sharpness

Let's consider a situation. You went out for a photo shoot with your trusty camera or phone. On location, all the photos looked sharp on the small screen and when you returned to base and opened the photos on your computer you found some photos had missed focus. Worse in some photos the entire image seemed shaken and out of focus.

NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will jointly release the James Webb Space Telescope's first full-color images and spectroscopic data during a live broadcast on July 12 at 10:40 AM EDT.

One of the James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror segments was struck by a micrometeoroid and while it has been damaged, NASA says it's not cause for alarm and the telescope is still on schedule.

The James Webb Space Telescope will release its first full-color images and spectroscopic data on July 12, and a countdown clock has been added to the telescope's website.

What is an aspherical lens and what does it do? Canon has shared a video that explains the problems engineers face in lens design and how the company solved them using aspherical lenses.

Many of us enjoy quality. Be it a car or a lens, there's a pleasure in using quality things. And in the case of lenses, how perceivable is the quality of the images captured?

While teaching a recent workshop, I joked that street photography was the only genre where people would buy $3,000 worth of cameras and lenses and then deliberately use them to make out of focus, grainy, imperfect images. This led to a pretty interesting discussion about the merits to imperfection.

As with a majority of newbies to photography, the obsession with gear and chasing the newest toys proved to be irresistible to me. I spent far more time reading reviews, comparing charts, watching youtube videos, and looking for deals than actually going out and shooting.

From Wiktionary: Noun pixel peeper (plural pixel peepers) (idiomatic, photography) "A person who carefully scrutinizes a magnified digital photograph in order to evaluate resolution and image quality."

When we finally pluck up the courage to purchase an expensive lens, we expect them to be perfect right? Unfortunately, no matter how good the lens is, there are always going to be minor differences when we attach it to our specific camera.

So, here’s the story: Nikon announced its new 180-400mm f/4 lens, and I’ve been more than a little curious about it. However, I’m not 100% sold on it just yet, so I decided to rent one and give it a whirl for a few days and share what I’ve discovered with you.

Purchasing a new lens for your kit can be an expensive endeavor and the more information you know before making a purchase is always useful. You may have noticed that lens manufacturer sites tend to include what is known as a Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) chart.

Besides sensor size, quality glass is the other major hurdle that smartphones need to overcome if they ever want to truly compete, quality-wise, with their bigger more capable brothers.

But since attaching a 500mm lens to a smartphone looks... well... kind of dumb, the folks at Canadian startup Algolux are taking a software-based approach and producing some truly incredible results in the process.

For landscape photographers, getting your entire scene in focus while keeping things as sharp as possible at the same time can be a challenge.

But if you follow the simple technique laid out by photographer Joshua Cripps in the tutorial above, as he puts it, it becomes "as easy as manually removing a corn syrup-based artificially-flavored confectionary product, from the infantile grasp of a newborn Homo sapien."

It’s fairly well-known that, when it comes to capturing images, more important than almost any camera body is the glass being put in front of it. However, there are times when your camera body plays a vital role in determining the quality of the image rendered by said glass.

To prove this and also help show off what glass performs best with a particular body, DxOMark has published a series of articles that break down what the best lenses are for the Nikon D800E.

Reikan Technology, the company behind the FoCal automatic lens calibration tool, tells us that it has released a new web-based tool for researching the performance of camera and lens combinations.

Ever since Canon’s new 24-70mm f/2.8L II arrived late last year, lens reviewers …

Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) charts are a very commonly used tool in the photo industry for measuring and describing how sharp a particular lens is. However, it's a system that is largely enigmatic to those outside the realm of optic experts and camera gearheads.

For those of you who don't want to learn how to read MTF charts, camera gear testing service DxOMark has announced a new metric that boils a lens' sharpness down to a single easy-to-understand-and-compare number: the Perceptual Megapixel.

Despite its girth, weight, and price, Canon's original 24-70mm f/2.8L is a highly-regarded general-purposes lens. When the followup Mark II version was announced back in February, the higher-price tag, similar specs, and lack of IS had many photographers scratching their heads. Then the reviews started coming out.

After being announced back in 2002 as a replacement to the 28-70mm, Canon’s 24-70mm f/2.8 (above right) quickly became …