The Canon 50mm f0.95 is the stuff of legend. Sure it wasn’t particularly sharp, and depth of field was so short that you’re unlikely to get an entire face in focus, but the notion of a lens that bright is more than a little attractive (even if you’re unlikely to have enough light to focus at all if you’re in a situation where you need the f0.95 maximum aperture).

So the announcement of a new 50mm f0.95 lens, this time from Leica and with sharper optics, is probably an angel song to some. It’s a little spendy for me to put on my lens lust list, but it’s good to know such a lens exists.

Digital Photography Review’s look of Sigma’s 50mm f/1.4 has me drooling. I have an el cheapo 50mm f/1.8 and am looking to upgrade. At $1500, Canon’s 50mm f/1.2 is just way too expensive, but their 50mm f/1.4 just didn’t seem to be enough of a upgrade to be worth the price. Sigma’s new lens, seems to do it.

I stumbled into that lens, however, as I was looking up Canon’s EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro. I’ve had my eye on it for a while because I’m a fan of primes and in need of a macro, but that’s no reason not to look elsewhere. I quickly found the Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 “macro” zoom. My preference to primes doesn’t blind me to the fact that a long-ish prime costs more than a decent used car, so Tamron’s promise of 200mm at f2.8 for under $700 seemed like a deal. Digital Photography Review entry on it is pretty good, too, but does reveal the reason I had to put “macro” in quotes above: the closest focus is only about 1 meter. And that review pointed me to another, this time for Sigma’s 70-200mm f/2.8 “macro” zoom. Like the Tamron, that lens isn’t really a macro by my definition, but it performs a little better in other respects. DPReview compared them both against Canon’s $1,500 optically stabilized EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM, but a fairer comparison is against the non-stabilized version, which is priced much closer to the Sigma and Tamron units.

At least that’s the only thing a person can conclude from the stories at Copyfight earlier this week. This post reports on two stories where the photo services concluded that the photos to be printed were too good to have come from an average customer. Upon trying to order prints of her child, one Ofoto user found the following:

Your order has been cancelled because it appears your order contains one of the following… 1. Professional images.

And Wal Mart told another mother:

We can’t release the pictures to you without a copyright release form signed by the photographer.

At least Ofoto gave the mother the opportunity to sign an affidavit warranting that she was the photographer or had permission from the copyright owner. Wal Mart wouldn’t even accept that.

So, like I noted in the headline: Professionals apparently don’t use Ofoto or Wal Mart. I wonder if they promote that as a selling point…

Seltzer’s post notes the new copyright warning that Canon is putting in their camera manuals and the trouble that the developers of the open-source Gallery image management software project found themselves in recently.

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