**The Importance of Lens Design and Its Impact on Image Quality**

When it comes to photography, lens design is a crucial aspect that can make or break an image. A well-designed lens can produce stunning results, while a poorly designed one can lead to subpar images. In this article, we'll delve into the world of lens design and explore some key factors that affect image quality.

**Chromatic Aberration and Lens Design**

One of the common criticisms of wide-aperture lenses is chromatic aberration (CA). CA occurs when different wavelengths of light pass through the lens at slightly different speeds, resulting in fringing or color casts. When a lens is shot wide open, CA can become more pronounced, making it noticeable to the naked eye. However, as you stop down the lens, CA becomes less of an issue. For example, if we consider the f/1.8 lens mentioned earlier, it will exhibit significant chromatic aberration when shot wide open, but this effect will diminish as you start stopping it down.

**Lens Design: A Key Factor in Image Quality**

A well-designed lens can make all the difference in image quality. The f/0.95 lens, for instance, has 17 glass elements and is massive and heavy. This suggests that the lens designer had to carefully consider the optical design to achieve the desired results. In contrast, the f/1.8 lens has a more modest optical design, but it still produces stunning images.

**Personal Opinions vs. Technical Reality**

When it comes to photography, personal opinions can be valuable, but they shouldn't be confused with technical reality. Photographers often have a strong personal style and aesthetic, which can influence their choice of lenses and camera settings. However, this doesn't mean that personal opinions should override technical considerations. In fact, many photographers benefit from understanding the technical aspects of lens design and how they affect image quality.

**The Role of Pixel Peeping in Lens Design**

In recent years, the advent of pixel peeping has become increasingly prevalent. This refers to the practice of zooming into an image on a computer screen to examine every detail, including the resolution and sharpness of individual pixels. As a result, lens designers are under pressure to create lenses that can produce images with incredibly high levels of resolution and sharpness.

**The Significance of Lens Design in Modern Photography**

Lens design is crucial for photographers who want to achieve the best possible results. While technical considerations like aperture and focal length are important, they shouldn't overshadow the role of lens design. In fact, many professional photographers will tell you that a well-designed lens can make all the difference between a good image and a great one.

**The Cost of Specialized Lenses**

Some lenses, like the f/0.95, are designed to be specialized for specific types of photography. These lenses often come with a hefty price tag, which can be a barrier for many photographers. However, if you need that lens for your work, it may be worth investing in.

**The Importance of Feedback and Discussion**

As with any aspect of photography, feedback and discussion are essential for improving image quality. Whether it's online forums or social media groups, sharing knowledge and experiences with other photographers can help us all improve our craft. By discussing the pros and cons of different lenses and camera settings, we can learn from each other and become better photographers.

