Photography Diary | Voigtlander Nokton 35 1.2 Aspherical II Lens

Modern lenses have more perfect optical performances. In contrast, vintage lenses or the characters of imperfections become a distinctive flavor.

This 35 Nokton II has a painterly look with swirly bokeh that is not perfectly round, a bloomy glow, and lower contrast at f/1.2, along with the associated colour fringing at high contrast edges similar to a Noctilux.

The charm of a large aperture lens is indeed its light-gathering capabilities in dark situations, and the play of focus and blur, where depth is depicted, like a cinematic frame. People find this look intriguing as we can’t see the world this way with natural vision.

On a full-frame sensor, blur is more contrasted due to the wider field of view, it can focus down to 0.5m which exaggerates the depth. See the images below of the branches, it’s like a virtual fog machine was on with the perceived depth in a 2D photograph. They are shot on the Leica SL2-S to take advantage of the close-focusing feature.

I purchased this lens about 10 years ago based on the recommendations made by Steve Huff. Although I ended up getting the 35 Summilux as well like him, I kept this lens for its vintage flavour. It’s a bit of a beast to carry due to the size and weight, but just pretend it’s a Noctilux - as mounting it on the M8 with the cropped sensor is about equivalent to a 50mm, call it the poor man’s Noctilux as you can enjoy some of those lens characters. Below are images shot on the Leica M8.

As visible, the painterly and cinematic feel is created by the lens. Below are some images and a crop to show the character of the bokeh balls and blur.

Here are some more images of the lens in various lighting conditions with a play on the focal points.

Rangefinder Diary | Bestowing new power for older camera sensors?

Whether cryonics will work on humans is yet to be seen, but for Digital Negatives, it has merits. Keep your RAW files until newer technology can unpack and extract more, we are seeing the advantages these days with AI imaging help.

Traditional noise reduction software is bound by the limits of maneuverability with pixels and noise artifacts. New AI noise reduction is based on deep learning where AI can accurately distinguish between image details and noise, granting it abilities to recover details and produce images with less noise intelligently.

I was recently blown away by Adobe Lightroom’s Denoise “magic”, it is quite impressive indeed. You can see an extremely manipulated image with severe under-exposure brings up all kinds of flaws. In this case, the M8’s antiquated CCD from the 2006 era has more limits compared with the latest CMOS sensors. Review the image comparisons in the post, it took care of a lot of things, although it can’t decipher whether the severe banding is content or blemishes. In the big picture, the image is “revived” and went from unusable to passable!