Starting the Salamander Optics Blog.

I started this blog because I want to share how to get the most out of your lenses.

When you look up a lens, you find no shortage of material: posts on X, review sites, official pages. But the assessments vary from person to person, and working out “so what is it actually like?” or “what will it do for what I shoot?” turns out to be remarkably hard.

What I want to write here is the kind of thing that lets you read a lens’s characteristics as fully as possible, and get the most out of the lens you have.

Who is writing

I have a background in optical design, including camera lenses. On X (@OptSalamander) I build my own optical software and post about all sorts of lenses. This blog is meant to be the place where I sit down and write things out more thoroughly.

Why I wanted to start a blog

How a lens is judged actually shifts a great deal with the conditions — shooting distance, for one.

For the same lens, change how you measure, which metric you look at, or where you put the weight, and the conclusion can flip. In design work this premise is taken for granted, but in places where lenses are discussed it is hardly ever shared. So assessments diverge, and conversations talk past each other.

For sources you can rely on, official pages and catalogues give you MTF curves and layout diagrams. But reading “how it will actually render” out of those is not straightforward, even for a specialist. Put the other way round: if you have the background firmly in hand, you can infer a lens’s rendering to a reasonable degree.

Information itself is available in any quantity these days. What seems scarce is anywhere that discusses it quantitatively, with that premise in place. So it felt like there ought to be at least one place that stays honest to the basic principles of optics and writes only what can be checked about a lens’s characteristics. That is why I decided to start this blog.

What I hope to deliver

Here is what I am hoping to get across.

That you can draw out everything your lens has to give.
That you can choose the lens that fits you best.
That the “why?” gets answered.
Above all, that you come to find the world of optics interesting.

I was moved by the way photographs and films move people, and I wanted to make things that move people too. That is what set me on the path toward optical engineering, and it is what has carried me to where I am now. I hope this blog can be a good influence on the work you make.

(And that you sink a little deeper into the lens swamp…)

The three places this blog lives

Optics Blog (here): explanatory articles on lenses and optics. Written as carefully as I can manage, with plenty of figures.
Toy Box: a box where I write freely, about things related to optics and things not.
Lens Atlas (under construction): an atlas where lens data from published patents is drawn out and the optical performance compiled. I want it to be a place with few words, where you can simply enjoy what is inside a lens.

Some promises

Precisely because of that background, there are things I have decided not to write.

I do not rank products as better or worse. (I do not think it is something that can be ranked, either.)
I write only on the basis of public information. I do not touch non-public knowledge, and I will not answer questions about it.
On technical matters I put accuracy first. If you notice something, I would be glad to hear it in the comments.
I do not write articles that hurt anyone, whether a company or an individual.

One last thing

I am an unhurried sort by nature, so I would like to keep this going slowly, and for a long time.

In an age of AI, with all kinds of information flowing past, I want to grow a place — freely, at my own pace — where you feel you can come and read something dependable.

When the writing is not going well, or the motivation is not quite there, I tend to be posting on X instead. Do drop by if you like.