**Conclusion**

Lens design is a critical aspect of photography that can make or break an image. Whether you're shooting wide-aperture lenses or specialized optics like the f/0.95, understanding the technical aspects of lens design can help you achieve the best possible results. By considering factors like chromatic aberration and pixel peeping, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the art of photography and improve our craft as photographers.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business so i got a question and i think this is a good one to share with everybody this comes to us from mark who writes dear ted love the show especially the lens day videos i have a question i am a canon user and the new rf lenses are beautiful but they're also massive i've seen this with other brands as well panasonic has a 50 millimeter f 1.4 on their mirrorless system that's over twice the size of my old canon 50 millimeter f 1.4 why are the newer lenses so much bigger does that mean they are better lenses in terms of image quality thank you mark so this is a really great question and i think there's kind of two answers to this depending on how you look at it so the short answer would be technically yes i think especially with modern lenses lenses that have been designed in the last 15 years you're dealing with new manufacturing techniques really high tolerance of surface smoothness and we're able to make lenses now that we weren't able to physically produce years and years ago so i think they're probably from a technical standpoint these lenses probably are better image quality because of their size now there's also the artistic standpoint to this and there's a practical standpoint lenses are made by engineers optics designers and they're used by photographers so you have science on the one hand and then you have the more art side the more practical side on the other and i think that it depends on what you're doing and this is the short answer and i'm going to explain a little further but like let's say you're a street photographer and you want to kind of melt into the background and be very stealth in the way you shoot i think using a really large lens i think you could argue that's going to prohibit you from getting your best images but let's break this down a little further i also want to note that this is the internet and the way it works is when you get into forums and comments and discussions with people there's a lot of people who are photographers who think they know a lot about optics because of the opinions that they've got they're not actually optics designers they're photographers and so what you find is that most people's opinions are hard facts that's just the way people operate there are technical things however that you can measure with optics these are things like sharpness or resolution if you look at an mtf chart there are things like how well a lens deals with distortions with chromatic aberration with astigmatism all those kinds of things so those are usually facts they're usually measurable and then the opinions start surfacing where we start talking about the quality of the bouquet which technically you can measure some of that as well but it is going to be an opinion based thing you either like it or you don't and then you get into the magical qualities like the glow and stuff like that and those are things that really aren't measured and so just know that going into this discussion that you're going to see a lot of conflicting opinions what really matters in the end is what draws enjoyment from you and what you enjoy using and what works for you the best so what goes inside of a lens that would impact its size well there are two things first of all you have the optics in the lens they come in what we call elements some of them are grouped together we also have the autofocus mechanism now of course not all lenses have autofocus including modern lenses and i'm going to leave that out of this discussion that can be a factor in size though especially when you've got bigger elements that an autofocus motor has to drive this could have an impact on the way the autofocus is designed but i'm just going to talk about this purely from an optical standpoint so why do we have multiple optics inside a lens well the reason that we do is because each optic that is added into a lens design is trying to have an overall impact and correct some kind of imperfection in the overall light source as it touches the sensor or the film plane and it also has an effect on how it comes into the sensor the film plane so that is why we design lenses in groups of optics they all exist for specific reason now there is a catch-22 here in that the more optics or the more glass that you have inside a lens the more it would probably degrade the actual light that's coming in because you just have more elements to pass through it's just more resistance what are we trying to correct well they're things that are going to impact the final image so first of all there's two types of chromatic aberration that you're trying to fix there's things like coma astigmatism field curvature distortion so on and so forth so there's a lot that happens within that circle of light that comes through the lens that is being corrected by using those elements and of course as i mentioned lens design has changed dramatically i think in the last 15 years not only in terms of what we're able to design but how we're able to actually manufacture it i talked about surface tolerance we also have unusual shapes of a spherical elements that don't exist in nature i think every company kind of has their own name for these but i think a great example would be what sony calls their xa elements or extreme aspherical elements they're very hard to produce they're very costly and they can be different sizes and so it might add to the size of the lens it's definitely going to add to the price of the lens so all this certainly sounds very fancy but i want to get into some specific examples and compare some lenses for you and show you some images but real quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag and drop based back-end system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or url and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life squarespace is host to a number of other tools including e-commerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to squarespace.com aop to save an additional 