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

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:

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An unexciting image

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:

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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.

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Sitting too far away

Let's zoom in again...

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Servals can really jump

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

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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:

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Raindrops on roses

Here are those images again, in more detail, so you can see what detail hides in the full frame shots.

#50mm #APO-Lanthar #crop #review #Voigtländer