The pop has little to do with wide open aperture, don't you find? I find that lens aberrations make it harder to achieve.

Exactly so! When I shot on film (for a newspaper) we didn't even really worry about which camera or lens we had, beyond the basic focal length thing. We just grabbed one and shot, thinking momentarily about our film choice.

Thanks! She looks a bit crazed in the other, but IIRC she was chasing a fly. All our geeky arguing aside, you really can't go wrong with any of these nice lenses.

The rest is all about subject, light, composition, and technique.

Thanks for going a bit further to explain.

First, on a point of logical consistency: If you are as willing to remove lens characteristics in Photoshop as you say, you are no doubt willing to add them. In which case any lens can be made to look like you shot at f/1.2. Follow this route and there's little point arguing the merits of different glass. The glass matters very little compared to the vast world of digital manipulation.

An argument for the light capture benefits of f/1.2 runs up against engineering realities. The benefits of have been shown to be minimal or non-existent. It's hard to be sure in this case since Pentax is not forthcoming about their lenses (as John remarked above). But we can be pretty darned sure this is not a T1.2 lens. The benefits of squeezing out every extra third-stop of light might have made some sense in the film era (though I doubt it). It makes very little sense in the digital era when we are no longer effectively limited to ASA400.

In any case you might have misunderstood what I meant when I said that f/1.2 is a gimmick. The implication is not that gimmicks serve no purpose... obviously they do. What does dictionary.com have to say?

As a point of fact I own TWO f/1.2 lenses. Just in case you think I am taking a shot at owners of such glass. I'm not. But when I take a shot with a gimmick I make no bones about it. OK, you prefer to call it "artistic effect". We're talking the same thing.

Outside our own personal practice, it's of interest to me to see how such gimmicks -- ahem, "artistic effects" -- have come in and out of fashion at various times in photographic history. For example, sometimes people have wanted soft images, going to extremes to get the right effect; other times they have pixel-peeped to confirm exacting standards of sharpness.

My own preference is to capture what I see. I manipulate the image to conform to what is in my mind's eye, filtered inevitably by the passage of time and effects of memory. I am not really interested in what the machine called a camera sees, or the various "effects" it might apply. I use tools; I don't want them to use me. (Cyborg transforms and McLuhan's media relationships aside for the moment.)

It's essentially a geek's pursuit to say "Oh look how fast my lens is". Or "look at the bokeh swirl". It's not so fashionable to say "look at what my PhotoShop lens blur filter can do, when I apply it in a separate layer and composite with this particular mask here."

But there is no essential difference at all.

Back to the point of the thread. Shot at f/2.4 to f/4 the FA43 Limited renders beautifully as I happen to see the world, with no overt gimmicks at all. The K or A 50mm stopped down does a good job as well, but is needlessly big in comparison, and furthermore sacrifices AF for those who might use it. One would be better off getting a Zeiss.

Hey, Smeg, thanks for making my point for me.

Not that these aren't all immediately "bad" photos, but they are far from how good they would have been at a more reasonable aperture. Coma, halos, fringing... it's all here.

I think that a tech would disassemble the lens to get to the offending piece of glass. I also recall something about chemical baths. If the lens is worth saving I would have a professional deal with it.

Of course, some people like lack of detail, coma out the yin-yang, no discernible depth of field, collapsed dynamic range, and so on. Some people like gimmicks.

I agree. The f/1.2 thing is a gimmick. If you want portraits you've got the FA43 in that bracket.

The Distagon 25mm is not well liked, I thought? You could instead grab the Distagon 21mm and get some much needed width.

If you were using Micro-Four-Thirds you could use the Zeiss M lenses. 18/35/50 set runs about $3200 at B&H.

Vivitar made some excellent lenses. The Close Focus variants of the 24mm and 28mm focal are examples. Some of the non-CF lenses too, so long as they were not made past the mid-eighties.

Hope my page helps.

Except you've still got the A50 because you took the photo with it.

Not too rash IMO. 35, 50, 55 totally redundant. I'd want something wider and longer but that doesn't suit you so much so...

Job Done!

If you don't want to be stuck with any one provider and their Terms & Conditions, the best solution is TroveBox. It's not much of a social network, however. And sharing is restricted to Facebook, Twitter, and email. Unless you use their API directly.

Most sites have a similar clause. Otherwise they couldn't actually display content you submit for public distribution without being in violation of your copyright. Note that they can only use the content "in connection with the Site and the Service". They can't sell it on or anything. The backup clause is also required for server services as simple as caching.

The only way around this, really, is to host everything on your own server.