Fast Lenses
Prime lenses (that is, those with a fixed focal length) used to be the standard for professional photography, until their status was gradually eroded by zoom lenses with excellent optical qualities and remarkable zoom ranges.
Yet one of the advantages of prime lenses is that they can be designed with very wide maximum apertures. This is not new technology. Ultra-fast lenses have been around for a while, from the early Ermanox from 1924 with its Emostar ƒ/1.8 (not great by today’s standards but remarkable then) to the Leica Noctilux-M 50mm ƒ/0.95 lens of today. Extremely high resolution is a necessity, because, as we’ll see on the following pages, a large maximum aperture results in shallow depth of field, and this usually concentrates ...
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