This part of the route 78 was completely destroyed by the 2021 typhoon Chanthu. The Chanthu was not the strongest or most dangerous one, but it brought the most devastating rainstorm and that really damaged this area. The traffic fence was completely bent, and the deer fence was also bent. There were no people walking by. I saw a several wild pigs and wild dogs in this area this time. I think I used the headlight of the car and quickly photographed this and ran back into the car and drove away from this area. This area is dangerous and very odd (kind of spooky too), but I love walking around this area.
The cult of lenses 58:
Now, I must agree with those people who hated the 24-105 mm kind of lenses and called them as convenience zoom in some derogatory way.
Every time, I use this Sony FE24-105mm f4G or similar FE24-70mm f2.8GM 2 lens I deeply regret my decision, and I want to reshoot everything I shoot with it.
This lens is a horrible lens optically. In fact, most Sony or Mirrorless lenses are cheating in most Free online based lens testing sites.
Those free online tests are utterly useless. Their tests are easy to cheat and really tell almost nothing about any lens they claim they test. All free online based tests are designed to test the resolution figures of lenses at ten feet focus range. And they cannot see the real distortion level of the modern lenses that use very sophisticated distortion or any lens flaw correcting programs at RAW level in camera.
I think Sony and all mirrorless manufactures took the advantage of that very flawed nature of the modern commercial lens testing programs that you can buy for a very small amount of money. Immatest and DxO have really corrupted the lens testing industry or community. Those programs are useless and thus so cheap. And so, everyone interested testing lenses can get that crapware to start so called science-based lens tests online. But those free lens tests are nothing but scientific at all. They just use cheap crapware to test certain type of lens resolutions and aberrations and call it a day.
I think there are no reliable real good lens testing sites online, and it is impossible to provide that for free. When I realized that in 2018, I stopped reading all internet online lens tests (and camera and lens related online forums) and started asking our own experts to do that at our university lab. And that required a lot of money. Every time, we tried to run the real Optical Bench testing machine that'd cost us almost 2000 USD, that is the real cost of testing a lens for real practical lens resolution that actually mirror the real-world performance of all tested lenses.
Now, I am negotiating that cost and money we have to pay for our lens testing sessions. If I could make it under 500 US or 66000 yen per lens, I would like to continue that and may even launch my own lens testing site online by the end of this year.
But I think the 500 US price per lens is just too good to be realistic, and I think I just have to ask our experts to do their testing super slowly but also accurately, and that means I can only test a few lenses every month, or every other month. I think that's the real cost of testing lenses seriously. So, if we consider that and how much money and time we actually need to run lens testing sites, it is easy to see all of those FREE Online lens tests are useless and flawed, or at best incomplete. If those testing sites had been really accurate and reliable, this sort of real horrible convenient zoom wouldn't have performed as well as it did in 2019. But this lens performed quite fantastically well at many of those free online lens testing sites, at least in the central portion of the frame and overall resolution.
So, now we all know that those lens testing sites are designed to make any newer lenses look much better than they actually are, to generate some extra lens sells for the manufactures. So, the bigger companies like Canon, Sony, Zeiss, etc. always dominate those free testing sites. Those FREE lens testing sites are all utterly useless.
I think the LensRentals site was really good and quite honest one, but their testing speed was really slow always way behind the time. So, many people just complained or criticized their testing speed or the number of lenses they could test monthly. Also, the Cameralabs was a good site, but they too were extremely slow, and that was why they were not a very popular site even in their heydays. People just criticize or unfairly judge those serious lens testing sites with some unrealistic expectations without really understanding the true cost of running serious lens tests. So, most of those serious lens testing sites without major commercial sponsors will have to go either the paywall route or just test a very limited number of lenses per year. And those really lousy lens testing sites remain very popular online.
It is really sad, but it is the way the lens testing industry works.
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