New 21mm || SEM or not SEM, that is the question!

[Dennis]

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39 minutes ago, derleicaman said:

Dennis, if you’re like me, you are always wanting a new lens or focal length to experience.

I'm not a techie, but I do shot a lot. And new gear, new things, or techniques to try always give more sparklings to the matter 🙂 

It looks like you are shooting with a 21mm since a lot. Do you use a lot an external VF? What do you like most about the FL? My goal is for a reportage approach and PJ stuff to tell stories with a lot of context. Then a bit of landscape and architecture. I don't care about how fast the lens is; I would shoot at f/4 and f/8 anyway. 

I hope I can travel soon this summer. I already have a few RF missions. I'm just waiting for the right time 🙂 But I'm a hanger of trying new Leica stuffs, and more than anything, understand things hands-on. Because TBH w/ you, I know that I can do more with Leica camera (so far the M). I'm just filtering gear until I arrive at my ideal kit. Once I find my niche in some equipment and lenses, I'm sure I can tell stories in a better way. Once I get a 21mm, I want to shoot a wedding with the M10 soon. But now, (soon to be) 21+35+50, I'm IN .. For everything!

57 minutes ago, derleicaman said:

Although, I have been looking at the CV 21/1.4 - super wide with shallow depth of field! 😂

 

If I don't get the SEM but the Color Skopar 3.5, and I like it, the 21/1.4 would be in the radar. No for travel, or daily stuff, but for serious work 🙂 

[JonPB]

I rather like my Elmarit Asph, but I doubt it would be a good fit for you. Perhaps this will help you avoid needing to scratch an itch... and maybe inform a few other folks who find this page on a later date. 🙂

(Background: I've owned the Elmarit Asph for a few years now, with a handful of non-M 21mm's before that. I looked very closely at the Super Elmar before deciding against it, but have not shot the two together. At the time, the Voigtlander 21/3.5 was new; reviews were trickling out and I was trying to find information on it when I found a deal on the Elmarit that settled things for me.)

I think of the Elmarit Asph as a storytelling lens while the Super Elmar is more of a documentation lens. I would trust the Super Elmar to be essentially transparent in pretty much every scenario: f/4 and be there, f/8 only if you need close to infinite depth of field. For pristine reproduction imagery, I'd shoot my Elmarit at f/8 because the corners get crunchy around f/4-5.6. But, I rarely want that kind of image, and, at f/2.8, I adore how the lens softens the corners and, slightly, the foreground or background. It is like using a shallow depth of field to isolate subject, but across the frame rather than across depth. It clearly isn't transparent, traditional-landscape precision, yet neither do I lose the contextual information that the wide angle provides. More importantly, the Elmarit Asph has lovely, gentle glare. High contrast scenes receive just the right amount of boost for my taste, and removing the hood (or adding extra shading) can modulate that change in contrast. Similarly, specular highlights bloom (visibly at f/2.8, detectably at f/4), which I like.

I should add that there's a chance my lens is not representative. It dramatically back-focused when I received it, and I fixed that with shims. But I think that was due to the lens being designed for film, the thickness of which would cause it to behave correctly without the shims, which were about half the thickness of film. On digital, the transition from front-focus to in-focus is very brief while the transition from in-focus to back-focus is prolonged; I'd estimate that, when focusing at 3m at f/2.8, 2.5m is about as in-focus as infinity. But, once I got it to focus where I expected, none of that has mattered to my photos. Focus close and the background will be very slightly soft, focus far and the foreground will be, as you'd expect. And nothing I've seen with my lens differs from what I expected in the course of my research before buying it.

To be clear, the Elmarit Asph is a high contrast, high resolution lens. It induces moire across much of the frame of my M9 at f/2.8 and its clarity is excellent, despite the glare. But it lacks that crisp, translucent perfection of modern lenses, which the Super Elmar has a lot of. To me, that is a virtue: lens designs will only continue to reduce aberrations, so lenses which have aberrations that I enjoy will only become harder to find.

...and here I was, thinking I could summarize my thoughts briefly...

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[lct]

Nicely said . 

[Dennis]

On 7/25/2021 at 11:29 PM, JonPB said:

I rather like my Elmarit Asph, but I doubt it would be a good fit for you. Perhaps this will help you avoid needing to scratch an itch... and maybe inform a few other folks who find this page on a later date. 🙂

Thank you for sharing, i'm sure it's a good info and help for many of us.

On 7/25/2021 at 11:29 PM, JonPB said:

I think of the Elmarit Asph as a storytelling lens while the Super Elmar is more of a documentation lens.

An inspiring choice of words: documentation vs. storytelling. Can you elaborate more? I'm not sure I completely understood your point. But I want to know it.

On 7/25/2021 at 11:29 PM, JonPB said:

To be clear, the Elmarit Asph is a high contrast, high resolution lens. It induces moire across much of the frame of my M9 at f/2.8 and its clarity is excellent, despite the glare. But it lacks that crisp, translucent perfection of modern lenses, which the Super Elmar has a lot of. To me, that is a virtue: lens designs will only continue to reduce aberrations, so lenses which have aberrations that I enjoy will only become harder to find.

