photography to reproduce what I see."
The majority of photographs I take are in black and white. I prefer film for many of the reasons you mention. No interest in looking at images on a screen at 100 or 200 percent. I do not shoot when the light is too low. However, I do not make my living with a camera. I can see the world around me as it suits without demanding constraints placed by the prevailing winds or whims.
Posted by: Paul | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 08:51 AM
Too many variables. Sharper when measured how? On a screen, which screen? On a print, what size and viewing distance?
FWIW...pull out a copy of "The Americans" and ask if "sharpness" really means anything.
Posted by: Albert Smith | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 09:02 AM
Yes.
Posted by: David Brown | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 09:30 AM
Interesting thing about eagles: their experimental ability to resolve things is very close to the limit placed by density of cone cells in their fovea, and both of these are close to the theoretical limit (Rayleigh criterion) due to pupil size of their eyes. So eagle vision is as good as it can be in terms of resolution. They could only make it better by having bigger eyes. I think their eyes are already tubular (so they cannot swivel) in order to make the optically useful bit of the eye larger as a proportion of the total size. Owls do this I know and I think Eagles do as well: rely on flexible neck to look in different directions
... Or of course in a science fiction world they could turn pairs of eyes into optical interferometer. In even more science fiction world cooperating groups of eagles will fly in formation in order to construct a collective optical interferometer. They will use this ability I am sure to observe distant black holes, which will be their prey.
On another subject: how much is the meaningless race for better cultural, how much innate? I think probably it is cultural: we do it (or men do it: I don't and I have not met other women who do it) because we can. It is like cats playing with mice: cats do not do this in the wild because sometimes the mouse escapes and then the cat dies of starving. a wild human does not spend hundreds of hours looking for the meaninglessly-perfect stuck: they find one that works and then use it, is my guess. So I think it is a disease of culture,
probably.
Posted by: Zyni | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 09:54 AM
The art of photography seems to me the experience of expectations. When I want to capture my visual experience, I have certain approximate visual goals that I try to accomplish. Lens and camera performance are each a part of that need, but I’ll work with what I have. With whatever particular camera I’m using at the moment, I believe in that the resulting image speaks for itself. It’s lens sharpness, color rendition, depth of field, etc., is relative to how I perceive the scene and how I feel about it, and if it turns out as I wanted, good. If it renders something interestingly unexpected, great. Individual high-level specifics of photographic technology are often secondary, but not essential. And, age plays into the aspect of the camera as a tool becoming supportive to diminishing physical abilities.
Posted by: Bob G. | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 10:03 AM
Now you've done it! You thought a circuitous approach, all this talk of sharpness, would camouflage the intent of this post. However, us careful readers know what you're up to: you, with your 20/40 vision, are asking to be arbitraitor of what is "real" in photography. [I am not. You skipped or ignored the paragraph which began, "I know other people have...." --Mike] Good luck with the comments my friend.
You've opened the gates at Pamplona. These bulls are ready to run. Prepare yourself for an onslaught of arguments such as: no photogtaph is real, photos are a 2D projection of a 3D world. Or this gem: just because it's not visible to your human senses doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What about infrared photography? I could go on.
Here's what I've discovered through years of practicing photography: the appearance of reality in photographs doesn't matter as long as the photographer exhibits good taste. Soften a portrait of a lady but sharpen a landscape photo. Make the sitter in your portrait feel beautiful. Make the viewer of your landscape photos feel like an eagle in nature.
As a photographer, you have three contrasts: light vs dark, warm vs cool (color), and sharp vs soft. That's your working pallet. You can take those contrasts as wide as the viewer is able to see. Use those contrasts with talent and taste and people will say you're a great photographer. Unless you cloak yourself a strict documnentarian or journalist, nobody will bother asking if your work is "real".
