A Year with Zeiss Lenses

More than a year had passed since I started migrating to Zeiss lenses – and I still couldn’t be happier. This, together with the Canon 5DS R completely transformed how I approach my subjects. The resulting files reflect what I see and how I see it. Every time. No additional frills that need to be edited out in post.

Fall Morning

Fall Morning

No matter if I work slowly and deliberately under a dark cloth, tethered to a MacBook Air, or – as it was the case with the above image – shooting handheld from a moving boat. The images are always stunning. I’ve never been so satisfied with any photographic equipment. These words shouldn’t be taken lightly – I’m an extremely hard-to-please man.

The only thing I miss with this setup is movements. A few degrees of tilt/swing here and there, plus a couple of millimeters rise/fall/shift could save the day sometimes. Well, if you think that I’m exploring the possibilities in this area, you are right. But more on my findings later.

Flaming Fall Forest

Tilt-shift lenses help you to use perspectives impossible to obtain with normal ones.

The maximum 12mm shift on my Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II lens helped me to tame the strongly converging trees resulting from an upward pointed lens – but still keep some from the convergence, which makes this image work for me.

Flaming Fall Forest

Flaming Fall Forest

Colors from the Canon 5DS R and Capture One Pro 8 combination are just lovely (unfortunately you won’t see their full glory on an sRGB web image).

On the downside of things, the camera clearly outresolves the lens – which is a pity, as this is the best wide angle tilt-shift option currently available. Once the 24 TS was my very best lens, but today with the 5DS R all my Zeiss, Sigma and most Canon optics are better.

But regardless of the resolution difference, there are situations when the perspective control capability is a must, and in these cases the 24 TS comes out of the bag.

Shot tethered to a MacBook Air 11″ running Kuuvik Capture 2.1.1 beta. I’ll post about the whole rig I’m using for landscape shots during the coming days.

The Circle

I love the 5:2 aspect ratio. And I dislike the majority of the “trees from below” kind of images. But this afternoon I was unable to resist the temptation to turn my pano shooting rig upwards – the scene was simply too graphic to ignore.

The Circle

The Circle

And like all of my 5:2 images, this one really shines on a 40 cm x 1m print.

“Damn, I Would Need a Tilt/Shift for That”

I can’t remember how many times I had to say the above… Until my 24mm TS-E lens arrived, of course. This is a kind of scene that you can’t photograph without such a lens (OK, you can do that with a 2m ladder). The other option would be perspective correction after the fact – losing substantial amount of resolution. But for a stunning 40 x 60 cm print you need the resolution.

Because of the slight overexposure I employed here (to add to the glowing fog feel), there was some cyan CA at high contrast edges along the top 1/5 of the image (the lens was shifted a lot), but nothing that can’t be corrected quickly in post.

I must admit: the TS-E 24 is my favorite landscape lens.

The Dividing Line