 I've been obsessed with sharpness and resolution, and for what? My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer, but with a family to feed and bills to pay, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. It was time to follow my passion. I'm along on my journey to become the best black in my photography I can be, whether it be film or digital, I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures in hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Brighton Yash. Since I started shooting film, again, it's become more clear to me that I have an obsession with sharpness and resolution. I'm one of those guys that seems to be zooming in past 100%, 200% looking at my files, and I started wondering, why? Why am I doing that? Films kind of cured me of that a little bit. You start zooming in with film and all you're going to see is grain. There's really nothing gained from that much magnification on the computer screen. And I started thinking, well, why is it that it's important that minute difference in sharpness or resolution that I'm looking for? Why is that even important? Nobody will ever see it, even in large prints. I don't know why I've been kind of sucked into this whole thinking that everything has got to be at the maximum sharpness. I've got to use the sharpest aperture, got to use high resolution sensors. When I'm stopping my lens down to F16, and the print sizes I make, I don't see the difference. Why am I so worried about something like that? What is enough? What is enough sharpness? What's acceptable? What is acceptable resolution? I once saw a guy so obsessed with sharpness that he was focus stacking a landscape image at F4 and using like 10 frames. Like that was going to give him so much more sharpness. That just seems a little bit overkill to me. I've never gone through that extreme. I'm not really a big fan of focus stacking just because I think I'm lazy. My 20mm really has excellent depth of field. I haven't really found the need to do that unless I'm just really getting really close on something. There are times where I'd rather the background not be as sharp as the foreground, especially if I'm really emphasizing what's in the foreground. There are times, very seldom, but there are times when I will focus stack to get enough depth of field, and that's just to get sharpness from the front to the back, but overall it's not just to get a sharper image, it's just to get sharpness where I want it. I don't remember if I said why I'm shooting digital today, but it's the last few months I've been shooting mostly film with my medium format camera. We've just recently moved in all my darkroom. My developing supplies are all packed away. It's going to be a little wildfire, I can get all that sorted out. It's been a really busy summer, and last month or two we're going to sell our house and get moved. The good news is we're moved, we're sold the house, and should have a little bit more time for some photography, some videos, if that's important to you. It's important to me. I've gotten really drawn to these rocks along the creek here. I really like the texture around the southern. I think these shots I'm taking in here are really all about the rocks, not so much about the water. I've seen tests done on the internet on the YouTube channels where they'll take various size sensors enlarge them really big and just make a crop and do an 8x10 printout of the crop and say, look, there is a difference. Well, if you're judging it by an 8x10 printout that you're holding inches from your face, yeah, you'll see a difference. But if you actually look at the image at its full size, you will be standing 12 inches away from it to look at the image. So you probably won't see that much of a difference. One thing about judging sharpness or resolution. We don't look at images side by side in the real world. An image is sitting there by itself on its own merit. If it looks sharp enough, it's sharp enough. We don't set two images side by side and say, oh, it's not quite as sharp as the other one. It just doesn't work that way. We need to stop falling for that marketing hype. I think that's where it comes from. Camera makers are wanting to make money. I get it. They've kind of got themselves in a pickle now. They're trying to convince you that this one lens resolves so much better than the other. And if you magnify it 500% and look at the writing on some sample image, you'll see a slightly sharper image, but in the real world, you'd never see it. You'd never notice it. And since when has sharpness become how we judge photographs? I would think composition, I would think emotional response to the image would be much more important than this one's slightly sharper than this one here. This one has slightly more detail than this one here. I'm as guilty as anybody. I have fallen into that trap of analyzing everything for sharpness. I've done my tests to see where diffraction enters into my lenses. And yes, there's a difference, but it's so small. They're just not worth worrying about in most cases. At least for my lenses, your mileage may vary. I actually did a test a few months ago, maybe six months ago, and I made a video about it of testing to see how my lenses, how diffraction affects my lenses at F11 and F16. And I was worried that the sharpness, I'd be losing enough so much sharpness that F16 would be kind of useless, because I've been using F16 quite a bit on a few of my lenses. And what I found was, yeah, there was a little difference, but a little uncharred mask, and it really didn't look that different. And the difference was so small to me visually that it really wasn't worth worrying about. And that was just with my lenses. I just tested three of my most used primes. You realize that I was obsessing about something that really didn't need to obsess about. I actually pulled down the video because I just didn't want my channel to be about geeking out over resolution and sharpness. When I talk about judging sharpness, I'm talking about looking at the image, the minute sharpness, obsessing over the little details. I'm not talking about out of focus, miss focus. I mean, that's pretty obvious if the focus is missed or it's out of focus, motion blur, that kind of thing. But that will be pretty noticeable no matter what, even a smaller size. I'm talking about the minute details, the stuff that you have to zoom in like 200% to see. And then you think you see it, but no one's ever noticed. No one's ever going to be able to say, it would have been slightly sharper if you just used F8, kind of like this fern back here. Kind of bracketing my depth of field though, not for sharpness before background blur. And try to balance the background blur with the subject sharpness. I've got old lenses like this 105 here. I know it's not as sharp as a modern lens, still manual focus lens, but I really like using it. And the images I get from it are sharp enough. If I was to compare it side by side with another lens, there would probably be a difference. But my images aren't going to be compared side by side. I think I'm actually enjoying my photography more now that I'm not obsessing so much over stuff that people really can't see anyway. I feel a little freer. So as far as obsessing over sharpness and resolution, those little things that don't really make that big a difference in my photography, I'm going to work harder on not obsessing over the little things like that. Focus more on the big picture on the full frame. I think I might be much happier in the end. I think we all as photographers need to figure out what that level is for us. How sharp is sharp enough? How much resolution is enough? I think I'm going to be much happier in the end if we can come to terms with those things. Is it really that important that we can zoom in to 300 or 400 percent and say, oh my gosh, look at that? If you're shooting film, you know very well that that's not going to be very fruitful. So I'm going to leave you with that thought today. So I'm going to end the day's video right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.