Posted by: David Raboin | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 10:31 AM
I’ve needed glasses since I was 10 years old. For a photograph to match my vision with glasses it needs a little barrel distortion and some chromatic aberration toward the edges. My favorite glasses are a little old, have lost most of their coatings, and are plenty scratched up at this point. I often photograph with a Tiffen Black Pro-Mist 1/4 filter on and like the look; maybe it’s because it matches the way I see with my old favorite glasses! Slightly reduced contrast and a little ‘glow’ to highlights somehow looks more natural to me than the perfectly sharp and contrasty images my cameras are capable of.
Posted by: Andrew Eckert | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 10:48 AM
IQ (image quality) hasn’t been a limitation in camera / lens gear for a long time. It’s even less an issue nowadays with the immense capabilities of post-processing software, including AI. Human IQ, making decisions and judgments in shooting, processing and printing, have always been more important, film or digital.
Posted by: Jeff | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 10:48 AM
For landscape work, cameras cannot be "too sharp." Especially if one prints large. "Nose on print" inspection is equivalent to walking into the scene. It's not just a "perfect" representation of what a human with excellent vision would see from the camera's viewpoint.
For anything else, especially portraits, whatever a photographer deems the correct level of sharpness is appropriate.
There. My opinion stated as "fact."
😀
Posted by: Sal Santamaura | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 10:49 AM
It does sound like you have explained why some people have gone back to film. Or to older digital cameras, or use old, lower resolution lenses with flaws, or, like me, have mostly stopped using 200 percent magnification on my computer (100 is fine, really).
Pixel peeping is the lonely pleasure of the modern digital photographer. Sitting at home with a nice monitor, zooming in to the far corners of an unremarkable image with spectacular detail levels. Knowing that online sharing will not do it justice. We are trapped in a digital prison! Ok, it's not that bad. I still enjoy this techno-hobby.
Posted by: John Krumm | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 11:01 AM
Not something I worry about, after decades of experiencing results that were sometimes less than optimal as far as "sharpness." I'm good with Holga, 100MP and everything in between. There will always be a certain faction striving for balance- in art, as well as politics...
Posted by: Stan B. | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 11:02 AM
I think it's important to distinguish between resolution and sharpness. The former is an inherent characteristic of the camera lens and sensor used to capture an image, the latter typically an attribute enhanced by post-processing—either in-camera or with software explicitly controlled by the photographer—and involves enhancing fine contrast boundaries along edges. Higher resolution may not matter, but it isn't likely to adversely affect the image. But all-too-many photographs are oversharpened, causing visible "halos" around boundaries which, if anything, detract from the viewer's experience.
Posted by: Chris Kern | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 11:23 AM
I've done event photography in low room light for Halloween, and some evenings. I never cease to be amazed how bright the camera and Lightroom want to make the scene. Daylight bright. I end up dialling the exposure way down to better match what the scene actually looked like. It turns out to be a bit of a balance, make it exactly like what human eyes will see, and the photo would be so dark people would wonder what they're looking at.
Posted by: Keith | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 11:28 AM
I completely agree. All the fuss about high ISO capability does not matter to me. I never shoot above 6400, usually at much lower ISO because the resulting high ISO image is never what I want to replicate or envision.
And the high resolution/contrast APO lenses leave me in a quandary. I am amazed by the lens on the Leica Q3 43, having previously tried out a Q3 and a 50 Apo-Summicron-M on the M10R. (I've done some horse trading.) However, I am finding that something is lacking when I compare those pictures to my previous work. I almost always post-process in Photoshop and am evaluating the results. As I tell my wife, photography (cameras and lenses) is a journey.
Posted by: Rick in CO | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 11:30 AM
I never thought of this until I needed a very quick (that day) portrait of myself for business purposes, and decided to take it myself. I got out the Z7II, with an 85mm S-line lens, put it on a tripod, and shot myself in front of library shelves full of books. When I put the photos up on a screen, I found I could easily read the small-print names of the publishers on the books and even see the grain in the cloth bindings, this from a distance of ~15 feet. No way to do that even with well-corrected glasses on my nose.
On the other hand---I can see the same thing if I move closer. So the camera lens is sharper than my eyes at some distances, but not all. And if you think about what microscopes and telescopes do, that's been true for at least a couple hundred years.
