Deep crops with the Voigtländer APO-Lanthar 50mm/1:2.0 and Sony A7R IV

Positivity on 2020-03-04

This is the first of a series of articles showcasing pictures taken with the Voigtländer APO-Lanthar 50mm/1:2.0 on the Sony A7R IV. These pictures were taken around Melbourne and demonstrate the ability to crop images from this combination heavily.

When I started using this lens I took a photograph in the State Rose Garden in Werribee, and it looked like this:

I brought the image up in PhotoShop, and looked at what I had in the viewfinder while I was focusing. You can see it in the centre of the image above. Let me make it easier to see:

You don’t often see a catchlight in a bee’s eye

I liked that, so I cropped it out of the frame. That’s what I call a deep crop – I kept 1300 x 1600 pixels from the full 9504 x 6336 frame, or 2 megapixels out of 60.

Here’s a later example. I was at Werribee Open Range Zoo (it’s next to the Rose Garden), at the serval presentation. I wasn’t at the front of the audience, so I got some other people in my shot.

Let’s zoom in again…

You can’t get too close to the meerkats at Melbourne Zoo, nor to the rhinos at Werribee Open Range Zoo.

What these examples show is how much detail this lens can capture. The cropped images are pixel-for-pixel what I captured with this lens. I have scaled the full frame shots so this page doesn’t take ages to load – they are there to give context for the crops.

I am not saying that we have to crop every image this deeply, but I generally do some cropping to get rid of distractions, or to change the shape of the image. Here’s a much less savage crop: