Hacker News Reader

Comment by kajecounterhack | Hacker News Reader

I love my mirrorless, but it certainly wasn't 5 minutes. The first two lenses I tried (cheap ones obviously) were pretty underwhelming. Once I got a large aperture lens, I started to really get it. Even then, so many of my photos came out dark or blurry because I hadn't learned how to pick settings or focus for different lighting conditions and subject movement speeds. Autofocus on consumer cameras is pretty trash compared to iPhone/Pixel. EyeAF my ass.

These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.

View on HN

Lenses make SUCH a difference. A family member asked me to shoot their wedding (no pressure, right?) and since without me it wouldn’t have happened, I agreed. I also rented some L glass for my SLRs, and holy shit was that eye-opening. Turns out that a $2000 lens is objectively better than a $300 lens, who knew?

The clarity, the sharpness, the pop - everything was improved. Good glass is a bigger difference than the body.

Can you say a bit more what you think was the factor?

-- more control of depth of field / shallower DoF ability?

-- faster shutter speeds?

-- less chromatic aberrations?

It doesn't intuitively feel like sharpness should be a factor -- even cheap kit lenses usually get that right.

(Guessing the faster glass.)

* wider f-stop * less chromatic aberration * less distortion generally * smaller circle of confusion

The chromatic aberration is an important but subtle effect. Remember that lenses are multiple pieces of glass, and every interface diffracts the wavelengths of light like a prism. One of the considerations in lens design is converging all those different wavelengths of light in the same place. Not just at one point, but at every point across the image plane.

Poor lenses might do the well in an area. Good lenses do it everywhere.

Sorry, should have clarified. The lens in particular that made me rethink everything else I had was a 70-200mm f/2.8L. Zooms in particular often suffer from sharpness and chromatic aberration issues compared to a prime due to the larger number of optics. This lens did not. I’m sure a comparable prime stuck next to it would still show it up, but coming from kit zoom lenses, it was quite a shocking difference.

The static aperture also helps tremendously of course, yes - nice bokeh with a tight zoom means you can easily get candid portraits that look great from anywhere in the room.

70-200 f2.8 L IS III is the Bentley of lenses, the Aston Martin, the Maybach, etc. you got the best hardware possible for the job. for the price it better be amazing! even the older ones without IS are excellent.

L glass is also a very interesting used market - those things basically don't lose value IME.

It was the IS II at the time, but yes - an absolutely spectacular piece of kit. I think it was about $100 to rent for the weekend? Very reasonable IMO, and made me realize that one could quite easily bootstrap a wedding photography business without actually owning gear.

Other than the actual business side of things, pesky details like getting clients. And the massive stress of shooting a wedding. I was happy to do it gratis for family, but I don’t think I’d want to deal with paying clients.

When I was still shooting Canon, I used a 70-200mm f/4L which I picked up for a song (C$~600 sixteen years ago?). Not the beauty of a 2.8, but having a consistent 4 made for some beautiful shots on Cape Breton.

Lenses affect color contrast too. I don't fully grasp it but internal reflections adding neutral white bias or correction tradeoffs between geometry and color or something. Aperture can be widened as much as lens barrel allows so that isn't it.

Actually this is potentially wrong.

A $300 lens is objectively better than a $5 smartphone lens.

A $2000 lens may be objectively better than a $300 but it depends what you're standing in front of and you.

The Nikkor Z 28mm f/2.8 is my favourite so far and it wasn't exactly expensive.

The priority order for things is of course:

1. What the photographer is standing in front of

2. The photographer

3. The lens

4. The camera

Fair enough; perhaps it’s fair to say that given a specific application or lens type, a more expensive one will generally be better than a cheaper one. For example, you can get any prime or zoom you want from Canon as a normal or L variety. The latter will cost about 10x as much, and will be better. 10x better is subjective.

On the flip side, my favorite macro was a Sigma 105mm prime. Tack-sharp, and cost well under $1000. Of course, I’ve never shot with the equivalent Canon L (which isn’t quite the same at 100mm, but close).

And the light. Good lighting can compensate for not so great sensor

This is also introducing the difference between zoom lenses and prime lenses. You can get a good 28mm lens for much less cost than a good 24-70mm zoom lens. Most novices in photography don't start nowadays with good prime lenses, but with cheap zoom lenses.

The 16-50 that came with my Z50 is really good too.

Great! Inexpensive zoom lenses are getting better all the time. And manufacturing processes are likely also improving. The gap is narrowing.

But, at least today, you still get enhanced features on the more expensive zoom lens, such as wider aperture, and a constant maximum aperture across the entire zoom range. Neither of those things necessarily yields a superior photograph -- you don't need f2.8 across the whole zoom range if you're taking pictures at f6 -- but they can be very helpful. If they're worth paying for depends on one's personal needs, desires, and budget.

>A $300 lens is objectively better than a $5 smartphone lens.

Not sure where you are getting the $5 figure from. In any case, smartphone lenses are manufactured in vastly higher quantities than lenses for interchangeable lens cameras, so it doesn't make sense to compare the per unit cost. Modern smartphone lenses are miracles of optical engineering. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578 The cost of the R&D that's gone into enabling their design and manufacture probably couldn't have been recuperated if they were being used only in cameras.

I feel the same comparing my iphone and mirrorless. It's obvious software is years behind in almost every aspect; even relatively easy fixes like the horrible designed and unintuitive UI choices where the same mistakes are made year after year despite complaints...ugh! The last thing I need when taking pictures is fumbling around in 5 layers of menus to change important settings while my subject moves on and the moment has past. It almost feels on purpose as if the though is that added complexity is some proxy for it being "professional"

If processing power is one of the bottleneck to get some of the features phones can do it would be great if there was a universal hotshoe-like way to mount phones to camera bodies to use the screen, touch capabilities, and offload processing power, maybe with all phones now having USB-C its more of a possibility. If the camera makers don't do it I wouldn't be surprised if Apple/Google eventually do and eat their lunch.

> relatively easy fixes like the horrible designed and unintuitive UI choices where the same mistakes are made year after year despite complaints...ugh!

This is exactly the complaint I have about car manufacturers not having enough / the “right” digital UX experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com