Posted by: John Camp | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 12:50 PM
I'm not sure there is any right or wrong when it comes to sharpness. Well there is actually but it all depends on the subject matter and what the photographer is attempting to portray.
Walking the dogs in the greenbelt of the local park I made my way down an embankment to the brook's edge. the breezes were not there and the reflections of the trees in the water were beautiful. Only having a P&S film camera loaded slowish B&W film and no tripod I took a photo of the scene. Yeah the shot was soft but I had it printed on canvas and it is one of my favorite shots of late. It's hard to tell where the trees end and the reflections start. Sharpness would not have helped the cause.
Posted by: Mike Ferron | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 01:00 PM
I think this is a great post.
“Here's an exercise: try to correct a few photographs to match your vision of a scene, the way you see if with your eyes…..”
If I did that, I would have to somehow model the “floaters” that hang around inside each eye casting shadows on my retina. Those “floaters” move too. How to replicate that? I would also have to put some dimness and unknown color shift to simulate cataracts that are not bad enough to fix – yet. One friend told me how the world turned less yellow after he fixed his cataracts. Not sure if mine are similar.
If I am also experiencing vertigo, which I get from time to time, I would have to simulate how the room spins due to that joy. I actually have been thinking about how to replicate that in a photo which makes your proposed exercise interesting.
I get your point but sometimes it is fun to go beyond normal vision just to see what’s there.
Posted by: Rick | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 01:07 PM
Does any photo - digital or not - look like how we see the world? Our eyes and the camera lens/film sensor combo do not function the same way. Photographs are, at best, representational. They are not "real".
Over time, I think, we've come to accept "photography" as capturing the world as it is, and it's skewed the way we actually perceive the world. Now, with the latest digital sensors, we can "see" even more, but only via the device. But it is still not "real".
Posted by: Hank | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 02:31 PM
It is an art and we all agree that, as such, every artist gets to make their own call on what they value in it. In college (more than 50 years ago) i more-or-less worked as a PJ-type photog and a local newspaper "stringer". So i am not a photographer that (like Ansel Adams) "pre-visualizes"; i take the world as i find it, and my most delightful images are ones with surprises (often human expressions) hidden in the details. Looking at my walls here i see mounted prints with New Orleans jazz street musicians, a grimy engineer at the throttle of a chugging steam locomotive and a line of Revolutionary War re-enactors mid-volley discharging their crude weapons. I didn't see any of their expressions when taking these photos but the camera's system recorded them. And, yes, i value that the system sees better than my eyes.
Posted by: gary raymond bliss | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 02:52 PM
OT. Did I miss the post about you cloning yourself? My anecdotal view is that you're posting a lot more and on a variety of subjects. Or have you quit doing other things?
Posted by: Greg | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 04:00 PM
Just an aside; as an also-editor, I quibble with "the last surviving species of the genus Homo." It's the last that we know of at this point in history, but it isn't necessarily the last ever. I would have said "the only surviving species..."
Possibly related: I saw a video today of a guy solving three Rubik's cubes WHILE JUGGLING THEM. Depending on who he breeds with, he could be the start of a new species of Homo that might not be properly cataloged for some time. Something like Homo WTFicus?
Posted by: Ed Hawco | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 04:10 PM
I am not a photography person. But my friend who is has taken me to some exhibitions. Some of these have moved me deeply. And I have never, ever, worried about how sharp the photographs were. Not ever, not once. Well, I know nothing about photography but I know many things about guitar players as I am one. Some guitar players have also moved me deeply. And I have never, ever, worried about how fast a guitarist can play, or how fast a sax player can play. None of it matters, at all.
Posted by: Zyni | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 04:35 PM
In economics, "unlimited wants" refers to the concept that human desires and needs are virtually endless, exceeding the capacity of available resources to satisfy them, which is a fundamental aspect of the economic problem of scarcity.
You're making good points about sharpness. I think part of it is so many take photos and view photos on their smartphones, which have a small screen. An image that is sharp and "HDR-Like" looks good on the small screen, which is where so many people view their photos anymore.
