A Modest Contribution to Dispelling Diffractiophobia

The last time I was at the MOMA looking at famous photographs it was Photrio Day, and the only thing anyone was talking about was the lp/mm and MFT of the lenses the photographers used to make them. You never heard so much sneering in your life. No one would even deign to walk over to the Pictorialist area. Anyway, at the end of the day, everyone went home and cleaned their lenses. Those who had Flickr accounts uploaded more pictures of their cat.

Nothing wrong with having nice equipment as long as you don't lose sight of its ultimate purpose.

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Sharpness is not the only goal of photography. And obsessing about image quality at length on the internet (or in magazines, before the internet) can be detrimental to going out and making pictures.

However, it's useful to have rules of thumb about some technical aspects of photography. For example, Sunny-16 exposure, or the guideline of exposure time faster than 1/focal length for handholding a 35mm camera. It's just a guideline: we know (or quickly learn) that most people can't expect to handhold a camera at 1/15 and get consistent unblurred results, but there are times where you might bend the rule of thumb (or brace your camera on a fixed object, etc).

I look at the diffraction guideline similarly. It's just a rule of thumb, not something to carry around in a calculator. Generally I like to stay below f/16 on 35mm, but if I need it, I'll use it.