The Focus Point of it All

[Michael Erlewine]

Well, I recently took images using most of the major ‘sharp’ Hasselblad XCD lenses, old and new, just to see how sharp they are. I made the mistake of not having them all at the base ISO of 50, some were at 400, so that was a waste of time. However, I did clearly get the idea that the XCD 120, the XCD 80, and the XCD 90 were plenty sharp. Actually, all of the Hasselblad XCD lenses are sharp.

Of the bunch, the one with both some character and sharpness was IMO the XCD 80mm f/1.9 lens. And although I used to stack focus for years, with the XCD lenses I believe I will stop doing that and just take single shots at various F-stops. It’s not worth stacking and then working at fixing the artifacts.

The Hasselblad XCD lenses are just so granular and sharp that I’m actually now working in the other direction, trying to introduce more bokeh and no longer worrying about the overall sharpness. All the XCD lenses seem sharp enough. Instead, I find myself working on composition, color, and things like that.

My original interest in focus stacking, many years ago, was to remove the concept of a single point of view by having the whole image in focus and by that free the eye and its ‘Seeing” to just naturally look around rather than be led by the embedded point of view of a single shot.

In the world of dharma and meditation, which I spend a lot of my time in, non-duality and full immersion is valued and important, our being totally immersed without the normal duality of a subject and an object.

Working with the 100 MP Hasselblad and its very sharp lenses where, as mentioned, everything is pretty much in focus without the effort to be so, has kind of ruined focus stacking for me, and thrown me back on considering composition and the invoking of bokeh and blur as a punctuator rather than vice-versa, struggling to find sharpness as I found myself doing with my Nikon system. 

In other words, rather than attempting to universalize sharpness as the delimiter, to make everything or some specific things sharp, offering an abundance of sharpness, seems to free up the eye from being naturally or unconsciously directed by sharpness.

Thanks to the Hasselblad lenses, being lost in a sea of sharpness, immersion in sharpness, at least for me, is very Zen like, with instead the result of invoking and subjecting us to the ordinary.

I quite like being lost in the ordinary and the vibe this introduces. Perhaps this is the result of, as mentioned, many decades of practice in what the Tibetans call Mahamudra, a form of non-meditation.

Also, perhaps my interest in AI graphics such as those from Midjourney AI are because AI just quite naturally plays havoc with the focus point and thus often renders a sense of unreality to images that I intuitively like.

Hasselblad X2D II and the XCD 80mm f/1.9 lens

[ARTUROARTISTA]

Perhaps giving sharpness a break is your way of trying to capture it definitively.
That photo of the rose can be sharp if you reproduce it sharply.

[Frank Fremerey]

I like your reasoning, Michael


With love from Germany


Frank

[Les Olson]

My original interest in focus stacking, many years ago, was to remove the concept of a single point of view by having the whole image in focus and by that free the eye and its ‘Seeing” to just naturally look around rather than be led by the embedded point of view of a single shot.

[...]

In other words, rather than attempting to universalize sharpness as the delimiter, to make everything or some specific things sharp, offering an abundance of sharpness, seems to free up the eye from being naturally or unconsciously directed by sharpness.

Although the image our eye forms on the retina has depth of field, our brains suppress the out of focus areas and it is very difficult to see that parts of the world at different distances are not all in focus. Because accommodation is so fast, we are unaware of shifting from near to far objects and we see both near and far objects as in focus. This is why paintings never had depth of field before the appearance of photography and rarely (if ever) after. So you are in good company in not using focus as a marker of visual importance.

Even within the walled garden of photography depth of field was never as big an issue with large format cameras, which are not restricted to a film plane perpendicular to the lens axis so depth of field is not determined by aperture, focal length, and focus distance. With film cameras, print resolution is determined by the size of the negative, because there is a fixed relationship between the negative and the print. That is not the the case with digital cameras. A 100 MP Hasselblad sensor has 4 micron photosites. The resolution and dynamic range are exactly the same as every other sensor with 4 micron photosites, regardless of sensor size. There are more photosites, but that just means you can print larger, not, as with a film negative, that you can have more resolution in the same print size.

[Ilkka Nissilä]

Although the image our eye forms on the retina has depth of field, our brains suppress the out of focus areas and it is very difficult to see that parts of the world at different distances are not all in focus. Because accommodation is so fast, we are unaware of shifting from near to far objects and we see both near and far objects as in focus. This is why paintings never had depth of field before the appearance of photography and rarely (if ever) after. So you are in good company in not using focus as a marker of visual importance.

