Favoured Focal Length
June 5, 2008
The post you are looking for can now be found here.
My photography posts were getting lost among my technology and other content. It made more sense to move them across to a dedicated website, particularly as I plan to post a lot more on photography, initially majoring on the issues around sorting out a practical workflow for digital photography.
That is how the exposures website came about.
Do please visit it. If you are a bona fide photography blogger yourself and would care to link to exposures I will be delighted to reciprocate.
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I wondered whether it was common for lenses that were fine with 35mm film cameras to be shown up as bad performers on switching to a DSLR. I found this illuminating comment in a forum posting.
“Modern sub-frame dSLRs have several characteristics that make them different than 35mm film SLRs. The biggest is that the image sensor/size is much smaller than a 35mm frame. While this results in extra magnification for tele work like wildlife and turns your 50mm into an 85mm, it also means you are cropping the image, and hence being a lot harder on the optics.”
Yes, of course he’s right. My Sony A100′s small sensor is “pre-cropping” every shot and exaggerating the lens’s deficiencies. Obvious when you think about it. And it explains why Ken Rockwell (see link in main blog post) finds situations where a cheap lens can do better on a full frame DSLR than a more expensive lens on a small-sensor DSLR.