Great series Airy. Your skill and how you use these lenses drowns the glory of auto-focus. Very lively photos.
Thanks Anirban. There were quite a few misses though; I selected 40 shots out of 151 and some rejections were due to bad focus (minority case though).
Fortunately, there was ample space for me to move around and shoot from interesting vantage points.
In addition, the postprocessing was not meant to enable lens comparisons, as the aim was to get a decent "series". So I PPed much more than usual. Typically:
- reframing, using all sorts of crop factors and proportions (3:2, 1:1, 5:4, 4:3, 16:9 and reciprocals)
- WB adjustments (a few; AWB works well and, if not, auto WP provided by LR6 is helpful; few override cases)
- all sorts of lighting and contrast adjustments
- clarity generally set at +12 in LR
- some dodging and burning, especially when faces were too much in the shadow
- luminance of orange and, to some extent, yellow and red pushed; blues and cyan decreased; this was to increase the contrast with the background (evening skylight)
- in some rare cases, saturation decreased (blues if background was becoming "obtrusive"; yellows or oranges if faces became donaldish due to some predominant incandescent light, red if saxophonist was under "high pressure")
- de-noising, and lateral CA elimination of course
- post-reframing vignetting applied, as the lenses had very little vignetting at the chosen apertures. Purpose was not so much to have a "tunnel-like effect", but to further reduce the high peripheral brightness provided by the windows.
