Three Pictures Under Discussion

So let's look at a few actual pictures. These all come from the same sharing site and several are made with the same lens, but there's no need to read anything into that.

A digression first
Before I start, though, I just wanted to comment on one thing in passing: in looking for a deliberately soft lens that doesn't go for the analytical/clinical/forensic look, I happened across one of those very cheap third-party manual-focus lenses (I sometimes jokingly call them "fourth-party" lenses—you know, sorta like "off-off-Broadway"—but nobody gets the joke). It only costs around a hundred bucks, and it looks like it might be quite nice for intentionally less-than-sharp portraits.

So then what does the first review say? "This lens is total crap! It's soft at every aperture!"

...Which seems unfair. He's criticizing the fact that the $100 lens he bought is not the same as a $500 lens. Whose fault is that though? His, if you ask me. If you insist on a lens that renders like a $477 Nikkor, then save your money for a bleepin' $477 Nikkor, ya broke-ass, no-cash-having jamoke. Leave the soft $99 lenses to those who are looking for soft lenses.

There, now I feel better.

Picture 1
Okay, now on to the pictures. When you open this first picture, just look at it sitting a normal distance from your screen, without being critical. Pretty standard, right? And looks okay. At a glance, you know what's going on: sharp, in-focus blooms in front, fading into progressively more blur in the distance. So now take a look.

But zoom in by clicking to enlarge it two times, and we find to our astonishment that virtually nothing in the picture is sharp, save a few leaves on the left-hand side of the frame. None of the blooms are sharp, not even the one at the lower right which seemed like the prime candidate at first glance.

But remember 3R prints, the once-ubiquitous standard so-called "drugstore prints" that were 3.5x5 inches in size? This would look fine at that size. Those 3R prints were optimized to mask slop and imprecision of many kinds. It was a system designed to routinely make silk purses out of sow's ears.

Picture 2
Or take this one. Now, in my humble opinion at least, this portrait (which gets the important things right, the expressions and what it implies of the relationships—and it's a nice enough composition, too) has a few more pressing technical problems, specifically a tonal scale that's way too short and what looks to me like a virtual green filter (you can see it in the gums, which should be a much lighter tone that doesn't draw attention, and that characteristic mottling of the skin tones. Light skin often has slight reddish mottling which is nearly invisible, or rather inoffensive, to our eyes, but it's highlighted in an unpleasant way when you make the reddishness darker with a green filter). But again, if you look at it uncritically at the original screen size, it looks fine. But, enlarged, the boy (middle figure) is clearly less sharp than the other two and the face on the left is less sharp than the face on the right.

When I was a custom printmaker (I always said "custom printer" but that was before a "printer" was a black plastic box made by Epson), I would often call clients to inform them that a certain negative would only go to a certain size. My clients were mostly photographers, and they would almost always assume that I was talking about technical parameters. They might reply something like "I've enlarged Tri-X negs from the Hassie to 16x20 before and they looked fine." Sometimes I was indeed talking about technical parameters, such as the size at which a slight touch of camera shake became too obvious. But I was usually using my judgement about the size at which that specific image would most effective. For example, if I were printing this picture, I might suggest a smaller size as the max, to avoid drawing attention to the disparity of sharpness between the three faces. Printing it overlarge would just draw the viewer's attention to the differences in sharpness, and those differences are absolutely immaterial to the picture.

I might even cheat a bit and actually soften the sharpness of the face on the right. Have to be careful with that, though, because that would never be something you want to call attention to.

Picture 3
It's actually not easy for non-specialists to detect very small amounts of blur, whether it's out-of-D-o-F blur or camera shake. I'm more sensitive to it than the average bear*, but I can't claim to be infallible. Sometimes you almost intuit its presence depending on how large you're seeing the image. On this third and final picture, there are three women dressed in blue T-shirts front and center. Look at the middle woman first when you open the link.

She looks fine, right? Comma, at that size. But, again, after you enlarge this and look critically, you can see more easily that she's actually not at the plane of best focus. The woman on the left, with the tiara and the portrait of the photographer in her purple sunglasses, is the most sharp. The smiling woman on the right is now clearly out of the depth of field, even though she's in the D-o-F at the smaller size.

