Lenses: The Long and Short of it

Gary Hart Photography: Howling Dog at Sunset, Bandon Beach, Oregon

Howling Dog at Sunset, Bandon Beach, Oregon
Sony a7RIII
Sony 24-105 G
1/50 seconds
F/11
ISO 100

I hope everyone is doing well. I’ve been sequestered at home since returning from Anchorage two weeks ago (visiting my daughter, a trip that seemed okay when I left, but really stressed me when it came time to fly home). Social distancing, shelter in place, quarantine, or whatever you want to call it, we’re all coming to terms with our new reality in different ways. With my wife stuck in Southern California and no kids at home to entertain or educate, I’ve been left to my own devices as I try to fill my days productively: processing images, learning new skills, cleaning up my website and social media pages, and rescheduling workshops. I hope you’re staying safe and happy.

My previous blog post detailed my current equipment lineup and got thinking about me lens choices, specifically about how much I use each lens. Much as a golfers try to identify the ideal club for the unique location and lie of their ball, photographers have to identify the lens that creates the shot they’re going for. Every scene has many variables requiring a seemingly endless number of decisions, from the exposure settings that manage the scene’s motion, depth, and light, to the focus point, to framing.

Prime lenses are undeniably sharper and more compact than zooms, but sharpness gap has narrowed so much in the best lenses that, for me at least, the convenience of being able to refine my framing in my viewfinder justifies whatever small (and often imperceptible) quality they sacrifice. (But zoom versus prime is a personal choice, and a debate I refuse to have with anyone.)

Framing is the most obvious reason to select one lens over another, but it’s certainly not the only reason. As a general rule, the more I want to emphasize my foreground, the wider I’ll go, sometimes filling my frame with a nearby subject and significantly shrinking the background. Telephoto lenses are great for isolation shots that highlight a single aspect of the distant landscape, and also to compress the apparent distance between near and far subjects.

The lens choices we make say a lot about our vision in the field—what we see and how we chose to express it. So, to get a better idea of my own lens choices and maybe identify potential creativity-limiting biases, I created a 2019 lens-use report in Lightroom. Here’s a screenshot for that report detailing the number of frames I shot with each lens in my bag in 2019:

2019 lens use breakdown

And here’s the breakdown:

