do you spend a lot of time worrying about sharpness ?

DREW WILEY · Aug 16, 2016

I once spent two hours straight inspecting a genuine Vermeer painting in the National Gallery. He was a genius at making very sharp paintings which
accurately simulated some of the inherently unsharp characteristics of human vision.

Alan Johnson · Aug 16, 2016

For prints SQF appears to be nearest to an objective measurement:
http://www.imatest.com/docs/sqf/

Jim Noel · Aug 16, 2016

No, in fact currently i use all lenses wide open, especially my soft focus one. I spent 40+ years worried about sharpness, now I concern myself with the image.

Gerald C Koch · Aug 17, 2016

DREW WILEY said:
I once spent two hours straight inspecting a genuine Vermeer painting in the National Gallery. He was a genius at making very sharp paintings which
accurately simulated some of the inherently unsharp characteristics of human vision.

Vermeer "cheated" a bit as it has been recently determined that he used a type of camera obscura of his own devising. This enabled him to show things in correct perspective and detail.

Gerald C Koch · Aug 17, 2016

Whether you show fine detail in a photograph or not depends on what you want to emphasize. Is the detail the point of the photograph or is there another subject. Showing too much detail can actually detract from a photograph's impact. The eye concentrates on a particular detail and misses the big picture.

One of the intents of Pictorialism is to de-emphasize any extraneous detail. It is not the intent just to create out-of-focus images. Consider a image of a ship. When you show a lot of detail the image is of a particular ship. With detail removed the ship becomes ALL ships.

DREW WILEY · Aug 17, 2016

I've got a lot of respect for anyone who can sort all of this out according to specific visual strategies. But I don't have much patience for manifesto
stances like the olden fuzzy-wuzzy Pictorialism versus f/64, or now the idiotic statement that its the subject that counts, not the quality of printing.
That's like saying you can play a tune using a lawnmower. And it's not always about distinctly in-focus versus distinctly out-of-focus, like subject
versus background blur. You can have all kinds of shades of gray in between, for example, the whole scene seemingly in focus, but with just a bit
of extra edge where you want the eye subconsciously directed first. View camera technique is especially nice for this kind of thing.

Wallendo · Aug 17, 2016

I generally try to maximize my exposure and focusing whenever I shoot, but don't generally worry about sharpness in particular, unless I have previsualized the image in a way that requires maximum sharpness. In those cases I will preselect a lens and film to maximize sharpness, and probably use my Mamiya m645. Generally, however, I prefer to shoot TX400 in 35mm where the grain of the film will provide a sense of "sharpness" to a less than ideally sharp image.

In response to the initial question: "Do you send a lot of time worrying about sharpness?" The quick answer is no, I don't waste my time worrying about it. If I lived in the Rockies or Alps and shot 8x10 large format I might worry more about such things. I live in the Appalachian mountains which are far more ancient and therefore more rounded and even the peaks are tree covered and razor-like sharpness does not enhance the photos I take.

NJH · Aug 17, 2016

I agree with pdeeh's response early in this thread, its a digital obsession because high pixel count sensors these days are pretty brutal to lenses when zoomed in 100% on screen. I can't blame people for that but it gets really silly when guys do extensive comparisons of various Leica lenses for example and obsess about tiny differences between them.

I do spend quite a bit of time these days obsessing about light, I mean really obsessing about it, seems to me that many of the attributes of sharpness and tonality that people like in outdoor photography is very much down to the quality of light.

LAG · Aug 21, 2016

One blurry photograph could be a mistake, 12 an experiment, 36 a style

wiltw · Aug 21, 2016

I find it an iteresting dichotomy that folks worry so much about sharpness -- even for portraiture -- and yet we have lenses from portraiture which were deliberately 'soft focus' designs, and we used soft focus filters over lenses when soft focus lenses were not made to fit a particular camera.

I guess the modern photographer is into seeing the insides of the pores.

dpurdy · Aug 21, 2016

I have on numerous occasions waved a bit of cellophane under the lens on the enlarger while printing portraits. My Rollei lens is too sharp.
I was recently showing my spouse a print of a patterned squash I shot on 8x10 that I really liked. She said "not my favorite". I asked why. She said it isn't sharp.
She was right I shot it nearly wide open.
Last week I shot a set of portraits and facility images for a therapeutic massage place. Digital Nikon job. I thought it was good work. The client thought it was too sharp. He wanted a dreamier look.

Old-N-Feeble · Aug 21, 2016

If sharpness and contrast aren't important then I wonder why lens makers have been spending so much time and money improving those optical traits since the invention of the very first lens.

tedr1 · Aug 21, 2016

.............because it is easy to make a sharp image blurred, but (almost) impossible to make a blurred image sharp. Lens makers deliver the maximum sharpness the photographer can afford, and it is then up to the photographer how much blur to use.

Old-N-Feeble · Aug 21, 2016

You're describing an Imagon or similar style lens?

blockend · Aug 21, 2016

Photography is applied in different ways. For medical analysis or aerial reconnaissance the more information a photograph reveals the better. For the kind of photography most people here are interested in, the aim is to elicit an emotional response. Visceral responses may be prompted by detail, but creative photography is basically about abstraction, turning the world into some kind of 2-dimensional personal expression, and sharply defined detail isn't necessary to get that kind of reaction.

bdial · Aug 21, 2016

Sometimes I spend too much time worrying about sharpness, other times not enough.
I try to get a reasonable average.

Athiril · Aug 21, 2016

I like to know what I can achieve with my equipment so I test and optimise, but otherwise I'll just whatever I do have to their best potential I can get out of it without worrying too much. Just maximise what I can get and forget and shoot.

Terry Breedlove · Aug 26, 2016

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept
– Henri Cartier Bresson

darkosaric · Aug 26, 2016

Terry Breedlove said:
Sharpness is a bourgeois concept
– Henri Cartier Bresson

Bresson was French, and we all know what happened to French bourgeois in 1789 !

Bob Carnie · Aug 26, 2016

LAG said:
One blurry photograph could be a mistake, 12 an experiment, 36 a style

Nicely stated

DWThomas · Aug 26, 2016

Enh, I'm retired for over a decade, I try to not to spend a whole lot of time worrying about anything! I have accumulated some decent, if not top of the line photo equipment and try to remember to focus when using the manual stuff. I also shoot some pinhole work and accept what comes out. For most things I lean toward sharp results (the olde engineer in me perhaps), but if lighting or circumstances call for wide apertures and/or slow shutter speeds, I'll do it and see what happens rather than just skip the shot.

Had an incident last week trying to shoot a sculpture in a gallery with my Argus C3 and FP4 -- in trying to hold the camera against something to steady it, my knuckle intercepted the moving shutter cocking lever (a C3 hazard) resulting in gross overexposure *and* gross camera motion. I certainly didn't get what I was after, the subject is unrecognizable, but it is a sort of interesting abstract!

do you spend a lot of time worrying about sharpness ?

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