Kinds of Lenses, Classes of Lenses, and the lost Art of Lenses sacrificed to the Artifice

I will be outlining much longer detailed articles with lens reviews on this blog in the future. Suffice to say that clarification is necessitated that all lenses must be judged within 3 independent classes.  Zoom lenses, wide angle primes below 28mm, and conventional primes 28mm and above.

Only 3 aspects of lens design have improved in the past 25+ years (much longer still for conventional primes); image stabilization, AF tracking devices and interface, and lastly wide angle primes. Reinventing the wheel in simplex optical design has revolved around increased resolution, removal of CA, and removing vignetting, & corner-to-corner lens rendition. Much of this has, alas come at a heavy cost to the ART of high quality conventional lenses. The pendulum has to this day swung MUCH TOO FAR to the end of the ARTIFICE (the construct, the empirical lens and its quantifiable nature).

However, in the case of professional photography, the ART is also the ARTIFICE, the ART is also the PERFORMANCE. Unlike many devices in life, which may look lovely, performance matters move. In the case of the photographic art form, the esse, the logos, the KOSMOS NOETOS (κοσμος νοητος) has been lost and surplanted by existentialists, materialists, who have no more idea of what ART is than a computer. These existentialist beings embrace the quantifiable, the COSMOS AESTHETOS.

At the cost of ALL else  lens designers have bent their souls to the existentialists, rather than the artists. It might be added that the sharpest blade is undesirable if its art, its attributes are poor. This is an ancient truth that has been lost in the craft of modern lens design. 

Further still lenses are of two divisions, high purpose & generic. This is (or should be) self-explanatory in the diagram below; keep this in mind before your next purchase

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