Down the peeping rabbit hole
How to destroy the love of a lens
When I was a kid, my father had all manner of high-end stereo equipment. His prized Fisher amplifier had this fascinating magic knob called “Z-Matic.” I once asked him what that did. He said it fine-tuned the music to make it even clearer and crisper.
So we were listening to something by Vivaldi (it was always Vivaldi) and he told me to listen closely as he turned the knob one way then the other.
“Hear that? Now you know what it does.”
“OK, yeah,” I said as I heard no difference at all.
From that point forward, I stopped listening to the music but just to the notes as I twiddled the Z-matic knob. I was convinced that the knob connected to nothing or my parents were hiding some dreadful problem with my hearing. No matter—I no longer could enjoy music played through that amplifier.
Decades later, I am on a bucket list to The Wave in Utah with my Fujifilm X-T5. To lighten my load for hiking, I took just one beloved lens: the Fujinon 16–80mm F4 zoom. That’s a great all-purpose travel lens if you go minimalist. I loved the images I got that included a few wall-worthy zingers.
After the trip, I read a review of the lens. Soft at both ends of the zoom range. Can’t resolve the camera’s 40MP sensor. Not five stars. Not as good as this lens or that lens. Not the best.
So I went down that photographer’s rabbit hole: pixel-peeping. A second pass on my bucket list images, this time at 100% and 200% zoom, indeed were a bit soft on the edges at 16mm wide angle and at 80mm zoom. Leaves looked a little indistinct. These defects were only noticeable at 100% rendition and above but the damage was done. I even started looking at 300% zoom, which only made the wound worse.
My relationship to the lens forever changed. I began treating it like a wild animal treats an offspring that’s been handled by humans. It was tainted.
When I used the lens, I deliberated about sharpness and forsook composition. I wouldn’t use the shoulders of the zoom range even when I would get best composition. I felt this lens, once a reliable extension of arm, eye and brain, was now alien to me.
A recent article claimed that no one ever won a contest because of sharpness. Yes, there are those gigapixel images of a cityscape that hold up to zooming in until you can see some old man hanging out an apartment window. But that’s not the goal of the creative photography most of us do.
Learning to love my soft-on-the-edges lens again is taking persistence and concentrating on the image, not the pixels. And I began noticing that many acclaimed photographs weren’t that sharp.
I invested in an AI sharpening program. It has helped my relationship with this lens by giving me some latitude to get past its putative deficiences.
Most of what I show now is online. I’ve sold images to magazines (which did help redeem the lens as the editors were more interested in content than sharpness). I fret less about sharpness but I still find myself pixel-peeping at times.
Notes are not music. Pixels are not art. Better cameras and better lenses can help a photographer technically but the artistry doesn’t live in the machine.
I’ve resisted the urge to buy a lens with a higher sharpness rating. More effort to find great locations and great light as well as being more intentional in what I capture is my path forward.
A machine’s prowess—or lack of—isn’t what actually limits me. I am the limit, not soft edges.
The love for this lens isn’t fully restored but we are getting along much better.
