It's all about the glass...

There are many aspects that make a photograph look great. Composition, drama, contrast, color, subject, the scene's content and/or message, the (catching of a) moment. My personal favorite however is sharpness. The level of detail and resolution that is present in a photograph is almost a personal obsession. Especially in portrait photography. I know that most subjects, especially female, don't like their skin texture shown sharply in their portraits; they'd ask the photographer to hide away all little spots and irregularities and definitely avoid showing wrinkles and skin pores. To achieve that in digital photography nowadays is a trivial task indeed, done in a heartbeat, as any Photoshop practitioner can promptly assure you. In addition to any 'corrections' like these, many subjects prefer additional 'soft focus' applied to eliminate skin texture even further.

On the other hand, all great portrait photographers usually go for the sharpest detail their glass can capture. In the days of Kodak and Agfa B/W negatives, they'd boost sharpness and texture detail by using low ISO ratings first, high contrast studio lighting next (usually strobes with honeycombs), and by subsequently underexposing and then pushing development times to achieve sharpest possible texture, and smallest grain possible. Karsh's work is a classic example of this. As most of his work, one of his portraits of George Bernard Shaw was an exceptionally sharp photograph in which you could count one by one all of Shaw's hairs in his beard and mustache... of course the Great Yousuf used large format field cameras with 'huge' surface negative plates that could capture all that detail rather 'easy'. Ten years ago, I saw an original Karsh copy of Shaw's portrait hanging in the... restrooms of the Sterling Software offices at the company's Crescent Court HQ in Dallas, Texas!  I mean, can you just believe this? A Karsh in the restrooms? Self-made Texan billionaire entrepreneur Sam Wyly, owner of Sterling Software, used to decorate the offices with expensive artwork, to the extent a Karsch was only good enough for the restrooms! But this is another story...

Few days ago I came across the shots of someone going under the name Simon_01 on Flickr.  Simon's lucky enough to own an H3DII Hasselblad medium format DSLR. Maybe he won the Euromillions, who knows. These things cost north of 15K euro's the cheapest, incl. a normal focal length objective (80mm) and will certainly produce images of exceptional sharpness quality. Click Simon_01's male portrait above to 'experience' the sharpness we are talking about. Yep, it is an experience!

Think about that: Simon's portraits are shot from a distance of 3 to 5 feet from the subject, minimum. As you check out the sharpness captured by the Carl Zeiss glass on the H3DII-31mpx sensor, you just can't believe the level of detail. You can count this guy's pores and hairs hands down. I mean, to be able to observe most facial details shown on that shot on the live subject, you'd actually need a magnifying glass a few inches above his face, right? These cameras capture almost medical level detail from a distance that certainly qualifies as non trivial! This Zeiss glass is capable of the weirdest sharpness ever seen on a photograph! No wonder pro's like Erwin Olaf use no other than Digital Hasselblad gear with Zeiss glass in their studio work!

Anyways, as I can't afford an H series Swede or I ever will, I went to test the next best outfit I could afford. A Nikon D200 with a 'portrait' ideal lens, the Nikon 60mm 1:2.8D. I used a ten sq. feet Elinchrome softbox as my front lighting, and a secondary strobe with honeycomb on the model's left side. I shot a few pictures at 10mpx resolution, which is one third of Simon's H3DII-31's full pixel range. I used as low an ISO rating as I possibly could. The level of detail achieved this way, without any software sharpening involved (see picture to the right), is still impressive by normal DSLR standards. Click on each of the two shots shown here (Simon's and mine) and compare. You can then see why a Hasselblad will still cost you seven to ten times more. Remarkably far better resolution and sharpness, not to mention dynamic range and skin tones.  Nevertheless, the question still remains. How obsessive should someone be about technical quality in photography to still keep dreaming about owning one of these ultimate boxes? That is the question...

UPDATE: For those of you who are curious about whether one could further improve on a captured image and create the illusion of better sharpness by applying some minimal level software corrections (via On-One and Lightroom tools), take a look at an 'improved' version of my previous image with sharpness and color balance adjusted.