In the land of real cameras, probably for as long as I can remember on the photography forums I frequent sharpness is the main thing of any lens. Not just sharp, but sharp to the corners. And not just sharp stopped down but wide open too! The discussions are endless.
My favorite lens was the Nikon 58mm 1.4G, which was not all that sharp wide open, but had such a great look, a special look for that particular lens. Stop that lens on down to f/5.6-f/11 and it was very sharp, because of course it was. Not many lenses are being made this way anymore, the market is demanding sharpness, and so here we are.
Posted by: SteveW | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 05:44 PM
The Sigma Merrill SD1 DSLR creates clear photos. They're not sharp necessary. Just delineated with thick colour and luxurious tones.
Ooh. There's a brand new one for sale on eBay! Trustworthy seller. Never even had a battery in it.
Posted by: Kye Wood | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 06:35 PM
It all depends…
Every technique (high ISO, shallow depth of field etc.) can be used effectively to make a point, illustrate something or use the information in legitimate ways. Or it may not and when the lack of purpose becomes apparent, the picture is a failure.
I was reading a book about the last Shackleton trip to Antarctica, there is a picture of the Endurance taken with flashes. The ship looks like a ghost against the dark sky, while trapped in the ice. , I am sure it didn’t look exactly that way to the human eye, but it might have felt like that nonetheless
Posted by: Tullio Emanuele | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 08:42 PM
I think it's an interesting rabbit hole to go down--is using a shutter speed to freeze action that is beyond the human eye somehow not being true to the scene? Photography has long been used to see in a way that our own vision cannot and if it's done well has been used to create great work.
This also goes back to your previous discussion about photographing with an idea in mind and not just wandering around. If we just wander around without an idea, we default into what our cameras tend to decide for us; namely, that hyper-sharp super saturated look.
Personally, I've always been interested in what I think photography does best which is to approximate our human vision to show someone else a scene. I think I'm pretty aligned with you, Mike, on that front--documentary style, street photography, natural light, with as little artifice as possible. We had a period where that was all photography could do easily and so it was the default, which is no longer the case.
A possible antidote--printed out work tends to mute the sharpness and saturation issues. Even out of place dodging and burning I've found to stick out more in a print. More than once I've reverted a highly edited file back to how it looked after fiddling too much when I have a piece of paper in my hands.
Posted by: Craig H. | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 09:22 PM
When I first discovered Ansel Adams's work, I wondered how his photographs could be so sharp. I didn't know that he used a large-format camera, like an 8x10. His pictures looked incredibly and beautifully sharp. There was a sharpness in his pictures that didn't look like that in real life. I found his work to be inspiring because of the overall sharpness of his images the detail in the shadows was amazing. I think when used in the right way, an artist can use that sharpness and shadow detail to fully express his or her vision.
Posted by: Gary Nylander | Friday, 04 April 2025 at 11:56 PM
I am another fan of the Sigma Foveon cameras. I have a Quattro DP3, and every so often I scan the classifieds for a wider angle example, like the DP1 (Merrill or Quattro). I am also a fan of fixed lens cameras.
Anyway the principle seems to be that (like film, only without the expense), the snapper is challenged to create something, by looking and hopefully seeing.
I rarely get away with it, and when I do, it is only my opinion, but surely that is where the fun of photography is. Hunting and shooting where nobody gets hurt.
It is probably different for the professional, who is selling or representing a body that sells images, but I am not one of those.
Posted by: Stephen Jenner | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 12:20 AM
Too much detail? No, all that detail ACTUALLY EXISTS in the subject.
What bugs me is the people that whine that a good lens has no "character". They claim that distorted "swirly" bokeh, or distorted "filmlike" color makes a photo "better". Nope.
Posted by: Luke | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 07:38 AM
Great post Mike…
I hate sharp photos and hate seeing detail that my eye has trouble seeing in the first instance. All my editing is from jpegs and I’m guilty of pushing the boundaries by crushing the blacks and pushing the highlights. My sharpening consists of reducing the clarity and if needed adding some blur. I absolutely love imperfection in an image as a perfect image is impossible to achieve. Wabi-Sabi I think is the term for it.
