The Wrong Way to do Lens Testing


So tonight I decided that it might be interesting to see how sharp my four lenses are, and how they react at different apateurs. Good idea. Sadly this good idea was plagued by several bad factors, leaving 30 minutes of picture taking pretty much down the tube.



  • No tripod, everything handheld
  • Nowhere near enough light in the office for anything but a wide open apateur to be effective
  • Forgetting to take the white balance setting off of tungsten when using the flash


So I have 160 or so files taken with different lenses, with different camera settings, all of the same object (a gorgeous Voightlander Bessa-R rangefinder lent to me from dad) that are all either partially shakey or completely shakey (Iwas able to have one shot that was handheld for 1.5 seconds turn out sharp), or an odd blue tinge, sitting on my desktop.


Next time I’ll remember that I’m not a lense tester 🙂


I do want to get a better idea of how the camera and lenses react to different settings, different apateurs, etc. Just have to be smarter about it next time.


To amuse you, here’s a 100% crop (90k) of an image taken with a manual focus 28-80 macro lense, with tungsten white balance, flash, F5.6 @ 150: clicky-clicky.


Funky no? Nice and sharp though…