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Aperture Series: Pine Creek Thunderstorms (Nikon D810)
ISO 64 36-megapixel Nikon D810 (mid-2014), original release firmware.
A distant landscape scene with high contrast lighting is a demanding subject for any lens, particularly a fast f/1.4 design. All sorts of aberrations can reveal themselves: violet haloes, coma and “bird-wings” on point sources and other smearings, spherical aberrations, secondary color blurs in out of focus foreground areas, color fringing, frustratingly pronounced undulations in the zone of sharpness ( field curvature ), etc.
Context: the Otus 55/1.4 minimizes all of the foregoing issues to residual levels. And yet its sibling the 50mm f/1.4 Planar shows all of those issues in spades, though it is a strong performer stopped down. Even more expensive designs such as the Leica 50/1.4 Summilux-M ASPH show deficiencies for the first few apertures with regards to many of those issues; the Otus sets the standard.
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Diglloyd Guide to Zeiss offers comprehensive integrated coverage of Zeiss DSLR lenses for Canon and Nikon. Nearly a decade in the making, it covers everything you need to know for every lens in the ZF.2, ZE, Milvus and Otus lines. Guide to Mirrorless and Zeiss ZM rangefinder lenses in Guide to Leica.
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- Aperture series from wide open through stopped down, showing the full range of lens performance and bokeh.
- Optical quality analysis of field curvature, focus shift, sharpness, flare, distortion, and performance in the field.
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