Good to know. If I can live with some glow and decent sharpness of the CV 35/1.4 II MC, I guess it could be easier to accept the 21 Elmarit, right? I don't need perfection, as the SEM. It would be great for some reasons, but I'm open to value other options. For example, I was very interested in ZM 21/4.5 ... an Amazing IQ, almost zero distortion, etc., but the Italian flag is SO pronounced, no way I would use it on the M10.

 

[lct]

Main con it is rather bulky, unless you don't use its dedicated hood.

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[Dennis]

8 minutes ago, lct said:

Main con it is rather bulky, unless you don't use its dedicated hood.

It's not so bad, but it's notorious. Maybe it's in between the SEM and the CV 21/1.4 🙂 

[JonPB]

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Documentation and storytelling: I was avoiding the baggage of common terms. I mean, what is a lens with "character"? I have a 20mm Takumar that has loads of "character", which is a marketing term roughly synonymous with what mechanics might call "scrap." Thinking about it now, that lens taught me how to fill a frame when important subject matter would be drawn in areas that had only a nodding acquaintance with the concept of resolution -- so I might just lack the skills needed to appreciate a lens like the Super Elmar. But to use the same word to describe the Elmarit Asph is to challenge the idea that words have meaning.

So, I used "storytelling" to convey that, relatively speaking, choosing the Elmarit Asph sacrifices verisimilitude to more effectively communicate a message, whereas "documentation" indicates that the Super Elmar draws light onto the sensor with rather sparse commentary. An example of might be a photo of a child among toys. The toys are an important part of the story, but the photo is about the person, not the things. So, a good storytelling lens will de-emphasize the things around the person while retaining enough detail to be recognizable context and to avoid having the resolution fall-off a distraction in its own right. You've seen tons of examples of this, I'm sure, except in the form of longer lenses at wide apertures, using depth of field to manipulate the resolution at which context is drawn.

Perhaps an illustration would help. Below is a photo of mine from this weekend's ramble. You can't really see the benefit at this resolution, but you can see the problem: there are very strong lines leading the eye out of the image to the bottom left. To an extent, this is mitigated by the composition (the much stronger lines toward the center, the heavy cupping lines toward the opposite corner). But, if you were to examine the full image, you might also see that the bottom left corner is gently out of focus: the bright concrete is slightly darker, the dark structures are slightly lighter, and fine textures are absent relative to the majority of the frame. So, someone who has been drawn into the image by the stark lines and is examining the details will eventually be drawn to that corner, and when they are these subtle cues will encourage them to continue to look at the more prominent details nearby rather than just drop out and lose interest. It is a very subtle thing, but, in my opinion, such nuances are the difference between art and fine art -- once a solid foundation is already present, of course.

To a discerning landscape photographer (or audience), such rendering could be just as fatal to their satisfaction as it is a boon to mine. "Documentation" lenses are generalists: you can always add blur in post, but not the opposite; you can use higher resolution on finer sensors in future cameras, but sensors won't get much more out of a lens that's already blurring points; and the quirks of a "storytelling" lens can show up in the most inopportune shots. So, documentation lenses -- technically superior lenses -- are an easy recommendation. If you prefer storytelling, identifying the extent to which you desire quirks, and then not obtaining a catalog of lenses at each focal length, can be challenges.

If you're going to buy Leica, buy the Leica you really want rather than the one that's convenient in the moment. This is doubly true here as the Super Elmar and Elmarit Asph cost about the same. And do look at the Voigtlander; there are traits to their longer lenses that I do not like, but I was close to choosing the 21/3.5 before I found an ugly Elmarit and decided to gamble.

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[lct]

Nicely said again but for storytelling i'd rather choose another "Super" lens, the S-A 21/3.4. The Elmarit asph lies somewhat between two chairs, and it is its charm or lack thereof depending on tastes IMHO . 

[Dennis]

31 minutes ago, JonPB said:

So, I used "storytelling" to convey that, relatively speaking, choosing the Elmarit Asph sacrifices verisimilitude to more effectively communicate a message, whereas "documentation" indicates that the Super Elmar draws light onto the sensor with rather sparse commentary.

Thank you for taking the time to explain it well to me. It was a pleasure reading it. Sometimes I feel wrong about writing in English: very minimalistic, short sentences like a robot, haha, and not with proper use of words, as you did. I apologize for it.
.
I perfectly understand what you are saying. In a certain way, I agree with you. But I do also believe that a "storytelling lens" can be used as a documentation one. We all know the capabilities of the SEM, and its way to document is very objective, right? It deliveries the truth (to tell you simplistically, again 🙂). 
If I get hired tomorrow to shoot a sports event assignment, if I use my Leica M10, I would probably bring my 2.8/35 ZM rather than the CV Nokton Classic 35/1.4. But If I want to tell the story of a family, like a day in their life, today I would probably use the Nokton. It depends on many factors. And it's more complicated than what we think. There is a very subtle line.
These minor differences can be nothing or totally make the difference.

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1 hour ago, JonPB said:

If you're going to buy Leica, buy the Leica you really want rather than the one that's convenient in the moment. This is doubly true here as the Super Elmar and Elmarit Asph cost about the same. And do look at the Voigtlander; there are traits to their longer lenses that I do not like, but I was close to choosing the 21/3.5 before I found an ugly Elmarit and decided to gamble.

I agree. If I find a super Elmarit bargain, I'll probably think about it. But if it's a Leica, I'm staying with the idea of a new SEM so far. I think it's a beauty, an outstanding lens, an intelligent investment.
Or just try a CV 21/3.5 and see what's going on with my first 21FL on M. I still have a little time to think about it.
And your comments are gold 🙂

[JonPB]

Thank you for the find words, Dennis.

I am a compulsive writer. These days I mostly write software, so I often get an itch to write something, anything, that permits a bit of flourish. So, thanks also for giving me a good prompt. And know that writers often struggle to compose minimalistic, short sentences, so don't lose that habit!

All of these lenses are excellent. You can't go wrong. I hope you find delight in wide angles and use this lens for a lifetime, but even if you don't, simply facing the challenge will make you a better photographer, no matter the tools at hand.

[epand56]

CV 21 mm f/1.4 Asph.
In-camera B&W. I love this lens.

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[epand56]

Same as above.

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[epand56]

Again.

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[cp995]

Am 25.7.2021 um 17:08 schrieb Dennis:

The SEM seems to beat all other 21 lenses, always 🙂 ...

[epand56]

On 7/25/2021 at 5:08 PM, Dennis said:

The SEM seems to beat all other 21 lenses, always

The SEM, by itself, beats nobody. It takes at least a camera and a photographer to do that. And a a good photographer with any other 21 can take better pictures than a bad photographer with a SEM.

[Dennis]

5 hours ago, epand56 said:

CV 21 mm f/1.4 Asph.

Thank you for sharing your photos. I know, it's a beautiful lens. But it's too big for me. And I don't need a fast 21mm lens. As someone said here previously, f/4 and be there 🙂 It's usually what I do. I'm familiar with the 21FL, but not on M cameras. If I really like it, the 21/1.4 could be a great addition in the future for a few reasons. But so far, I need/want a small effective lens.

4 hours ago, cp995 said:

On 7/25/2021 at 9:08 AM, Dennis said:

The SEM seems to beat all other 21 lenses, always 🙂 ...

6 minutes ago, epand56 said:

The SEM, by itself, beats nobody. It takes at least a camera and a photographer to do that. And a a good photographer with any other 21 can take better pictures than a bad photographer with a SEM.

 

Haha.. Don't take me so seriously with these sentences. I meant that FWIK, the SEM has an outstanding IQ, corner to corner, always at any given aperture (exception for diffraction, as all). A super balanced weight/size, performance. The CV 21/1.4 maybe it's the same, but not for size and weight. It's huge. Not on an SL2, but yes on nay M. And if one doesn't need a fast lens, that's why I'm saying that the SEM is beating (for me) all other 21mm lenses... 

.

Of course, it always depends on the photographer, no on the tool. It's pretty obvious. But when I make the list of all possible quirks/issues of a lens, such as focus shift, flare, CA, and many more, that's when I say, FWIK, that the SEM is unbeatable. It's just my personal opinion. It would be great to see a comparison CV 21/1.4 with the SEM from f/3.4 on.

 

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Dennis said:

Thank you for sharing your photos. I know, it's a beautiful lens. But it's too big for me. And I don't need a fast 21mm lens. As someone said here previously, f/4 and be there 🙂 It's usually what I do. I'm familiar with the 21FL, but not on M cameras. If I really like it, the 21/1.4 could be a great addition in the future for a few reasons. But so far, I need/want a small effective lens.

Haha.. Don't take me so seriously with these sentences. I meant that FWIK, the SEM has an outstanding IQ, corner to corner, always at any given aperture (exception for diffraction, as all). A super balanced weight/size, performance. The CV 21/1.4 maybe it's the same, but not for size and weight. It's huge. Not on an SL2, but yes on nay M. And if one doesn't need a fast lens, that's why I'm saying that the SEM is beating (for me) all other 21mm lenses... 

.

Of course, it always depends on the photographer, no on the tool. It's pretty obvious. But when I make the list of all possible quirks/issues of a lens, such as focus shift, flare, CA, and many more, that's when I say, FWIK, that the SEM is unbeatable. It's just my personal opinion. It would be great to see a comparison CV 21/1.4 with the SEM from f/3.4 on.

 

My view is that both the SEM and the NOKTON are technically top class lenses.

Get the nokton if you need the speed but get the much smaller SEM if you do not.

Some of the time i need the fast aperture so i bought the 21mm asph nokton and i am very pleased with it,

[Cl35mm]

Be careful when buying

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[giannis]

31 minutes ago, Cl35mm said:

Be careful when buying

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Careful of what?

What is the picture about?

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[Cl35mm]

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