How slow can you hand-hold?

[fast_primes]

In the face of such cogent reasoning and careful experimentation, I will of course, defer to your superior expertise Mr. Vanson. Others who might wish to persevere with NeatImage, can check further at Norman Koren's site for more reviews and usage tips at the following site:

 

http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF8.html

[dave_s]

Hey, didn't mean to open the big can of worms. Sorry.

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Seriously, I don't have an axe to grind, and maybe I should pull my head outa my butt and accept the fact that unsharpness is a necessary evil, and may not even be an evil for some applications. Derek Z's image definition (above) is limited by shallow depth of sharp focus, but to me that's exactly what makes it effective, for reasons I won't go into (but probably the same as your reasons).

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The other extreme is the image where everything's sharp, focused, and there's no grain, like an 8 x 10 taken at f/22 with best Scheimpflug blah blah you know the drill, and contact printed, a la Weston. I think it pays to study LF work like this, even though 35 mil shooters often aren't interested. To me there's more visual information there than I can process at once, which gives the image a lot of grip on me, sort of what the art geeks call a trompe d'oeil effect. Damn hard to achieve in 35 mil, though.

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What gets me is the disconnect: we obsess about MTFs, and sharpness, and image definition, and whether Canon glass is better than Nikon, and all that crap. People pay 1000s of bucks for fancy glass. Then we piss away our resolution by hand-holding, even when we don't have to. Probably nobody here would shoot cheap off-brand glass, but the guy with a $20 used Zenit, a good lens shade, and a quiet tripod is going to have a better negative than someone shooting "L" glass handheld at 1/30. But that's a boring rant you've all heard before. <i>(General nodding of heads.)</i>

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I'll shut up now. <i>(Applause).</i>

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Dave