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.com aop and i want to thank the folks at squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography i want to draw a comparison between two similar focal length lenses by the same manufacturer so let's talk about nikon so this year we saw the release of the nikon knocked 58 millimeter f 0.95 this is a crazy lens this is one that i rented i did a full review on this it is not a small lens it is massive i want to compare that lens with this one which is the z mount it's the 50 millimeter f 1.8 s this is not an expensive lens it's not a heavy lens it's fairly lightweight it's also not f 0.95 that is the big differentiator between these two lenses now with the knock lens this is a lens that's designed to be shot wide open usually in very low light situations or when you want razor thin depth of field now in my experience most situations with f 0.95 is such a shallow depth of field that it's really hard to get a picture that's not distracting so something like portraits when the nose is out of focus or especially if you're shooting close up if you're shooting flowers or something like that it's just so thin that you end up wanting to stop that lens down now so why is this an 8 000 lens and what's the practicality and what went into it a lot of people are offended so much by the price tag and the fact that it doesn't have autofocus that they just write it off as being a just extremely absurd lens it's really not and when you think of the way light comes through lens it produces what we call an image circle so we see it as a rectangle in the end it's actually a circular projection that gets put onto the sensor now one of the problems that you're going to have especially with a lens with that large an aperture things like vignetting and light fall off this is where the light is brightest in the center and it starts falling off towards the edges this actually does this in every lens it's just some of them show up more than others but with the f 0.95 this is an argument for making a much larger lens the other thing that it becomes very difficult when you design a lens is all those little aberrations and distortions and problems that we talked about earlier those are most prominent when a lens is shot wide open this goes for any lens like an f 1.8 lens if there's any chromatic aberration you're going to notice it most when it's wide open when you start stopping it down it's going to become less so so you want to find a lens if that's going to be a big deal for you where you don't want to see fringing to find a lens that looks pretty good wide open so that is another reason that the f 0.95 has 17 glass elements in here and it is massive it's also very heavy now can you get good images with this lens yeah of course i did i actually shot street photography in new york just to see what this would look like it was very difficult especially with manual focus i found that my best technique was to kind of pre-focus and wait for action to happen within the scene and i got lucky a few times when you're shooting at night and something's not moving around nearly as much i had better results with it i actually really like that lens can i afford that lens no that is a lens that i rent when i want to shoot on it it's just it's too much money for me to justify now what about the f 1.8 50 millimeter and by the way i do know that these are slightly different focal lengths and that's kind of another subject but they're close enough for what we're talking about here well this is a lens that i own it is a 600 lens and it's one that i bought because i end up reviewing a lot of nikon cameras i actually love the look of this lens this lens also has had some criticism because well up until most recently when nikon announced a 50 millimeter f 1.2 for a lot of people they didn't feel like f 1.8 was a quote unquote pro level lens i actually disagree with that yeah maybe you're not gonna get that extra little third of a stop or two-thirds of a stop of light in the end i actually love the way this lens renders i think it has a beautiful contrast to it it's got a really nice depth of field and the way that it falls off from the sharp areas into the bokeh areas i think it's a gorgeous lens and f 1.8 i don't feel really holds me back now remember i talked about opinions earlier everything i just said was my personal opinion except for the fact of why the f 0.95 knock lens is so big there are some very specific physical reasons why it has to be that big in order to render really well wide open you're not spending eight thousand dollars on an f 0.95 lens to stop it down in fact in my testing when you did stop it down it starts to look a lot like this lens once you get especially around f4 ish and so it's just it's kind of wild like that this is a very special purpose lens but if you need that lens and it's right for the work that you do then that's probably the right solution so i mentioned earlier that photographers have this annoying habit of getting on the internet and arguing in forums and trying to pass off their personal opinions as facts but it's kind of interesting to me because on the one hand you have lens designers basically engineers who specialize in optics that know what they're doing and they're scientifically designing an optic set that's going to go into a lens or lens design that is ultimately going to be used by photographers and photographers are very important too because they're the side of it that is going to bring the human element and bring the images to life i think this is true even if you're a technical photographer or if you're doing product photography there still is you know this area where your opinion and your feelings and your interpretation are what go into the final image not the science part of it and we are in the age of what we call pixel peeping because we can see all of our images rendered on a computer screen and we can zoom into the pixel level and we can see exactly what's going on i think that's actually driven the discipline of lens design and the seriousness that goes into it it sells a lot of lenses but in the end and i've always been a proponent of this it really doesn't make that big of a difference in the final image you either have a good photograph or you don't and sometimes those technical details in fact i think pretty much all the time with maybe a few rare instances if you're shooting astro and you've got blurry stars because