I would probably have simply placed the focus on the middle of the three women and stopped down one more stop. That can sometimes be a bit risky, of course, and I'm betting you know why: because if you misjudge and get the woman closest to the lens—the woman with the tiara—a little too soft, you draw too much attention to that. (As a general rule, subjects closest to camera position need to be sharp, and it can be distracting if they aren't.) Hence the extra stop of increased D-o-F, as a safety margin...assuming I'd have the presence of mind to adjust in the heat of the moment, which I probably wouldn't. But those are the things that experience teaches you to judge.

(Oh, and that "portrait" of the photographer in the sunglasses? I'm betting it's the other photographer. It seems to me that the three ladies are looking at someone taking their picture, and it's not the guy who took this picture. Because of the angle of their heads, I'm betting we're seeing the other photographer in the sunglasses, the one who they're looking at. Just my interpretation.)

How to evaluate your own pictures
So how can you start to get a sense for the optimum sizes of your own pictures? There's actually a pretty easy way, although it takes a fair amount of experience. Assuming your eyesight works for the distances involved and your room is big enough, just fill your editing monitor with the image, and stand up and back away from the monitor! As you move farther and farther away, notice how the image subtly changes and how the level of visible detail gradually diminishes. If you study what you see and learn to "feel into" the image and how it works, you'll start to get a sense of how much each image can take of enlargement, and the way different degrees of revealed detail "work" for that particular picture.

As mentioned above, though, I'd encourage you not to look at mere technical parameters, but rather to look at how the specific image is functioning in terms of content and meaning. All of what we've been discussing is a judgement call, a balancing act, based on what in the picture you want to call attention to, and what would be a distraction that would detract from the picture if it is spotlighted too much. This is influenced by technical parameters but is not a technical issue at root. It depends on each specific picture, and how you want that picture to work.

Mike
(Thanks to Junpei, Jim, and Glen, the photographers of these three pictures)

Ed. note: The second link was missing when I posted this. Gah. Sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

*That's actually a Yogi Bear reference, and if you even recognize that name you're showing your age as badly as I am.  :-)  Five life points if you know who the cartoon bear was named for.

ADDENDUM: Here's some truly trivial trivia for ya. Do you know why Yogi Bear had a collar?

The answer, says Wikipedia, is because it allowed animators to redraw only his head when he was seen speaking, and not have to redraw his entire body. This was a cost-cutting measure by Hanna-Barbera, the studio that produced the cartoon. It reduced the number of frames needed for a cartoon from ~14,000 to ~2,000.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Gavin Paterson: "It’s Yogi Berra, baseball player, but I do have an advantage, as I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Hanna Barbera in the '80s, when we still produced animated series for USA networks, such as the Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, and the Jetsons—now that’s showing my age!"

V.I. Voltz: "Yogi Bear was named after Yogi 'You can observe a lot by just watching' Berra. My kids watch YouTube; we had to make do with cartoons, which, at first, were in black-and-white."

Rob de Loe: "You can do as many of these posts as you like...."

hugh crawford: "I got the bear reference, but you missed the opportunity to call out your Boo Boo. Did you know there is a Daws Butler stream on Spotify?"

Mike replies: I never knew his name before! Thanks for that.

w98abee: "The Yogi Bear reference was like deja vu all over again."

Guy Couture: "Thanks, Mike, for this clear explanation. I think it's the first time I see it explained this way. No doubt you're a good teacher."

Mike replies: Gracias Guy.

Jim Kofron: "Photography is 90% mental, the other half is camera gear...."

Steve Renwick: "The bear's namesake might have said, 'Most pictures are not as sharp as they look.'"

Lawrence Huggins: "Why would you bother to devote any of your time to writing about three such unexceptional photos?"

Mike replies: Because they are...

Cary Talbot: "Nice examples to illustrate your point, Mike. Reminds me of something I read in a photography book by Scott Kelby. He was stressing the importance of zooming in on your image when 'chimping' it on the back LCD to make sure you nailed the focus because 'everything looks tack sharp on a 2.5-inch screen.'"

Mike replies: Yes. And, in like wise, just as with the old 3R prints the small size of a smartphone-as-display masks a multitude of sins.

John Robison: "Ah yes, 3R prints. I well remember an ad by Keystone Camera for a cheap 126 camera, comparing results from it to a Hasselblad. Of course, in a magazine reproduction at a 3R print size, there didn’t appear much difference.

