Ever since I started getting interested in photography, I began to read reviews, reports and forum opinions about supposed good and bad lenses. Sharp lenses, high contrast lenses, lens resolution and so on and so forth. I even gazed blankly at a couple of charts and graphs, which I’m sure have all sorts of scientific backing behind them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one for proclaiming that “I ain’t much for book learning” – I’m sure that the science behind lens sharpness, contrast, chromatic aberration, and so on, is sound as a pound. But really, who’s got the time for all of that?

The other areas that I studied, were photographic blogs and online forums. This  was a particularly useful source of user experience to do with all things camera and lens related. Especially when it came to legacy lenses, such as no longer produced manual focus lenses, There was much talk about sharpness, soft corners, improvements when stopping up and stopping down, sharpness at macro level, less sharpness at infinity. There was also some comment about ‘batch variation’.

Some lenses were apparently  better in their early incarnations, whereas others were supposed to be better if they were the ‘later model’, or if they were from a production run signified by a certain set of serial numbers.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that this is one of my favourite images. It was produced by an early version of an Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm f1.4. Yes, the lens has a silver nose and isn’t the multi-coated version. But, for me, it’s a great lens. Especially for black and white photography.

Your mileage, as they say on the forums, may vary.