This is not, strictly speaking, part of my review of the Voigtländer 50mm 1:2.0 APO-Lanthar. This is an explanation of where I started from when I began to review this lens.
I had never had much joy focussing manually. My first SLR pre-dated auto-focus: it had a split-ring focus screen. The idea was to line up two halves of an image to focus on it. I was not too good at that, and after a while I put that camera away.
The advent of autofocus reignited my interest, and now I could often get images in focus, mostly on the right subject. I used an auto-focus film SLR for a while, but my real passion for photography took off with a digital SLR, partly because I could review my images in the camera, and retry the focus if I’d missed.
For a short while I tried a Leica M9 - a digital camera with an optical rangefinder for focus. It felt like a return to the split ring focusing of my first SLR, but i was determined to make it work; maybe I just hadn’t tried hard enough last time. Eventually, I had to admit that persistence wasn’t working for me, and I returned to my auto-focus DSLRs.
The autofocus systems in all the digital cameras I have used are good, but they are not perfect. Reading the photographer’s mind to determine what they should focus on doesn’t seem to be within their capacity yet, although some recent AF systems come close! Given the propensity of humans to photograph humans, the eye AF functionality that has been appearing recently is scary good. Even the latest systems can get it wrong, though. There are times when there are things closer to the camera which the AF locks onto. As someone taking a lot of photographs at zoos, it can be really annoying when the AF chooses to focus on the bars, and not on the animal behind them. Sometimes I’d move my point of focus around, trying to get the camera to lock onto the right thing; I am apt to invent new vulgar words while trying to persuade the AF system to do what I want.
Not long ago my camera had decided to focus on the bars again, and I was frustrated enough to try using manual focus to deal with the problem. As luck would have it, I’d worn my reading glasses instead of my distance glasses that day. To my surprise, it was a lot easier to focus manually than it had been in the past. Admittedly, the Sony body I was using has the delightful habit of zooming in when I turn the focus ring, which meant I was looking at a much more detailed image. That helped a lot. But more important still was that my eyes could focus on those details, and I could discern the difference between in focus and out of focus far more accurately.
This did not make me an instant convert to manual focus. Auto-focus is easier and faster, and often focuses exactly where I want. Sure, sometimes a shallow depth of field will be focussed on an eyebrow rather than an eye, but I take multiple shots, and hope one of them is focussed on the eye. (Eye AF is a big help!)
At this point, I no longer regarded manual focus as something I did only when I absolutely had to.
For a while I had been looking for a really sharp 50mm lens to supplement or replace the Sony Zeiss 55mm (the 55mm was the first Sony lens I bought). It had to be not too big and not too heavy, very sharp, and ideally free from most aberrations, especially chromatic aberration. So when I heard of a new 50mm Voigtlånder lens which used special glass to eliminate chromatic aberrations, and which was extra sharp, I was keen to try it. The fact that it was manual focus was no longer a total blocker.
At first, I thought the lens was completely manual (in my defence, I was trying to learn how to use this lens without reading other people’s reviews). So I was using manual exposure as well as manual focus - I’d set the aperture with the ring on the lens, then I’d adjust the shutter speed with the dial until the exposure meter in the view finder said my exposure was good. This was tedious! I managed to get a couple of reasonable images, but it was slow, and hard work (yes, I can hear the old-timers at the back of the audience muttering about spoiled youngsters!).
Turns out this lens is smarter than I thought. I already knew that the lens told the camera when I was turning the focus ring (because the camera did the zoom-in for focusing trick), but I hadn’t realised was that it was also telling the camera what aperture was set on the aperture ring (the fact that the aperture is reported in the view finder should have given that away), and the focal distance. Nett result: this lens works perfectly in Aperture priority mode. I use Aperture priority almost exclusively in natural light anyway, so that made me very happy. All that has changed is that I have to set the aperture using the aperture ring - easy enough.
Even zoomed in, I still sometimes have trouble distinguishing in-focus from out-of-focus. Fortunately the Sony body has a feature especially to help with that, called focus peaking. The location of the setting has moved from one model to the next, but on the A7R4 and A7R3 it’s the second last menu in the still shooting section (14/15 on the A7R4 and 13/14 on the A7R3). It’s called Focus Assist. This is the manual focus shooter’s menu! My settings include:
Focus Magnif. Time = unlimited
Initial Focus Mag = x5.9
MF Assist = On
Peaking Setting:
What these settings do is show a yellow overlay in the viewfinder over all the areas which are most in focus. If you are photographing yellow things, you can change the overlay colour to red or blue, or even white, but I find yellow the most useful in general.
Will I stop using the AF in my Sony lenses? Emphatically not. Will I consider turning it off sometimes? Definitely. The lenses have to be very sharp for me to be willing to use them with manual focus - the Sony 135mm GM lens is a lovely example. Sorry, but I have been spoiled by the ridiculous sharpness of this Voigtländer.
Have I found the really sharp 50mm lens I was looking for? Absolutely! It’s small, not heavy, and very very sharp. Yeah, it’s manual focus, but I’m happy to live with that when I’m enjoying the quality of the images I can create using it.
