Thinking about a 135L

Please help! I hope you will understand my poor English....


....so I bought this lens a few days ago. This is my testing photo session... Im really confused by this lens. I expected something superb ... great sharp photos ... but I think this is not what I want..

It is not as sharp as I expected and many of photos are plain in my opinion. Where is mistake? Wrong focused by myself or by this lens? Is this one bad? Could I change this one for another one?

They look fine too me. How do you know it's not sharp? The pictures are too small to see. Where did you focus?

Really? Focused on eyes.... Think it isnt sharp at F/2.... There is this pic on Flickr, you can see full size here - https://www.flickr.com …01362934@N05/16​381848712/

Do you still think its sharp?

Evines wrote in post #17404630
Really? Focused on eyes.... Think it isnt sharp at F/2.... There is this pic on Flickr, you can see full size here - https://www.flickr.com …01362934@N05/16​381848712/

Do you still think its sharp?

Each image appears to be front-focused slightly. The hair on the near side of her face look sharper than her eyes. This is a result of either the lens, the camera, the lens and camera together, your technique, or a combination of any or all of the above. I don't believe it is a result of having a "soft" copy of the lens.

In my experience, auto-focus tends to lock onto the area of highest contrast that is nearest to the camera and in the immediate vicinity of the AF point. You have to also remember that even when using a single AF point, the camera still looks at a small area surrounding that AF point. So, if you attempted to focus on her eye, which happens to be very close to the dark strands of hair against her relatively pale skin, then it isn't uncommon to have the autofocus accidentally choose the hair instead of the eye. In this particular situation, for this particular pose, I would have actually tried to focus on the bridge of her nose. That would have hopefully excluded the nearby strands of hair while still keeping the front eye in focus.

Oh thank you so much for your reply! Your perception about focusing on contrast area is interesting. I will try it with this lens. I use still the same focusing technique, no problem until now, so I thought its because of lens... I will try, thank you

At F2, the DOF is thin if close to the target. Sometimes one eye is sharp clear and the other is not.

Mines sharp needed no afma. Without the full image it hard to ascertain what the issue is. They do look soft, to me.
I the sprit of posting small sections of who knows how big an image.

These do look very soft to me. I know I would not be happy with this result.

Just curious: how do you determine a shot is sharp or soft?

If I focus on eyes, I wanna get sharp eyes - its my criterion of sharpeness Im going to try again and more this weekend, so I hope, I just have bad conditions for shooting before If I look at the pic posted by "Two hot shoes" it looks very sharp cause eyes of the child are sharp. If I compare with my pic above, I can see huge difference, cant you?

I've had nothing but good luck and sharpness with my 135L.... good luck this weekend when you try it again!

Evines wrote in post #17405222
If I focus on eyes, I wanna get sharp eyes - its my criterion of sharpeness Im going to try again and more this weekend, so I hope, I just have bad conditions for shooting before If I look at the pic posted by "Two hot shoes" it looks very sharp cause eyes of the child are sharp. If I compare with my pic above, I can see huge difference, cant you?

So have you tried to compare a shot with live view to a shot through the viewfinder? Tape a bill to the fridge and set the camera up on a tripod and take at least two shots. Live view uses a different focusing system, contrast detect, than through the view finder which uses phase detect AF. If you see a difference, then you need to dial in some MFA.

Evines wrote in post #17405222
If I focus on eyes, I wanna get sharp eyes - its my criterion of sharpeness Im going to try again and more this weekend, so I hope, I just have bad conditions for shooting before If I look at the pic posted by "Two hot shoes" it looks very sharp cause eyes of the child are sharp. If I compare with my pic above, I can see huge difference, cant you?

To be honest, I thought the eyes of your shots look sharp too.

I normally zoom in, say 100% zoom, to see if the focus area is sharp. If after zooming in, the area is still sharp, I claim that is a sharp shot. Seeing them on a desktop is much more reliable than through a web post. That's probably the reason I am not sure if the four shots are sharp or not.

Not sure how this will come out but I used a 70-200 2.8IS Version II hand held with IS on this is zoomed in quite a bit

For me, 1/320s is the limit with the 135L handheld.
But still, this is what I get at that speed and f/2.5 in a 100% view.