Tuesday, February 21, 2006

A fast single-coated lens shot in full sun, what's that like?

I like fast lenses, even though I may rarely shoot near-total darkness. I like having the capability on the wide end to reach into shadows and pull out detail. My bias towards fast lenses comes from my days as a photography student, when the only camera I had to shoot with was a YashicaMat 124. It had a very good lens, but I was constantly bumping up against that f3.5 limitation. You couldn't have convinced me back then that 3.5 wasn't slow.



So here are some images, shot with the same CV 40/1.4 SC used in the previous post, in full sun, unfiltered (no UV either), on Tri-X, and processed with a solvent developer, designed to be similar to D76, but to give about a 2/3 stop speed increase over D76.