you didn't have a lens that handles coma correctly but i think for the most part the image is going to speak for itself i would love to know what you guys think though so drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then laterthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business so i got a question and i think this is a good one to share with everybody this comes to us from mark who writes dear ted love the show especially the lens day videos i have a question i am a canon user and the new rf lenses are beautiful but they're also massive i've seen this with other brands as well panasonic has a 50 millimeter f 1.4 on their mirrorless system that's over twice the size of my old canon 50 millimeter f 1.4 why are the newer lenses so much bigger does that mean they are better lenses in terms of image quality thank you mark so this is a really great question and i think there's kind of two answers to this depending on how you look at it so the short answer would be technically yes i think especially with modern lenses lenses that have been designed in the last 15 years you're dealing with new manufacturing techniques really high tolerance of surface smoothness and we're able to make lenses now that we weren't able to physically produce years and years ago so i think they're probably from a technical standpoint these lenses probably are better image quality because of their size now there's also the artistic standpoint to this and there's a practical standpoint lenses are made by engineers optics designers and they're used by photographers so you have science on the one hand and then you have the more art side the more practical side on the other and i think that it depends on what you're doing and this is the short answer and i'm going to explain a little further but like let's say you're a street photographer and you want to kind of melt into the background and be very stealth in the way you shoot i think using a really large lens i think you could argue that's going to prohibit you from getting your best images but let's break this down a little further i also want to note that this is the internet and the way it works is when you get into forums and comments and discussions with people there's a lot of people who are photographers who think they know a lot about optics because of the opinions that they've got they're not actually optics designers they're photographers and so what you find is that most people's opinions are hard facts that's just the way people operate there are technical things however that you can measure with optics these are things like sharpness or resolution if you look at an mtf chart there are things like how well a lens deals with distortions with chromatic aberration with astigmatism all those kinds of things so those are usually facts they're usually measurable and then the opinions start surfacing where we start talking about the quality of the bouquet which technically you can measure some of that as well but it is going to be an opinion based thing you either like it or you don't and then you get into the magical qualities like the glow and stuff like that and those are things that really aren't measured and so just know that going into this discussion that you're going to see a lot of conflicting opinions what really matters in the end is what draws enjoyment from you and what you enjoy using and what works for you the best so what goes inside of a lens that would impact its size well there are two things first of all you have the optics in the lens they come in what we call elements some of them are grouped together we also have the autofocus mechanism now of course not all lenses have autofocus including modern lenses and i'm going to leave that out of this discussion that can be a factor in size though especially when you've got bigger elements that an autofocus motor has to drive this could have an impact on the way the autofocus is designed but i'm just going to talk about this purely from an optical standpoint so why do we have multiple optics inside a lens well the reason that we do is because each optic that is added into a lens design is trying to have an overall impact and correct some kind of imperfection in the overall light source as it touches the sensor or the film plane and it also has an effect on how it comes into the sensor the film plane so that is why we design lenses in groups of optics they all exist for specific reason now there is a catch-22 here in that the more optics or the more glass that you have inside a lens the more it would probably degrade the actual light that's coming in because you just have more elements to pass through it's just more resistance what are we trying to correct well they're things that are going to impact the final image so first of all there's two types of chromatic aberration that you're trying to fix there's things like coma astigmatism field curvature distortion so on and so forth so there's a lot that happens within that circle of light that comes through the lens that is being corrected by using those elements and of course as i mentioned lens design has changed dramatically i think in the last 15 years not only in terms of what we're able to design but how we're able to actually manufacture it i talked about surface tolerance we also have unusual shapes of a spherical elements that don't exist in nature i think every company kind of has their own name for these but i think a great example would be what sony calls their xa elements or extreme aspherical elements they're very hard to produce they're very costly and they can be different sizes and so it might add to the size of the lens it's definitely going to add to the price of the lens so all this certainly sounds very fancy but i want to get into some specific examples and compare some lenses for you and show you some images but real quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag and drop based back-end system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or url and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life squarespace is host to a number of other tools including e-commerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to squarespace.com aop to save an additional 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.com aop and i want to thank the folks at squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography i want to draw a comparison between two similar focal length lenses by the