Mirek’s Photo Blog

I have been using the 17-40 for several years. I liked this lens a lot, especially its color and contrast. Unfortunately, I do not use flash and even for hand hold nature shots I frequently use polarizer and therefore I prefer faster lenses. As a result, the 17-40 usually stayed at home. I recently got the 16-35 and kept them both for few weeks to compare.

Some data from the Canon web site:

Focal Length & Maximum Aperture	17 - 40mm; 1:4	16-35mm f/2.8
Lens Construction	12 elements in 9 groups	16 elements in 12 groups
Diagonal Angle of View	104° - 57° 30′	108°10′-63°
Closest Focusing Distance	0.28m / 0.9 ft.	0.92 ft./0.28m
Filter Size	77mm	82mm, P=0.75mm/1 filter
Max. Diameter x Length, Weight	3.3" x 3.8", 1.1 lb. / 83.5 x 96.8mm, 500g	3.5 in. x 4.4 in./88.5mm x 111.6mm, 640g

The Testing

I compared both lenses at on 35, 24 and 17mm at f/4, the widest opening of the 17-40 and f/8, which should be close to optimal on both lenses. I also looked at performance of the 16-35 at f/2.8 and briefly compared both lenses to the EF 35/1.4L. I shot everything in raw on Canon 5D and processed in Adobe Camera Raw with sharpening turned off.

The Results

Color and Contrast

The color and contrast are excellent with both lenses. The 17-40 shows little bit more vignetting.

Sharpness - Pixel Peeping at 100%

Focal length	Center	Corners
17mm	The performance of both lenses is about the same	16-35 is significantly better
24mm	16-35 is slightly better	16-35 is slightly better
35mm	16-35 is significantly better. The difference disappears at about f/8	The performance of both lenses is about the same

 

Looking at the center at 100% magnification in Photoshop, the 16-35 performs better. The difference is most significant at 35mm, still visible at 24mm and almost non-existent at 17mm. The 16-35 performed almost as well as EF 35/1.4 at equal apertures.

Sharpness - Prints

Prints - this is where the rubber meets the road. With naked eye and 10"x15" prints, the difference is only clearly visible at 35mm with f/4. At other f-stops and focal lengths the difference is negligible. 

Click on the following image to see full size image taken with the 16-35 @ f/5.6 and 26mm. Warning - very large file.

Further Info

http://www.fredmiranda.com/reviews/

http://www.16-9.net/lens_tests/

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-Zoom-Lens-Reviews.aspx

There are many web sites where photographer can find tests and reviews of lenses. Some of these sites are listed below and this is no attempt to provide information about general performance of lenses. Instead, I am focusing on suitability of my lenses for baby photography.

General Thoughts

How I Work

I’m using full frame camera and the suitability of lenses described below is related to full frame cameras only. I never use flash and rely on fast lenses and high ISO performance of my camera.

Age

The requirements and usability of lenses change with the ability of the baby to move. When they start walking, the AF speed becomes more important, especially during the age when they can’t understand everything you say and any attempt to stop them or attract their attention only causes that they start running to you. This has been a challenge especially with my 85mm lens and to some extent with 50mm.

Focal Length

Most of my photographs are from indoors, a situation which usually calls for shorter fast lenses. For baby photography I have been using mostly 85mm, 50mm and 35mm focal lengths, in that particular order.

EF 17-40/4L

Suitable for snapshots where it is necessary to get very close or where you need to include lots of background. The minimum aperture of 4 is limiting for indoors shots, but ok during daylight. You will often get close enough for the child to be able to reach the front element of the lens. Since the lens hood is shallow and won’t prevent the baby from actually reaching the glass, an UV filter is handy. If you are considering purchasing a wide angle zoom lens and plan to use it for baby photography, think about 16-35/2.8 II, which is more practical for low light situations.

EF 35/1.4L

This 35mm lens is considered by some the best wide angle lens from Canon, some reviewers rate it higher than 35mm Summilux R from Leica, but I found achieving sharp looking shots more complicated than with other lenses. Wide open it has shallow depth of field, but does not isolate the main subject the same way as longer fast lenses. This may create tricky situations on pictures with multiple isolated subjects, where some of the photographed subjects are not perfectly sharp and the viewer percepts this as bad focus. This may and may not be a problem for your type of photography. This lens can be hand hold at 1/30s and at wide open allows taking pictures with virtually no light. This is great especially during the period when baby works in 3 hours cycle and lots of interesting photo opportunities (feeding) happen in the middle of the night.

EF 50/1.4

I found this lens practical especially in the hospital. It is relatively unobtrusive, light and universal enough to cover all the needs. This lens is fast, makes nice background blur and I would recommend this lens for baby photography to anyone on budget.

