The clarity of a full frame on the Voigtländer APO-Lanthar 50mm/1:2.0 and Sony A7R IV

This is another in a series of articles showcasing pictures taken with the Voigtländer APO-Lanthar 50mm/1:2.0 on the Sony A7R IV. This time I’m going to show you the whole frame, instead of cropping as I usually do.


The lions at Werribee Open Range Zoo are a delight to photograph, especially when they arrange themselves rather photogenically. Fortunately they often do so quite close to the viewing window. You can judge how close they are by remembering that this is a 50mm lens, and these are full frames / no crop.

The first frame is fairly early in the day, with only four members of the pride in frame. Keep an eye on that dead tree on the left of frame; I will show you a close-up of it to address the question of the corners of frame. This frame was shot at f/5.6, 1/200s, ISO 100.

The second frame is later in the day, with the sun higher in the sky and brighter. We can see six of the eight members of the pride (in fact the seventh is intruding into the frame on the right, and I would have cropped him out if I wasn’t so keen on showing you the whole of the frame). Why am I not surprised that the only male in shot is lying sprawled while the five females are alert? This frame was shot at f/4, 1/1250s, ISO 100.

That third image is the corner detail that I promised you – this is pixel-for-pixel what is in the top left of that first image – it’s 1600×1600 pixels.

The originals of these images were full frames of 9504×6336, but they have been scaled so they’d load fairly quickly on this website. The only processing was to set the colour temperature; no post-processing sharpening has been used.

These next shots were taken at Healesville Sanctuary, on the opposite side of Melbourne from Werribee Open Range Zoo. Healesville features mostly Australian animals, like the Parma wallaby. The other two may not be Australian…

One more shot from Werribee, fairly early on another morning, shortly after the lions had fed. You can see condensation of the lion’s breath on the glass on the lower right of the image. I’ve added a crop from the image so you can see the level of detail.