"When working at a camera store, more than once customers would bring in a strip of 35mm negatives with the sample 3R print and ask for a 8x10 enlargement. Grabbing a 10x magnifier would often reveal that the neg was just not up to that degree of enlargement. It was surprisingly hard to explain this to customers. Some would insist that we send in their order anyway. Once a year, at inventory time we always had a box of enlargements refused by customers that were written off and discarded.

Mike replies: They never want to take your word for it, do they?

Comments

[Henri van der Sluis]

Dear Mike
Recently had a simular discussion on this subject in relation to Flickr.
We found that perfectly sharp pictures both on screen and on prints were looking out of focus after being posted on Flickr through Lightroom.
Could be a simular issue in your examples given.
Regards
Henri

[Markus]

Hmm, Mike, the link to the 2nd image seems to be missing.

Re. placing sharpness in the third image: From scrutinizing my own images, I've come to the conclusion that quite often the brightest spot - especially if it's a human figure or face - inevitably draws the eye. So at first hand the autofocus seems to have done a good job. But I agree that carefully stopping down (better two stops) and putting the focus on the middle of the three ladies might have brought all of them into focus - only that overriding the automatic selection of focus points is not always easy, depending on the camera.

[Al]

Yogi Bear was named after Yogi Berra, although I had no clue back in those days of rabbit ears and tinfoil. I have a few years on you. I have that character singed into my brain cells, along with certain other phrases, such as Hey Boo Boo. Also watched way too many Snagglepuss episodes with "Exit, stage left", and, " Heavens to murgatroid".
Oh, by the way. Pssssst. There's no link to Picture 2. At least I didn't see one.
Nice post, as always.

[Kirk Tuck]

I'm sorry Mike. I'm relatively new to all this computer stuff but I can't find a link to your second example to save my life. Do I need to "right" click something to see it? Or am I only to imagine it from your description?

The poignant writing left me thirsty to see the example.

Please let me know how to consummate my encounter with the full power of the post.

[Clay Olmstead]

There's no link for picture #2

Yogi Berra, of course. I feel like I was just having a conversation about him, but maybe that's just deja vu all over again.

Whenever I see photos printed really big, I think of Paul Rand, “If you can’t make it good, make it BIG. If you can’t make it big, make it RED!”

[Rusty]

Link appeared, thanks

[Joe Rukenbrod]

Yogi Berra, is my guess.

[Steve Deutsch]

Yogi Berra

[Thomas Walsh]

I will readily admit that I would never have noticed the things that you pointed out in those three photos. Well, I do see see that #1 is definitely OOF. In a way I am rather relieved that I don't have the ability to be able to analyze at the level you do, Mike. It almost seems that for me it would be a terrible weight to bear. I am not being critical, because I absolutely admire the skill that is involved and the years of work involved to achieve that analytical acumen.

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

Many thanks for the lesson Mike,
Are there any books on the topic of printing, or print making, that discuss these more qualitative aspects of printing? I.e. that go beyond the technical aspects of printing.
I see parallels with learning to take photographic images - one needs to wade through and learn all the technical aspects before you can get started on the creative aspects.
Cheers Ross

[Zyni Moë]

If you look at a photograph at a reasonable subtended angle to your eye (which, for me, is something like π/3 or a little more perhaps) and the things that should be in focus are sufficiently in focus that your eyes can not tell they are not, quite then no-one should care that they are not, quite. If in order to tell that they are not quite in focus you must enlarge the image so it subtends something asymptotically approaching π, then you are not looking at the picture any more: you are obsessing on technical details.

How physically large the image is almost never matters. My prints are 1au diagonal but I view them from my summer home on Mars: the subtended angle is quite reasonable (but variable sadly, also had to demolish Earth to make them which was annoying but, I will not miss it.)

[Dave G]

A motto to live by ",When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

[Alan]

I like the ephemerality of images and prefer a softer lower contrast image than most digital lenses produce. I enjoy it when an image is just sufficiently sharp to work, I want it to dissolve if someone tries to zoom in - poof gone - not allowed do that ;) you just have to accept it for what it is.
Old film lenses generally get me there

[terence morrissey]

I recently made some 12x18 inch prints from a personal project, you can really see how the lens performs in a print vs staring at a screen.
Today, 12x18 isn’t considered large for a print.

[c.d.embrey]

Mike said but nobody gets the joke.

