So it's been about a month now since I made my optics and over the past couple of weeks i've been out and about trialing each optic with multiple configurations. The easiest way to assess a lenses performance is to take photos of a still scene. In an ideal world I would light an array of objects each with different levels of detail (like feathers, bottles, paper clips, teddy bears) with flash heads and then set my camera up on a tripod and shoot everything very carefully. For me though, I don't have the patience.... so this evening I set up the most basic of scenes outside my flat and took some photos using my first optic, the 50mm F1 non-corrected simplet.
The scene is simple. A ukulele placed at a slight angle, so we can see DOF fall off. A wine bottle with text on the label to help us determine detail and attain focus lock. The background is of the walk way, fading out again showing DOF. From the image plane to the far wall is about 10ish meters I guess. The scene was lit with all ambient light in the evening (no direct sunlight, light bouncing off light concrete walls all around).
The photos were shot on a FULL FRAME camera (important to note) at ISO 200. The aperture stop down discs were replaced each shot with the stop above. I have rings covering F#'s 1 2 4 8 16 with 2.8 and 5.6 added as well as these are popular F#'s to shoot with on SLR's fitted normal lenses. The shutter speed was dictated by the in-body meter.The camera was about 6 inches off the ground mounted to a gorilla pod, and manual focus was set using live view and 5x zoom. 2 second delay was also added to remove any camera shake.
See the results below (click photos to see bigger), analysis to follow in the next post:
 |
| F1 |
 |
| F2 |
 |
| F2.8 |
 |
| F4 |
 |
| F5.6 |
 |
| F8 (something has gone wrong in this one, it doesn't look right) |
 |
| F16 |
