What Is Photography, Anyway?

In which we examine the art by means of the science.

I recent bought a lens that I have wanted for a lot of years. I have rented the lens multiple times, and thought long and hard about buying one each time. I waited so long, that they don’t even make this lens any more. All you can do is buy a used copy and hope for the best.

I’m talking about the Canon 200mm f/2 lens. Let’s break down those words and numbers; they tell an interesting story.

Canon: legendary lenses, for many decades now. There are subtle artful ways in which Canon lenses excel. I like them for their natural colors; other vendors run a bit cool or a bit neutral, but I like the natural, slightly warm tones of Canon lenses.

200mm: that is a telephoto focal length. It means that the lens is big, and long, and can take pictures of things that are further away in great detail.

f/2: a magic number for a telephoto lens. The list of lenses as long as 200mm and still offering f2? Two (Canon’s and Nikon’s). This is the ratio of aperture to focal length, and to a photographer it screams something special: a very soft, beautiful background combined with exquisitely sharp details in the plane of focus.

This is what the lens looks like:

Camera + lens is a little over 15” long. BIG lens. It weighs 6 pounds (2.7kg), plus the weight of the camera. I think most people would think that such a lens is not usable held in the hand, but I use it that more than half the time. (I did have to build a simple rig to make it easier to hold, but, it’s just magical to have such a magnificent instrument in your hand, ready to shoot.) It’s about like taking your tuba for a walk; you can make your funky tuba sounds wherever you go. It’s not for everyone, I suppose.

Why would I bother? Why would I write such breathless prose about a big, heavy, awkward lens? Because it takes incredibly beautiful pictures.

I purchased a random used copy recently, and have been putting it through its paces. I have special charts and software that allow me to measure the sharpness of a lens, and early on I realized that this is a very special copy of a very special lens. Your typical copy is very, very sharp in the center, but a bit fuzzy as you move away from center. Looking at my first photos, it seemed to me that this one was very sharp from center to edge. So I did my testing, and lo and behold, this lens is dead sharp in the center, and only very slightly less sharp at the edges. In technical terms, we call this magical. Just so unexpected.

So having done the tests, and made a few exposures, the next thing to do was to pretend it was just another lens and haul it out into the world for some photography. I did that today. I took it to more or less random available location (a railroad trestle that crosses the Carbon River near Orting, WA), and did what I do: look for things to take pictures of.

I don’t think I can convey how cool it is to even look through such a lens, but I am going to try. First, random objects viewed through the lens become…they're true selves. The colors are in your face. The surface textures appear in all their intricate detail, as well as something I had never seen though a camera lens before: the closest I can come to explaining it is this: they shine with the light their very existence. Ordinary objects become intensely interesting.

It was fun to see that looking through the lens, but the proof is in the viewing. Here’s a water fountain at a park next to that bridge.

Maybe you see what I see; maybe you don’t. I see a raw metal surface that has a silky texture and incredibly subtle colors, in the bowl. The spout is chrome, and it shines with every bit of reflectivity its native materials can muster. And the green pipe—the marred, poorly painted, scratched metal pipe seems to me to be the essence of pipes that live in the real world and do real work.

I can’t rationally explain why I have such an enormous emotional response to this photograph. It’s literally almost nothing!!! But I love it because it sits there in all its reality in a way that no other camera lens has ever captured an object for me.

And I don’t have to return it when the rental is over. I just have to take loving care of it to keep it in good working order, and we can work together to capture the magic of reality, the emotional basis of things that are out there in abundance, things that just need to be seen and felt about.

Call me sentimental, but I think that’s pretty darn cool.

More to come.