The Photo Files: Unfiltered & Undeveloped

I had a strong opinion about the Canon RF 14mm f/1.4 VCM before I ever touched one — and that opinion was skepticism. Having now rented and shot it for a full weekend across Cambridge MA, the interior of a Lotus Emira, Easter portraits of my daughter, flowers, and street subjects, I can tell you: I was partly right, partly wrong, and the whole truth is more interesting than either.*This episode is optimized as a video podcast, please check it out on Spotify or YouTube at this link: https://youtu.be/P8DbXgOdN5U This is my honest take on Canon's widest, fastest prime lens ever made — and the one thing I keep coming back to is this: turn off the corrections.When you import a raw file from this lens into Adobe Lightroom, the lens profile correction is applied at 100% by default. And in my view, that setting actively works against what is actually a very characterful lens underneath.With corrections fully on, you get clinically straight lines and controlled distortion — ideal for real estate, events, and weddings. But look at the corners. The stretching is hard to unsee, and it has a way of draining the character out of the image entirely. It's like too much plastic surgery: the problems are fixed, but the face is gone.Turn it off — and the image breathes. Yes, there's heavy vignetting. Yes, the integrated hood catches the extreme corners. Yes, there's real barrel distortion. But it has an almost classic quality to its rendering that I find far more appealing than the corrected version.My recommendation is to dial the correction down to around 20–40% for most artistic purposes. In Lightroom it's a single slider. I'll show you back-to-back comparisons throughout this video so you can judge for yourself.

In 1987, Canon did something photographers called a betrayal — they killed the entire FD lens mount and replaced it with the all-electronic EF system. To populate that new mount, Canon rushed out a first generation of lenses. Among them was one of the strangest, rarest, and most forgotten L-series lenses they've ever made: the Canon EF 50-200mm f/3.5-4.5L.Released in 1988 at around $700, this compact zoom carried the red ring and packed fluorite and ultra-low dispersion glass into a complex 16-element, 14-group optical formula — an absurdly ambitious design for any zoom lens, let alone one from the late 1980s. Canon marketed it as a high-performance professional zoom with a 4x zoom ratio, standard-to-telephoto coverage, and full-range macro capability down to just four feet with 0.23x magnification. Quarter life-size macro in a compact walk-around zoom — on paper, it was one of the most versatile lenses Canon has ever made.So why didn't it succeed? Because using it feels like operating a time machine — and not in a good way. It's a push-pull zoom that sucks in air, the manual focus is rough. And the autofocus is some of the slowest of any Canon EF lens I've ever used. Slow and loud. Canon quietly discontinued it after just a few years, and today their own museum website has nothing but a single photo and a spec table. But here's the thing — optically, this lens is genuinely remarkable. The fluorite elements don't just correct chromatic aberration. They give colors a purity, a separation, and a three-dimensionality that you can immediately see in the images. The rendering sits in an uncommon middle ground between the organic look of earlier optics and the clinical perfection of what came next. It reminds me of two of my favorite lenses from this era: the 80-200mm f/2.8L "Magic Drainpipe" and the 300mm f/2.8L. No washed-out, low-contrast haze — just honest, rich color with a gentle warmth that flatters without looking fake.I used this lens on a Canon 5D Mark II for nature walks, macro sessions, and a portrait shoot for a musician's album press photos. Even stopped down to f/5.6 and f/8, the lens achieves striking subject-background separation thanks to its contrast and three-dimensional quality. The bokeh throughout the aperture range is truly beautiful — soft-edged specular highlights with almost no outlining and a real painterly, organic quality. And in black and white, the exceptional contrast and tonal richness give digital images a filmic feel that's hard to replicate.The close-up performance is where this lens really surprised me. Fine textures — the veins of a leaf, the surface of a petal, a single cherry against a black background — are rendered with a precision you'd normally only expect from a dedicated macro lens. It encourages compositions you'd never attempt with a conventional zoom. One of the points of photography, in my view, is to take people where their eyes can't go, and that's exactly what this lens lets you do.Is it worth hunting down? The handling is genuinely unpleasant, and I won't pretend otherwise — it was dated even when it came out. But a single compact 700-gram lens from 1988 that covers environmental scenes, portraits, and macro-quality close-ups, all beautifully and not just competently, with a clarity of color and three-dimensionality that I struggle to find in modern lenses costing far more? That deserves to be recognized.

What did Henri Cartier-Bresson actually mean by "the decisive moment" — and is it even a real thing, or just a useful myth photographers have been chasing for seventy years?Welcome to Episode 1 of Unfiltered & Undeveloped, a new free-form series on The Photo Files where I sit down and think out loud about the ideas in photography I keep coming back to. No script, no tight edit, no B-roll cutaways every four seconds — just the meandering deep-dive my ADHD brain actually needs to work these topics out. If you want polished reviews and news, those videos are still coming. This series is something different.For this first episode, I wanted to start with the concept that's followed me around since I was ten years old: the decisive moment. I trace it from my first encounter with the idea — through my father, an advanced amateur photographer and a dentist (which, it turns out, is a surprisingly common pipeline into photography) — through the Texas Rangers games we'd attend in the early 90s where he'd carry a Canon 300mm f/2.8 into the stands, to learning on a Yashica 230AF, to eventually shooting Big 12 football at Baylor with a Canon EOS-1 and the first generation of Nikon D1 DSLRs.Along the way I talk about:- What Cartier-Bresson was actually describing — the alignment of action, geometry, and composition all arriving at the same instant — versus the oversimplified "height of the action" version most of us inherit- Why capturing the decisive moment is fundamentally an act of prediction, not observation, and what that means for how we train ourselves as photographers- The neuroscience problem: there's a measurable delay between your brain making a decision and your awareness of it, so how much control do we really have over when the shutter fires?- The Zen idea that at your best, you don't take the picture — the picture takes- Why I think "a good photographer knows where to stand" is one of the most underrated principles in the craft- How the decisive moment translates across genres — sports, candid, documentary, music, even landscape- My honest take on modern 30+ fps burst rates and why spray-and-pray is almost philosophically incompatible with what Cartier-Bresson was pointing at- Why my hit rate on medium format film (Mamiya 645 Pro, RZ67, Pentax 17, Canon EOS-1N) is dramatically better than on digital — and the paradox of feeling more in control precisely when the process becomes more automatic- The personal stuff: chasing a father's approval through a viewfinder, the complicated feeling of something coming easily to you, and why every picture I've ever taken probably falls into that categoryI also get into why I'm making this series at all — part of it is that I want to leave a record for my three-year-old daughter of how I actually think about photography, and eventually turn these conversations into a book. The tight, edited content isn't the right format for that. This is.I'll be dropping in some of my sports photography from the late 90s high school portfolio throughout the video so you can see what I was chasing at the time.This is a long, loose, honest conversation. If that's your thing, hit subscribe — there's a lot more of this coming.