Many got the joke. They didn't laugh because that would just encourage you 8-)

Yogi Bearra

[John Y]

This is my practice, and I'm interested in others' opinion: My default zoom-in level in Lightroom is 66%, not 100%. I judge sharpness, apply sharpening and apply noise reduction mostly at this level, not 100%.

[Mike Ferron]

Ok Boo Boo I may or may not be smarter than the average Berra but I am not going near that extra point quiz.

[Patrick]

You mean everyone doesn't immediately get the Yogi Bear reference? I am getting old.

[Moose]

". . . a tonal scale that's way too short . . ."

I disagree. Look at his other stuff. This guy has a lot of control of tonality. It's my bet that this look is intentional. It's not just short, it's intentionally compressed highlights and shadows around a modestly contrasty mid-range.

I wouldn't do it, but I find it quite effective, as art, if not journalism.

[Moose]

"Five life points if you know who the cartoon bear was named for."

I can't Berra to lose those points!

It ain't over 'til it's over, fat lady or not.

[Moose]

"This is influenced by technical parameters but is not a technical issue at root. It depends on each specific picture, and how you want that picture to work."

Indeed. If I were concerned about tack sharp focus on all three, I'd activate focus bracketing, and make them all super sharp.

OTOH, under the above rubric, I notice that the woman on the right, slightly OoF has more attractive rendering. If I were doing it, I'd look for slightly softer rendering for all three.

[Joseph Kashi]

Presumably Yankees catcher Yogi Berra

[Tom Burke]

Hmm - interesting. I presume that you chose three images taken with the same lens as a way of equalising one of those technical factors you mention?

I was particularly struck by #1, as I've taken a lot of (very) similar images.... It certainly needed a different aperture - on a 6D I would have gone to f8 for this image. There's not a huge amount of resolution in a 6D so diffraction limitation isn't that much of an issue.

As regards the second image, it might be interesting to learn at what stage in the process the image was converted to monochrome - in-camera, or in post - and if in post, how it was done, i.e. using a pre-set in the software or home-cooking, as it were. But I bow to your greater knowledge of skin tones - I don't think I've done a mono portrait since I stopped using mono film!

One final thought - two of the images definitely and I suspect the third as well were taken with full-frame DSLRs, which are actually a lot less forgiving of depth of field issues than APS-C or micro4/3 (let alone smartphone cameras). However, if the images will mostly be viewed on low-resolution devices, the problem becomes much less visible. It's only experienced pernickety perfectionists with traditional skills who raise these issues!

[Jim Fellows]

Hi Mike,

This reminds me of the line form Tootsie:

Rita: I'd like to make her look a little more attractive, how far can you pull back?
Cameraman: How do you feel about Cleveland?
Rita: Knock it off.

Jim Fellows

[Rob]

For my 5 points - Yogi Berra. Great article Mike.

[JOHN B GILLOOLY]

These last two posts have been very interesting and though-provoking. I never really considered the implication of sensor resolution on depth of field. I've been wanting to send you a picture from a particular camera and lens combo that I've been shooting with quite a bit. I would love to hear your description of the lens, sensor, format and color characteristics of this particular set-up. Let me know if you are up for that and I could select maybe 3-5 images? Ideally I would strip away the exif data!

[Doug Reilly]

This was a fun exercise, Mike. I really enjoyed the mini photo crit. I love to hear your printmaker's expertise on these.

[Alan]

I'm trying to stop myself from buying any more cheap film era primes but I recently spotted some Chinon lenses and after reading that they're soft and generally not very good I read up on the company as well as I could and bought a 28mm f2.8 and a 50mm f1.4 in PK mount and a cheap adapter to enable me to use them on my Sony A7.

They're both perfectly useable lenses and in very good condition and actually they could have been made last year not decades ago.

The 28mm has mushy corners but that doesn't always matter and the 50mm is as far as I can see pretty vice less with only nit picking f1.4 bokeh with a messy background to fall back on.

These cheap lenses have quickly become favourites with the only annoyances being that they have different filter thread sizes and the controls are reversed one to the other which seems strange for two lenses from the same manufacturer and in the same mount but I've decided that these are loveable quirks and not annoying drawbacks.

[Markus]

Re #2: In my eyes, this image suffers from severe oversharpening, especially visible in the face on the right - both the normally barely visible skin hair and the outline of the teeth is accentuated quite harshly.
Processed less harshly it makes a fine portrait of this group, but as you've observed correctly in image #3, stopping down a moderate degree would have helped.