— (3 images): This is (was) my 24mm f/1.4 Rokinon (its name is unlisted here because this lens doesn’t communicate any information to the Sony bodies) that used to be my dedicated night lens—until I sold it after getting the…
Sigma 20mm f/1.4 (10 images): I bought this lens about a month before Sony announced their 24mm f/1.4 GM lens (I hope this will silence the people who assume my Sony Artisan status provides inside knowledge, and who think I’m holding out when I say I don’t know of any new Sony equipment on the horizon). This is a very good lens, but it’s also massive. I bought it to become my dedicated night lens, a status it held for about a month—until it was replaced by my 24mm Sony f/1.4 (more below). I only used the Sigma once, side-by-side with the new 24mm Sony, and decided the Sony was slightly (but noticeably) sharper (and much, much smaller and lighter).
Sony FE 12-24mm (388 images): Not a high volume lens, but the 12-24 has become essential because it allows me to do things I once believed to be impossible (see my previous blog post). Even though I like to have a polarizer on all of my lenses, I don’t mind too much that this lens doesn’t take filters, because it’s so wide that I’d get differential polarization (which I hate) in the sky anyway.
Sony 16-35mm f/2.8 GM (1609 images): Since part of this lens’s focal range is covered by the 12-24, and the rest is covered by my 24-105, you could argue that it’s redundant. But this may just be the sharpest non-prime lens I own, (unlike the 12-24) it takes filters, and f/2.8, while not as fast as I’d like for night photography, is in fact fast enough. And sometimes when I’m photographing the Milky Way, I want more sky than my 24mm f/1.4 lens gives me—this is especially true in New Zealand, where the Milky Way is higher in the sky than it is in North America. Plus, as a general rule, the extreme ends of a lens’s focal range are not usually its best, so when find myself shooting the 12-24 or 24-105 at or near 24mm, (and I’m not being lazy) I’ll switch to the 16-35. One other reason I love this lens is that it delivers the sweetest sunstar of all my lenses.
Sony 24-105mm f/4 G (3322 images): My most heavily used lens and it’s not even close. I actually took more pictures with this lens than I did with all my other lenses combined. These numbers are skewed slightly by the fact that this is my primary lightning lens, because in an active electrical storm my Lightning Trigger might fire hundreds of times with only a handful of visible strikes (it rarely misses the visible strikes, but also catches many strikes that I or my camera didn’t see). But even accounting for that, my 24-105 is the volume winner by such a wide margin for the simple reason that it has a broad focal range that covers both the moderate wide and telephoto zones. It’s also really sharp, and relatively compact. That said, seeing these numbers makes my think maybe I’ve gotten a little lazy and should think more about the possibilities with the other lenses in my bag.
Sony 24mm f1.4 GM (208 images): My latest dedicated night lens, I haven’t a single picture with this lens when the sun was out. Super sharp, and so compact I don’t even know I’m carrying it (it actually squeezes into the front pocket of my Levis. I just got the 20mm f/1.8 G lens, which is even smaller, but haven’t used it—I’ll probably use both at night (only) rather than try to decide between the two.
Sony 70-200mm f/4 G (83 images): I love this lens, but it has been replaced by the 100-400 and I rarely carry it anymore. To save weight in my camera bag, I did take the 70-200 to New Zealand last June instead of the 100-400, and really appreciated having a lighter bag (especially since NZ is very tight on carry-on weight).
Sony 90mm f/2.8 G (6 images): Wow, only 6 images with this crazy sharp lens. Part of that low number is because I only carry this lens when macro is my primary objective, and part of it is because I’ve really gotten into using my extreme telephotos with extension tubes for my close-focus work. But maybe I need to dust this lens off and use it more in 2020.
Sony 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 GM (603 images, including teleconverter): The majority of my 100-400 images are of the moon, but I use it for other stuff too. In spring and fall I add extension tubes and do creative selective focus, and sometimes it’s fun to just put it up to my eye and slowly pan a landscape to identify subjects to isolate. Adding the Sony 2X teleconverter is like putting this lens on steroids, essentially doubling all the things I like about it. The teleconverter costs two stops, but I see no appreciable degradation of image quality—it’s definitely the sharpest telephoto/teleconverter pair I’ve ever used.
Sony 200-600 f/5.6-6.3 G (114 images, including teleconverter): Since lens is pretty new, so far I’ve only used it for the moon. But wow, if you want to make your moon big, try this lens with the 2X teleconverter and APS-C (1.5) crop. I’m looking forward to trying it for the selective focus work I use the 100-400 for.

About this image

The sea stacks at Bandon Beach on the Oregon Coast make a great starting point for an image, but because there’s so much else going on here, I try to avoid making the sea stacks my ultimate goal. Since the scene at Bandon varies quite a bit with the tide and sky, when I photograph here I like to wander at the water line and identify features that I can assemble into a composition: sea stacks, reflections, surf, sun, and (fingers crossed) clouds.

The reflections following waves receding on the very gently sloping beach are better at Bandon than most beaches because the water doesn’t recede as quickly, and there’s more surface area for them to form. The best reflections happen when there are clouds and or color in the sky, so I like to arrive early enough to pick my composition, then wait for the magic.

On this April evening I found a little creek, fed by runoff from recent rain, leading right into Howling Dog (often misidentified as Wizard’s Hat, which is a short distance south). The sun was behind the clouds as I worked on my composition, but the clouds were moving so fast, I knew the sun would appear soon. But I’d found my shot early enough that when the clouds parted, I was ready. A film of thin clouds subdued the sun’s brightness, making exposure easier. All I had to do was wait for a wave to wash up and recede, then click.