having fun with the dark knight

The weather is getting better and so the light, and I had the chance to shoot with the speedmaster dark knight, 50 mm f 0.95 prime lense, under better light conditions than I did in Trondheim in Norway in february. Of course I still use in mostly at F0.95 cause it is a superfast prime lense as you know. For all who does not know the lense, it s manual focus lense. 

The open question is still, how is the dark knight performing. When you have bad light conditions, you never know wether it is a problem with the lense or the light or whatever. So here are some results from the first european spring days.

With better light, you have more contrast on your target and the focussing is easier than under foggy conditions. So in most case you can nail the focus spot on, even with the shallow depth of field at f 0.95. No problem at all. I use always the magnifier option on the Sony A7 and not the focus peaking to be really accurate. And it does work fine. Period.

Let's talk about the results, the photos. Is there enough sharpness, resolution maybe even a 3D Zeissish pop visible? Let's see. on the left you have a post processed photo from this week, on the right, it is just the conversion in Capture One 8.2 with the default settings. You can click on the right one to see it larger.

The dark knigh is giving nice colors and is sharp enough for large prints. I have focused on the "Pirvat Club" of the upper poster and that is pretty sharp. Even sharper than I normaly need. I'm a big fan of VSCO and they are not focused on absolute sharpness and resolution and will add blur and grain to the photo. So the mitakon is sharp enough for me, at f 0.95!

Is the a 3D pop? To be honest, in my eyes the Zeiss 3D pop is a nice marketing trick, due to the shallow depth of field in combination with the sharpness there is a nice separation from the background. And the bokeh, it is nice, maybe not super soft, but nice.

Vignetting? I don't care at all about the vignetting. I know that there is a profile already available for Lightroom but I don't need it. 

I'm more interested in the colors but not in the way wether the lense is having a Leica or Zeiss color but if they are pleasant or not. And to be honest. I like the colors especially in combination with the VSCO filters.

Overall I can say, that the dark knight is performing very very good. It might be that the Leica Noctilux is a little bit better, but that would be over my budget. So if you want to have a good superfast 50 mm prime lense, the mitakon speedmaster is the way to go .....  if you have a Sony A7.