First Sample Shots from Zeiss 100mm F/2 Makro-Planar

01 Jan 2012

Here are some recently captured shots from the Carl Zeiss 100mm F/2 Makro-Planar on a 1D Mark II. All images were imported into Adobe Lightroom using default Camera Raw profile defaults, tone curve set to linear, and zero sharpening. Click on the thumbnails for full size images.

EXIF data available on each image for aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings.

First day I only had a chance to do some hand-held shots outside my office. Therefore some softness in the brick building facade might be from hand shake.

As expected with this size aperture, on high contrast regions both in-focus and those out-of-focus, purple fringing occurs wide open. In low contrast or images with minimal specular highlights, the F/2 aperture really shines. The contrast really makes even dull-lit subjects pop, and amongst a low-contract subject minimal fringing shows up wide open. This is a great news for my style of work, which a lot of times is in low lit or low contrast scenarios.

For the pen, I wanted to see just how far I could push the lens. This was captured with three Kenko extension tubes--a 12mm, a 20mm, and a 36mm--mounted to the 100mm F/2 MP. Note these images were captured on a 1D Mark II with a 1.3 crop factor. With the 100mm MP out-of-box magnification at 1:2, and all three Kenko extension tubes on, that gives a 1.18:1 magnification. Taking into account the camera's crop factor, that provides a 1.534:1 magnification.

The lens continues to impress...

Lastly, just for fun I did a hand-held shot and pointed skyward. Color rendition and saturation are great. Sure the blues could be pushed a bit more in saturation, but this is with zero adjustments other than default Camera Raw.

More 100mm MP samples to come soon.