same manufacturer so let's talk about nikon so this year we saw the release of the nikon knocked 58 millimeter f 0.95 this is a crazy lens this is one that i rented i did a full review on this it is not a small lens it is massive i want to compare that lens with this one which is the z mount it's the 50 millimeter f 1.8 s this is not an expensive lens it's not a heavy lens it's fairly lightweight it's also not f 0.95 that is the big differentiator between these two lenses now with the knock lens this is a lens that's designed to be shot wide open usually in very low light situations or when you want razor thin depth of field now in my experience most situations with f 0.95 is such a shallow depth of field that it's really hard to get a picture that's not distracting so something like portraits when the nose is out of focus or especially if you're shooting close up if you're shooting flowers or something like that it's just so thin that you end up wanting to stop that lens down now so why is this an 8 000 lens and what's the practicality and what went into it a lot of people are offended so much by the price tag and the fact that it doesn't have autofocus that they just write it off as being a just extremely absurd lens it's really not and when you think of the way light comes through lens it produces what we call an image circle so we see it as a rectangle in the end it's actually a circular projection that gets put onto the sensor now one of the problems that you're going to have especially with a lens with that large an aperture things like vignetting and light fall off this is where the light is brightest in the center and it starts falling off towards the edges this actually does this in every lens it's just some of them show up more than others but with the f 0.95 this is an argument for making a much larger lens the other thing that it becomes very difficult when you design a lens is all those little aberrations and distortions and problems that we talked about earlier those are most prominent when a lens is shot wide open this goes for any lens like an f 1.8 lens if there's any chromatic aberration you're going to notice it most when it's wide open when you start stopping it down it's going to become less so so you want to find a lens if that's going to be a big deal for you where you don't want to see fringing to find a lens that looks pretty good wide open so that is another reason that the f 0.95 has 17 glass elements in here and it is massive it's also very heavy now can you get good images with this lens yeah of course i did i actually shot street photography in new york just to see what this would look like it was very difficult especially with manual focus i found that my best technique was to kind of pre-focus and wait for action to happen within the scene and i got lucky a few times when you're shooting at night and something's not moving around nearly as much i had better results with it i actually really like that lens can i afford that lens no that is a lens that i rent when i want to shoot on it it's just it's too much money for me to justify now what about the f 1.8 50 millimeter and by the way i do know that these are slightly different focal lengths and that's kind of another subject but they're close enough for what we're talking about here well this is a lens that i own it is a 600 lens and it's one that i bought because i end up reviewing a lot of nikon cameras i actually love the look of this lens this lens also has had some criticism because well up until most recently when nikon announced a 50 millimeter f 1.2 for a lot of people they didn't feel like f 1.8 was a quote unquote pro level lens i actually disagree with that yeah maybe you're not gonna get that extra little third of a stop or two-thirds of a stop of light in the end i actually love the way this lens renders i think it has a beautiful contrast to it it's got a really nice depth of field and the way that it falls off from the sharp areas into the bokeh areas i think it's a gorgeous lens and f 1.8 i don't feel really holds me back now remember i talked about opinions earlier everything i just said was my personal opinion except for the fact of why the f 0.95 knock lens is so big there are some very specific physical reasons why it has to be that big in order to render really well wide open you're not spending eight thousand dollars on an f 0.95 lens to stop it down in fact in my testing when you did stop it down it starts to look a lot like this lens once you get especially around f4 ish and so it's just it's kind of wild like that this is a very special purpose lens but if you need that lens and it's right for the work that you do then that's probably the right solution so i mentioned earlier that photographers have this annoying habit of getting on the internet and arguing in forums and trying to pass off their personal opinions as facts but it's kind of interesting to me because on the one hand you have lens designers basically engineers who specialize in optics that know what they're doing and they're scientifically designing an optic set that's going to go into a lens or lens design that is ultimately going to be used by photographers and photographers are very important too because they're the side of it that is going to bring the human element and bring the images to life i think this is true even if you're a technical photographer or if you're doing product photography there still is you know this area where your opinion and your feelings and your interpretation are what go into the final image not the science part of it and we are in the age of what we call pixel peeping because we can see all of our images rendered on a computer screen and we can zoom into the pixel level and we can see exactly what's going on i think that's actually driven the discipline of lens design and the seriousness that goes into it it sells a lot of lenses but in the end and i've always been a proponent of this it really doesn't make that big of a difference in the final image you either have a good photograph or you don't and sometimes those technical details in fact i think pretty much all the time with maybe a few rare instances if you're shooting astro and you've got blurry stars because you didn't have a lens that handles coma correctly but i think for the most part the image is going to speak for itself i would love to know what you guys think though so drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"