f0.95 encapsulates my love of available light photography. As far as I am aware, the Canon f0.95 rangefinder lens of the 1960s is the fastest production lens ever offered on a camera.
Speed was its sole reason for being. It wasn’t super sharp, but with the films of the day (ISO 400 was considered top of the heap) it was king of the available light optics.
Today we take astronomical ISO settings of 25,000 as pretty standard fare and bitch about the noise in the final image! In the Sixties even with the f0.95, Tri-X and exotic developers the negative, more often than not, simply consisted of clear acetate and any trace if an image largely consisted of lumps of grain the size of tennis balls. And we thought it was great.
I don’t care much whether photographs are taken on film or with a digital camera. I don’t care whether a camera is used at all, as it is the final photograph is what it is all about in the end.