Posted by: Tom | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 08:43 AM
I struggle to reconcile this with the post only 2 days ago about the monochrome sensor. Cognitive dissonance?
Posted by: Arg | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 09:23 AM
If a frame is "too sharp", you can always soften it in post processing, whether in a digital or wet darkroom, but the flip side does not work - a soft frame cannot be made "too sharp". Therefore the former is always preferable to the latter, as it gives the photographer much more latitude and freedom to realize his vision.
Posted by: Jayanand Govindaraj | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 10:01 AM
As a counterbalance, some of my favorite pictures and ones that people seem to like a lot, were taken with a Holga lens on a Micro 4/3 camera.
Posted by: James Weekes | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 10:31 AM
My final product is a print. Photo paper can maybe resolve 10 lp/mm? Since I mostly shoot 4x5 b/w film and enlarge to (sometimes) 16x20", sharpness is not an issue. Perhaps you should look at the 'excessive' sharpness / resolution of modern sensors as 'headroom' for fine detail. Having your camera automatically record dark scenes brighter than you wish is just the old 'averaging meter' in the 35mm SLR's of the 1970s, to quite getting it 'right'. You don't have to simply accept what the camera gives you...
But most of this question comes from viewing your image file on a monitor at 200% or larger- an interesting (and addictive) practice. But cameras and lenses are designed to make pictures, and analyzing the capabilities of the gear will lead you down rabbit holes like this.
If too much sharpness is a problem, just save your images as jpegs and lookout them on your phone. Problem solved.
Posted by: Mark Sampson | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 05:08 PM
Sharp for sharpness’ sake might compromise the image. Mood, emotion, matter. An architectural photograph on fine grain film, low ISO, stopped down lens, camera on study tripod is a good process. Your child first riding a bicycle at 1/4000s f11 with a modern high contrast aspheric element lens probably misses the moment. Jane Bown liked f2.8 at 1/60s for portraits. That shutter speed affects the interaction of photographer and sitter, and not quite stopping motion. Lately I’ve been using so much Leica’s tiny f5.6 28 Summaron M with its long axis each end light fall off in the 35mm frame, the slight softness to the corners. The 28 Elmarit ASPH is biting sharp. I now only use it when I need the speed, which is almost never.
Posted by: Richard G | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 10:25 PM
Sharpest photographs I have ever ever ever seen were at the Ansel Adams exhibition at Boston MFA.
Smartphone photo sensors transformed into an unprecedented resolution antimatter camera
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250402181314.htm
Sharpness is a bourgeois concept" - Henri Cartier Bresson
Posted by: Kirk Decker | Saturday, 05 April 2025 at 11:13 PM
Your mileage may vary, but if I set my camera (or gopro) to a max iso of 400, they'll usually give me an exposure that matches what I'm seeing as the light fades.
Posted by: Kye Wood | Sunday, 06 April 2025 at 05:01 AM
RE: Stephen Jenner comment on the DP Merrill.
I had all three at the same time. A DP1/2/3 Merrill. No matter how careful I was, on all three cameras, I'd get these random purple blotches, even at base ISO.
I couldn't process the blotches out. And I'm a dab hand at photoshop. If not for that, I'd still have them to this day. But when you randomly get something that cruels a photo (one in four on average), the gear forfeits it's place in your life.
Am hoping the SD1 Merrill doesn't have that issue - given that it has a very different IR filter arrangement compared to the DP's. Because I just found a brand new SD1 for sale at a sane price.
Posted by: Kye Wood | Sunday, 06 April 2025 at 05:09 AM
Too sharp? As several readers have commented, it all depends. If you are a bird photographer, then almost certainly you’ll sometimes need to crop - perhaps substantially. The sharper the original image the more likely the cropped section will be acceptable. If you want to blow up a landscape photo to a wall sized print, again the sharper the better. But for most portraits, probably not.
Posted by: Peter C | Sunday, 06 April 2025 at 08:29 AM
Just my opinion here!
