Do not read this propaganda!

Friend of mine sent me this link in a mere attempt to help my addiction (though coming from him was a bit like Keith Richards attempting to lecture on healthy life-style :lol.

http://medfmt.8k.com/b​ronlensenvy.html

[full copy of website page deleted by Pekka: websites are copyrighted material]

Did you have to quote the entire article, including the long string of comments?

Sussman's book is a bit dated now (I have a first printing), and I bet that images that sell in galleries (as opposed to winning contests) are made with non-normal lenses most of the time. And I'll bet that the majority of contest winner used a zoom, though it's possible it was zoomed into the normal range.

One of the reasons I bought into the Pentacon Six lens mount in medium format is that the Inverse Price Law didn't work. The 30mm full-frame fisheye for the Kiev 60/Pentacon Six/Exakta 66 cost me $225 brand new. That's about what I paid for the stunning Carl Zeiss Jena 180mm/2.8 lens in that mount. Just about all the lenses in that line cost about that, except for the normal lenses, which routinely sell for fifty bucks.

And I found the cheaper the fisheye, the more often I use it, so perhaps the law is true after all.

Rick "who owns a lovely Rolleiflex that is unused because all it has is a normal lens" Denney

Rick, some folks may find it interesting and I didn't have time to edit. If moderators find a problem with it, they can and will remove it, leaving the URL link only.

Cheers.

Damn Chancellor, that is one long @ss post. you need a spanking!

Hey, you still read it

sweet jesus. I held down the cruise control on my mx100, and the words started flying by. Two sips of Hawaiian Punch and a bite of rice later, I was almost to the end!

Damn, it does look pretty long. Alright, I'm cutting it at conclusions, if you want all the following correspondence - follow the URL.

Dante King wrote:
Damn Chancellor, that is one long @ss post. you need a spanking!

Man, I have not laughed this hard since high school. Thanks Dante King and Ronald S Jr.

MALI

It would be very interesting to see what percentage of winning images are taken with what lenses these days

If 89% (may not be the precise figure, browser just crashed and about to go to bed so not reopening the window) of the shots were taken with f/3.5 or slower lenses it makes me wonder how many f/2.8 or faster lenses were available in 1973 or earlier? Anyone born before the 80's or with good lens history have any idea?

Also.. I remember reading something on here recently about how in the past few years Canon have released at least tens of zoom lenses sine 1997 and hardly any primes... the availability of quality zoom lenses would appear to have greatly increased in the last decade which one would imagine would influence what lenses are used to take the winning shots

chancellor wrote:
Friend of mine sent me this link in a mere attempt to help my addiction (though coming from him was a bit like Keith Richards attempting to lecture on healthy life-style :lol.

http://medfmt.8k.com/b​ronlensenvy.html

[full copy of website page deleted by Pekka: websites are copyrighted material]

Tell you what - I gte it too- must have this or that lens - then I ask myself which lenses do I ACTUALLY USE more than very rarely the anmswer from all the possible lenses is that I only actually use the 17-40 ( at the wide end usually so thatr's a 28mm really near enough) and the 50mm and the 85. The 70-200 I hardly use at all.

I use the 17-40 and 85mm 80%++ of the time

When you look at all those great shots by those great photogs they are nearly all taken within the 28-85mm range (17-50 range on a 1.6 crop)


The trick is to think less about lenses and get out there and take pics! ( I'm addressing myself here too!)

Jim G wrote:
If 89% (may not be the precise figure, browser just crashed and about to go to bed so not reopening the window) of the shots were taken with f/3.5 or slower lenses it makes me wonder how many f/2.8 or faster lenses were available in 1973 or earlier? Anyone born before the 80's or with good lens history have any idea?

Also.. I remember reading something on here recently about how in the past few years Canon have released at least tens of zoom lenses sine 1997 and hardly any primes... the availability of quality zoom lenses would appear to have greatly increased in the last decade which one would imagine would influence what lenses are used to take the winning shots

I was born in 53, I remember using the nikon 50mm f2, 99% of the time - took some great shots

I never use3d a zoom under 80mm until recently, I mean, how difficult is it to take a few steps back or forward or change a lens? But with the wide angle lenses now better in the zooms than in Fixed FL it seems the only way to go - allthough I still use my 17-40 zoom basically as a fixed 17mm (28 ish in 1.6. crop) rarely actually zooming with it, I change to the 50mm 1.4 or 85 1.8 and will not be buying the zooms that cover that range - The re4ason? I just don'tt like bulky lenses in the short to medium Fls, I think it affects the subject response , if it's human, and is too bulky for landscape, not just the physical bulk but the psychological bulk, I find fixed FLs cleaner to work with

The typical supplied normal on all cameras from the low-end Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL that I owned up through the Nikon F that was the king of the hill at that time was a 50 or 55mm f/1.8. The 1.4 was a commonly available upgrade.

Aaron Sussman didn't write his book about 1973 even if that's when he published it, I don't think. Much of the experience he writes about was from the 50's and 60's. But even in the post-war period, the standard lens on a Leica screw-mount camera was a 2.8, with an f/2 lens being readily available.

Rolleiflexes of the day, however, came in 2.8 or 3.5, with 3.5 being the more affordable (and to some owners, better).

Most consumer rangefinders of the 60's and early 70's had at least a 2.8 lens.

But if the amateur photographers in Sussman's survey (and all he did was report a survey that for all we know may have been conducted in 1947) were probably using either a Rolleiflex, a fixed-lens folder or rangefinder, or a press camera ala Graphic. Only the latter had interchangeable lenses, but most commercial photographers didn't use but one lens. They might have had a Leica, in which case then, as now, additional lenses are prohibitively expensive for most. If the photographers were high-end and were using large-format stuff, then lenses for large format are very much slower to keep the shutters from being too large. For example, I have an 8-1/2" Ilex Paragon (Tessar formula) which is a normal lens for 5x7 format, and it was among the fastest lenses available of its focal length and coverage at f/4.5 in its day. F/6.3 was more common. Despite this, I doubt that the survey Sussman quoted was filled with large-format photographers.

There's a reason why SLR's ended up owning the serious amateur and commercial markets--interchangeable lenses, and the desire to see what the lens sees. During the time of Sussman's experience, however, the SLR was still a toddler, with few in medium format that worked well and even in 35mm amateur-level SLR's were just starting to flourish.

Now that the supplied lens on most cameras right down to the cheapest consumer model is a zoom, I seriously doubt that the survey Sussman quoted would turn out the same today. I do not see photo galleries (where photographs are actually being sold) using the normal lens that much of the time. A lot, yes, but not nearly 87% or whatever.

Rick "who even in 1973 when he bought Sussman's book thought it a bit dated" Denney

I didn't read all of that, just stopped right at the start after reading the numbers.

You know you can interpret statistics many ways, often to support a specific argument. The conclusion here may not be that most pictures are taken with normal lenses but rather that contests (which are mostly run to get great images at low cost for the arranger's marketing) are designed to include as many photographers as possible, thus excluding difficult subjects that demand specialist equipment.

Those numbers are also old, I bet lens use is different today, there are more lenses besides "normal" available at lower cost.

More likely trhat most contests are entered by amateurs who don't have lenses upwards of 200mm


More relevent perhaps would be research that shows what proportion of lens lenghts are used in all PUBLISHED pictures, rather than thosein competeitions