Richard & Caroline's Blog

Most people think of the standard lens as the old 50mm, but what do we mean by a standard lens. Well there are a number of definitions.

Most of the books state that a standard lens is one that produces a field of view similar the human eye.

A simple statement except that the human eye and brain is a decidedly different concept. We can concentrate on a small object in the landscape or sweep our eyes across a majestic vista. This gives us the impression of going from a telephoto to a wide angle in a single moment. The camera is a much more simple affair.

One is often better to consider perspective. It turns out that a lens of a focal equal to that of the diagonal of the 35mm piece of film (or full frame sensor) produces a very natural perspective and field of view.

So what focal length should a standard lens be; well it turns out its about 43mm. As far as I am aware only one manufacture made a 43mm lens and that was Pentax.

So a standard lens could be considered either a 35mm or 50mm lens. Depending on whether you want something slightly wider or longer.

For Medium Format users then they generally use a 75mm standard lens, and for Large format users, well thats a topic for another post.

If your after a very high quality compact camera then the Sony RX1 is the king, but with a full frame DSLR price tag.

For me its biggest shortfall is the lack of a built in viewfinder.

One of the best Compacts around has been the Fuji X100, it had issues with focus speed but with the latest firmware its a good little camera but out classed in the focusing stakes by just about every other manufacturers offerings.

Well we are promised that they now have the best focusing around with the recently announced X100s.

I love its traditional format and optical viewfinder, lets hope that the third party RAW processors get better as it now has the latest iteration of the X Trans sensor.

Check out the following site for more details:

www.cbphotoblog.com/

If your interested in more information on the sensor and some background in the processing of its RAW file then check out:

http://chromasoft.blogspot.co.uk

Profiling is considered by many to be a bit of a dark art. I experimented recently with creating some custom camera profiles and comparing them with the camera profile built into Adobe Lightroom.

It always used to be the case that to get the best, a home built profile always gave you the best results, but now I like the results with the default Adobe Profile. I am not sure if it is better or if my test card is getting a bit faded and needs replacing. They recommend replacing every year, but mine is about five years old now. I’ll borrow a new one and retest, I have also run off a few prints using both profiles to see which I like best.

 

These two close ups have been calibrated for the web on a sRGB profile but even so I prefer Adobe’s profile, but to my eyes, both look a little off, with the Adobe profile being a little to Magenta and the Custom profile being to yellow.

While doing these tests it made me think about all the elements of profiling from Camera, Print and Screen, its an area that many struggle with. I’ll write some more about this soon.