EF 85/1.2L

This is my most used lens. 85/1.2 closest focusing distance works great for adult portraits, but babies are smaller and you won’t be able to get close enough to fill the frame with head and shoulders of several months old baby. When they grow and start to move, this lens’ AF system is not fast enough to track their movement. Nevertheless, the fast aperture and background blur made it my favorite baby lens. The 85/1.8 is faster and focuses from closer distance and should be a great alternative.

EF 135/2L

Greater shooting distance makes this focal length great for shooting unnoticed. Also great for details with blurred background. This lens is sharp wide open and despite the longer focal length can be used indoors. It’s sharpness and beautiful background blur make it tempting to use it wide open, but babies, especially those that can walk, may easily move after locking the focus and before the exposure and easily get out of the shallow depth of field. Using AI-servo, checking the shots for sharpness,multiple exposures and stopping down the lens will help mitigate the problem.

Other lenses

The only other lens from my collection that I used for baby photography was 180/3.5 macro. I used it for some detail shots but also for shots where the 135mm was short. This is a great lens and the pictures are fine, but as one would expect, this lens is absolutely impractical for macro shots of moving subjects. Shorter macro lens would serve that purpose much better.

Useful Links

http://www.fredmiranda.com/reviews/index.php?cat=45

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/ISO-12233-Sample-Crops.aspx

http://www.16-9.net/lens_tests

Many articles and posts on the Internet claim or disprove advantage of small and medium film format over digital. The two media are very different and it is not completely fair to look at digital with having film as an etalon of the best achievable quality. Here is in a nutshell what I have learned in my almost three decades of film photography and several years of work with DSLR.

 

Digital gives more faithful reproduction of reality

Some color films are optimized for portraits, some are good for landscape and all have some characteristic presentation. Digital cameras don’t do that. Owner of the GMB Color Checker can see that in a simple test. With a calibrated camera, the colors from the digital system will be spot on, but on film some patches will be noticeably off, no matter how good is the process.

Images from digital cameras are easier to post-process

This allows more flexibility with digital images. Compared to film, digital files straight out of the camera can be flat looking, but they can be easily manipulated without any damage to the data. From one shot one can create Velvia looking picture as well as Portra looking one. Processing actual Velvia shots into good portraits is not an easy task.

Digital photography should be compared with color film photography and not B&W film photography

Some photographers like to argue that digital printing does not allow to create that "Baryta look". Some people say this is not true anymore, but  my point is that you should only compare digital with color film.

Resolution on digital cameras works differently than film

With film, the quality of the print slowly deteriorates with enlargement. The best print quality is achieved with contact print. The bigger the enlargement, the lesser the detail and sharpness. To the contrary, with very high quality lens, quality of digital print does not exhibit any deterioration with enlargement as long as the original image has enough pixels to print at around 300 dpi. The digital image will however start breaking up when the size reaches the limit when there is not enough pixels to print at 300 dpi. When the photographer starts "upsampling" the image, the quality goes down rapidly.

As a result, when  we compare a 300 dpi print from digital camera with medium film print (where the 300 dots per inch come from the camera and not from upsampling), the level of detail and sharpness will look very similar, but if we compare 20x enlargement from film with digital print of the same size, the film will look more detailed and more natural. This is apparently the main reason for disagreements whether film is better than digital or not.

Sharpening and micro contrast enhancement has been frequently used in film photography. This article briefly introduces comparable digital and analog techniques.

Digital Unsharp Mask

Unsharp mask selectively increases contrast of edges and small objects by making dark areas of edges darker and light areas of edges lighter. Since this creates a sharpening effect, unsharp mask is frequently used to improve apparent sharpness in digital imaging. The following image shows enlarged detail of an edge with and without unsharp mask. The image consists of two gray boxes; the upper part is with USM applied.

If USM is used with narrower radius settings, it can effectively increase apparent sharpness. The following image shows effect of the unsharp mask on an image. The first character R is normal, the second is a copy of the first one with gaussian blur applied and the third one is a copy of the blurred one with unsharp mask applied.

If USM is used with narrower radius settings, it can be used to increase micro contrast.

Eberhard Effect

Exposed molecules of silver halides react during development with developing agent and convert the white silver halide into black silver and creates visible photographic image. This chemical reaction breaks up the developing agent and creates certain byproducts that are capable of retarding further chemical reaction - development. Eberhard found that if developer is left absolutely still, smaller details and edges are developed more rapidly than larger areas, because smaller areas and edges can be easily surrounded by fresh developer, while silver halide particles inside large areas are surrounded by exhausted developer that does not have the vigor of the fresh one. Eberhard effect can be observed in still developers and diluted developers, but exists in conventional development as well and is frequently used by photographers to increase micro contrast and apparent sharpness.