Two pretty pictures of Western Trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera Ciliosa) blossoms, taken with very different lenses; for both camera and flower geeks.
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Telephoto above, pancake below.
This bright cheery citizen of the garden looks fetching climbing the weathered driftwood fence. I had the big old Tamron SP 70-210mm on the camera to shoot the boy’s soccer game (great fun, see what I got two summers ago), and was enjoying shooting the flowers from a dozen feet away.
Then I put on the new Pentax 40mm prime “pancake” and took some of the same pictures. I did a bit of cropping and other Lightroom magic to get the composition and colours to match up reasonably well. What do you think?
Mostly, I’m astonished how close they are. The telephoto has more extreme bokeh which, with this particular picture’s un-busy background, doesn’t make that much difference. It’s easier to fill the frame with the telephoto zoom, so after cropping that shot is about 1700 pixels square, compared to the 1200 or so with the prime lens, which might make a difference at printing time. Remember, I have the original Pentax “*ist D” which is only six MP.
Actually getting the picture was easier with the telephoto. But it’s such a huge swollen heavy beast, the chance that I’ll take it along on any given outing is relatively low; also the shots come slower, partly because it doesn’t auto-focus, but also because of the zoom apparatus.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Ugo Cei (May 13 2007, at 14:43)
It's hard to tell at this resolution, but the one on the bottom looks a bit sharper. The difference is so small that I might be completely wrong about it.
Speaking of bokeh, it's not the the one on top has more bokeh, it's just that it has less depth of field, which is to be expected, given that the focal lenght is larger. Its bokeh doesn't seem that good to my untrained eye.
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From: Michael McMillan (May 14 2007, at 03:43)
The primary difference i notice between the two images is the depth of focus. The top image was probably taken at maybe 2 feet using F4, and the bottom image was taken at maybe 4 inches using F11.
I maybe completely off on this, but look at the xif information and see the F stop.
You can see on the top image that the Depth of field was probably about 1/4 of an inch. On the bottom image, the depth of field is about an image and a half.
-Michael
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From: Kevin H (May 14 2007, at 08:36)
"You can see on the top image that the Depth of field was probably about 1/4 of an inch. On the bottom image, the depth of field is about an image[sic] and a half."
I agree with Michael, and will also say that the increased depth makes it a more pleasing picture to my eye, on account of consistent sharpness of the leaf and the flower buds. I prefer the composition of the first picture, though, with that white vertical stripe in the background set off to the margin.
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