[Peter]

Thank you for this lesson, interesting

[John Baker]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for a very helpful article. I notice this alot in my own photos: looks sharp fitted to my monitor, not so much at 100%. And, it still always comes as a surprise; darn, nice photo, but no longer usable.

BYW, the bear reference feels like déjà vu all over again.

[Alex Mercado]

Phil Rizzuto

;)

[Joseph Iannazzone]

I’m proud of my age. Of course I recognize the name and know he was named after Yogi Berra, the NY Yankees hall of fame catcher from the 50’s and 60’s.

[Phil Stiles]

Mike, I once had a portrait of a minor celebrity where I cursed at myself for missing the focus on the eyes. It turned out to have a long career as a thumbnail.
Yogi Bear must have been named after Yogi Berra, although I never made that connection until now.
"If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."
Yogi Berra.

[Dan Khong]

It might be my imagination but I have found that B&W pictures are more forgiving of unsharpness than colour ones.

[Sroyon]

As a kid growing up in India in the 1990s, I watched a lot of Yogi Bear - and Bugs Bunny, Dick Dastardly and various other yesteryear cartoons - on cable TV (Cartoon Network). I recognised the reference immediately!

At some point the channel caught up with the times and started showing Pokémon and stuff. Me and all my friends hated it, and would wax nostalgic about the good old days of Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros (a bit funny now to think of ten-year-olds talking about the good old days). But now I have a better appreciation for anime and other styles of animation which are different to what I grew up watching.

[Bruce Bordner]

You really show a portrait orientation - you seem to prefer a single focus or small group. Any minor problems (or artistic choices) are amplified disproportionately by increasing size. So there's a maximum comfortable viewing size. I usually live in the 14-20mm FF wide angle landscape orientation where I get lots of detail and DoF is plentiful. So I love 20x30" prints and zoom in endlessly. However, there's very little focus in the artistic sense, so pick your mess...

[Chris C]

The third party lens market is certainly interesting. I recently got myself a manual only macro from Laowa (Venus Optics) and apart from the lack of electronics of any kind ( my camera can’t even see the aperture setting), it is certainly a quality lens, both optically and physically. Given the absence of motors and circuit boards, it is also remarkably slim.

If you are prepared to forego the electronics, there are certainly some lenses out there that are worth giving a try.

[Joel Kirsh]

Hi Mike,
Although there was a lawsuit involved, it seems the cartoon Yogi was named for the great NY Yankee catcher Yogi Berra. Berra sued but was unsuccessful. Berra apparently received his ‘Yogi’ moniker from the seated cross-legged position he assumed while waiting on deck to bat.

[robert quiet photographer]

interesting read, thanks for it. I rarely print large, love small prints we can have in our hands but this notes and the suggested exercise are very usefull in the cases I make large prints for exhibitions. I'll try it.

[Robert Pillow]

So I guess you wouldn't like this picture:

https://www.photo.net/photo/18650569

[No, I think that works.

With every picture it's really just a question of whether the photographer gets it the way s/he wants it, and then if others think it works for them too. Liking pictures is kind of like liking songs. Some work for some people, some for others; some work for most people and some work for few. But it's all in the "chemistry," so to speak, and it's an individual thing. --Mike]

[Robert Pillow]

So I guess you wouldn't like this picture:

https://www.photo.net/photo/18650569

[No, I think that works.

With every picture it's really just a question of whether the photographer gets it the way s/he wants it, and then if others think it works for them too. Liking pictures is kind of like liking songs. Some work for some people, some for others; some work for most people and some work for few. But it's all in the "chemistry," so to speak, and it's an individual thing. --Mike]

Thanks. Identifying the goal of your photograph before you shoot sounds so lofty, but if I think about what I want before I leave the house, so to speak, and I get what I seek, then I am immensely satisfied. (The tulip outing went as planned.) The trouble is when I go out with a pre-conception, but cannot achieve it because reality refuses to accommodate my “vision”. It's frustrating. I find in those situations it's best to look around for something else. Sometimes, the spontaneity is its own reward. The rest of the time I am more than satisfied.

[Ernest Zarate]

Yogi Bear was named for the famous New York Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra, #8. Berra in turn was famous for his quotations. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” “It ain’t over, til it’s over.” “Its deja vu, all over again.” (More info here: https://yogiberramuseum.org/about-yogi/yogisms/ )