Even within the walled garden of photography depth of field was never as big an issue with large format cameras, which are not restricted to a film plane perpendicular to the lens axis so depth of field is not determined by aperture, focal length, and focus distance. With film cameras, print resolution is determined by the size of the negative, because there is a fixed relationship between the negative and the print. That is not the the case with digital cameras. A 100 MP Hasselblad sensor has 4 micron photosites. The resolution and dynamic range are exactly the same as every other sensor with 4 micron photosites, regardless of sensor size. There are more photosites, but that just means you can print larger, not, as with a film negative, that you can have more resolution in the same print size.

For me it is easy to see that when I am looking at an object such as the computer monitor that I'm using to post this answer, that the areas of my visual field which are substantially at a different distance from the monitor are blurry (even if they are in the foveal area. However, the magnitude of the out of focus effect is smaller than what one can achieve with a large-aperture lens on a typical large sensor camera. A more obvious effect in human vision is that what we are looking at in the center of the visual field is sharp and surrounding areas are blurry, which is separate from the effect of depth of field.

Paintings were made typically sharp across the field not because human vision presents them like that but because this allows us to look at the painting like we were looking at the scene, focusing our attention on different parts of the image with the sharp central vision which then shows the details of that part of the scene / painting. The painting shows the scene open to exploration by the viewer. If they blurred the background or foreground, it would lock the viewer into looking at the main subject probably too strongly. Since the painter controls every aspect of the scene as represented in the painting, there is no need to blur out unwanted clutter as we often do in photography with a large-aperture or telephoto lens. A photographer (at least traditionally) does not have this control (except in post-processing) and thus photographers often choose to use a large-aperture lens to make the image cleaner and with fewer uncontrolled details as it can be hard enough to get the picture taken at the exact moment when the subject shows a particular expression or the geometry is pleasing. In studio photography, by contrast, usually we have complete control over what is shown in the photograph, including the lighting and background, props, and so often deep depth of field is used (I usually shoot at f/8 to f/13 in the studio). However, I don't have such control outside of the studio and I don't want to change the environment explicitly, so I often use a wide aperture to limit the degree of chaos shown in the surroundings. I prefer not to remove or blur objects in the photograph in post-processing as this to me goes against the spirit of photography and I still consider it an act of documentation to a point. Since I'm so used to large aperture photography, if I do need to show everything in focus and if it includes people, I find myself in great difficulty choosing the right moment where everything is in its place (without controlling the subjects completely, which I do not want to do). It's a paradoxical enterprise. ;-) I don't want to exert control, but use the tools of photography to select something from reality that leads to a pleasing or informative photograph in my way of thinking.

By the way Leonardo did not think objects should be drawn with precise boundaries at least according to a documentary I was watching a few days ago. So the objects were a bit blurred and sharp outlines were avoided in his paintings. I think the results look natural but not photorealistic obviously. The level of detail possible with modern photography was not realistic to paint by hand, I'm not sure if he would have wanted to do that even if he could have. It would seem he went for painting with techniques that made the subject feel natural and three-dimensional but not with the level of detail that photography (which had not been invented) gives. Of course, a lot of photographers also blurred (and blur) their portraits either using a soft-focus filter or lens, a process which didn't lead to a great deal of detail, or in post-processing. But this is a separate discussion from depth of field.

[Les Olson]

Leonardo objected to outlines, which were and are widely used in painting (here is Giotto using them in the Lamentation in the Scrovegni Chapel and Picasso using them in his portrait of Gertrude Stein), because we don't see outlines, we just see the end of one colour and the start of another. Leonardo didn't object to the boundaries between colours being sharp - at least in good light and for near objects (he also knew that atmospheric effects cause distant objects to be less sharp and paler than near objects).

Leonardo thought the eye worked like a camera obscura. He studied the camera obscura carefully, and he knew that in the camera obscura image blur is not related to subject distance. Leonardo had been dead for 100 years before anyone (Kepler) understood that what we see is an image formed by a lens, for which image blur is related to subject distance. Basic lens concepts like focal length were only worked out in the late 17th century and the optics of depth of field were only worked out in the 19th century.

Until the 20th century being aware of objects being "out of focus" was relatively uncommon. Although everyone who is old enough to have lenses in their eyes that have lost the capacity to change shape and has to wear corrective lenses for close work with a slightly different correction for reading a book vs a computer screen is seeing the effect of depth of field, that is not how they understand their vision problem or how it is discussed at the optometrist's. The hyperfocal distance of the human eye is about 6m, so even someone like me with no accommodation to speak of only needs correction for short distances, and young people with 10 dioptres of accommodation don't see depth of field even if they have refractive error, because accommodation happens in the brainstem, isn't represented in consciousness and can't be suppressed. It is important to remember that short-sightedness was relatively uncommon until recently because children spent more time outdoors, and in a world where there are no phones or televisions and relatively few people can read, presbyopia is not a problem.