TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II sample pictures

In the background at the top of the picture above, you can see some diffuse colored blobs that are actually oranges and grapefruit. Here’s a closer view.

That was shot at f/11, again with both tilt and shift…I forgot to note how much. Here’s a 100% crop of the intersection of the main branch. Barely visible is the remnants of a spider web.

I should note: that crop is completely unsharpened. I applied my usual style of tone / color / etc. adjustments, but what you see there is without sharpening-related manipulation.

Same thing with this crop from the lower right corner.

The remaining pictures are much more academic than artistic. One of the interesting applications of a lens with movements is the ability to create panoramas. Here’s a very rough example, complete with un-matched exposures and drop shadows to help identify the different frames.

The new 24 allows pretty much unrestricted movements. Most conveniently, the rotation has click-stops every 30 degrees. The astute will note that this makes creating panoramas with the same 2:3 ratio a snap. Rotate the lens in the appropriate 30° direction; shift to one extreme; shift to the other extreme; rotate to the other appropriate 30° direction; and make two more exposures at the extremes of shift. The center frame is extraneous; I included it here for reference.

By way of comparison, on the right is the same view with the 24 swapped out for a 16-35 at 16mm. As you can see, the perspective is identical, but the captured real estate is substantially larger. Indeed, this panorama gives the equivalent of a 36mm × 54mm sensor.

So, that panorama got me wondering if the payoff really is there in terms of image quality. Doing a bit of pickle peeping in the lower left corner quickly made me realize that, yes, a 24mm lens has a lot less DoF than a 16mm lens. The grass was blurrier in the panorama, but it sure seemed a lot more like out-of- focus blur than the usual kind of degradation one sees in the extreme corners of frames. To answer that question (“Is it worth it to shoot a panorama?”), I made use of that proverbial brick wall you see in the background.

All the following shots were done at f/4 with focusing done in Live View at 10× magnification. First, an overview shot of the 16-35.

As you can see, there’s the well-known barrel distortion present, and a fair amount of peripheral light falloff.

The overview shot below is from a Photoshop auto-stitched panorama from the 24 using the technique I described above. I cropped it to clean off the rough edges from the frames not aligning quite perfectly, probably just a hair more aggressively than I needed too.

So, at first glance, it would seem that those wanting a distortion-free 16mm perspective would be much, much better served with the 24.

And, to my eye, the 16 has a bit less vignetting overall, but the nature of the vignetting is less distracting with the 24. That’s a matter of taste, of course.

But what about sharpness? Here is a 100% crop of the 16, uprezzed to the same pixel dimensions as the panorama. This represents a 7″ × 7″ crop from a 54″ × 81″ print. Obviously, the insets are corner crops.

Considering the extreme enlargement, that center crop is damned impressive. The corners…not so much. One would obviously want to stop down farther than f/4 for this sort of thing with this lens.

And, for my last post, here’s the same thing from the 24 panorama. I think it’s pretty clear that the image quality, both in the center and the corners, is significantly better. Clearly, if one can take the luxury of making four exposures, moving the lens each time, the 24 is the better quality choice. Of course, if one is making panoramas, a longer lens combined with a panorama head can create even better results, even up to the ludicrous gigapickle range.

Granted, the lens doesn’t have autofocus, fiddling with the knobs is time-consuming, and all the rest. But I now have a new favorite lens, one that I will be having lots and lots and lots and lots and lots…and lots and lots and lots of fun with.

Cheers,

b&

Okay, I lied. One more boring shot.

If you make a different use of those 30° click stops, you can get a (basically) square format panorama with the equivalent of a 36mm × 36mm sensor. Here’s what a square brick wall looks like.

Cheers,

b&