I find some of HCB's photos to be too sharp. Mostly some of those made in the 1970s. For me, they just don't "sing" like his earlier work. I suspect he was burdened by improved optics and anti-reflection coatings. Poor fellow. He probably needed an M-Mount Summar.
Posted by: Kevin | Sunday, 06 April 2025 at 12:03 PM
"Also, if you're tempted to say some version of, 'I want all the information I can get, I can always make the file worse if I want to,' no, no one does that."
But I often do, and am sure many others here have experienced the beauty of sliding that Clarity slider to the left and seen the whole reason they shot that stand of trees reappear onscreen.
Posted by: bob palmieri | Sunday, 06 April 2025 at 11:20 PM
". . . if I'm taking a landscape, and I can distinguish single branches and twigs on trees with my eyes from 80 feet away, is it more accurate or less accurate to have camera system distinguish branches and twigs on trees 600 feet away?"
If I'm taking a photo of a colored subject, is it more or less accurate to have the camera produce a monochrome image?
If I'm taking a picture of a bird 600 feet away, is it more or less accurate for the camera system to produce an image as though I were 10 feet away?
(OK, only a bit over 40 feet away.)
ALL photographs are greater or lesser abstractions from what the eye sees. Somehow or other, our visual systems create a virtual image of our visual field. Although our vision is only really sharp and sees colors in a narrow part of that image. Yet, every part if it seems sharp and colored.
As I pay attention to various parts, my eyes move to focus there, while the virtual image of the rest remains seemingly sharp and colored. There is no bokeh, no blurred background.
And yet, we all accept photos with limited DoF and often with no color as meaningful and useful representations of the world. Your complaints about sharpness and the realism of apparent distance seem minor in comparison.
Which looks most like what a human with normal vision would see, looking at this flower?
Or this?
TOP.jpg)
Personally, I select sharpness based on the subject and how I want it to look. Here are the last two photos I made:
Next to last:
Last:
crTOP.jpg)
Posted by: Moose | Monday, 07 April 2025 at 12:52 AM
Two thoughts come to mind after reading this post, not original in any way, but...
1. Technical sharpness should not be important. What matters to me is the image clarity and that what the subject attracts the eye.
2. Technical sharpness has been a solved problem for ages now. I fail to see the point of going further.
Posted by: Stéphane Bosman | Tuesday, 08 April 2025 at 03:36 AM
I felt the photo Rubicon was crossed when hummingbirds could be shot with perfectly still wings. Those pictures are entirely un-natural and I don't seek to emulate them. I love a sharp body image, but let the wings hum!
Posted by: Jim r | Tuesday, 08 April 2025 at 11:11 AM
I was gifted a D800 and a Fuji X-E1 and lens for each many years ago by some very generous friends. My distinct recollection within a month was the incredible black and white dynamic range (not sure if this is what I mean, but although I am not a high contrast aficionado, the contrast and sharpness could be "pushed" extremely far before anything went to 255) then I learned about myself that this is what I want forever in any camera I use, not extremes of sharpness/contrast necessarily, but this kind of gorgeous WIDE granularity (meat?) between (255) black and white.
Posted by: Nikhil Ramkarran | Tuesday, 08 April 2025 at 11:18 AM
The sharpness of a lens has always influenced how we photograph things. And, as you said, it’s an integral part of our vision or style. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to test the latest lenses. In many cases, they’re clinically too sharp for my taste. By comparison, I’m always pleasantly surprised by how my 70 yr old Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar still produces lovely images…with a nice balance of detail and rendering using my Pentax K-1 II. But I understand the desire for folks to buy the latest and greatest lenses. And if the revenue from lens sales helps keep a camera company profitable, that’s a good thing:)
https://flic.kr/p/2qWybxW
Posted by: Ned Bunnell | Tuesday, 08 April 2025 at 12:16 PM
Interestingly, here's the last photo I shot yesterday:
(Hmmm... How do I insert a shot here?)
[Mike replies:
https://tinyurl.com/2s39rv3b ]
Posted by: bob palmieri | Tuesday, 08 April 2025 at 10:56 PM