The Summicron-M 50mm has been glued to my camera for the past few weeks in order to familiarise myself with it. It’s not much of a learning curve, but the focus shift and obvious susceptibility to flare is somehting one needs to pre-empt. Other than that the lens has a lovely clean draw, with modest colour and contrast.

While the lens isn’t going to turn any background subject mattery into a soft and creamy backdrop, I think it does a fair job at staying neutral. The amount of spherical abberation creates a focus transition that's fairly smooth and not abrupt. The lens seems slightly undercorrected for these spherical aberrations, which makes the background blur and the focus transition smoother and softer than to the other way round to the foreground. It doesn’t feel that a desgin goal for this lens was strong subject and background speration. 

The levels of detail and contrast rendered are a real feast for the eyes. It takes a couple stops for the sharpness to distribute itself nicely thoughout the frame, but I find the performance to be excellent in general. I think the level of some modern APO lenses have raised some perfomance expectations to a very high level that can sometimes reflect quite poorly on other lenses. Below are some images from the Swakopmund dunes. A great place to photograph patterns, textures and fine details. For more images of dunes, visit my Desert and Dunes Gallery.