A useful comment; thanks.

About wide-angle or not:

1.
California impressionists painted mainly landscapes, exploring light.
Looking at mine, they are roughly the shape of a piece of typing paper in landscape format, but less wide -- and in one case nearly square. The one I have by the top female of the genre is in portrait format! I'd not observed this pattern before and have not seen such a comment elsewhere for the genre.

2.
To reinforce, I was looking at (drooling over?) the Nikkor 45mm PC-E last night; not so wide, right? Nikon trumpets it for nature. I'm doing the math: there are by definition more good outdoor images one can compose with a 45mm 1:2x than at 20mm.

"a very different photographic medium " -- thanks for this insight.

Well, maybe exposure is troublesome because how much of lights and darks is open to discussion.

We are not born knowing where the objective boundaries are and I'm still learning. Same goes for the aesthetics. For example, flare can work well in some few cases.

I saw a case where lifting shadow revealed centuries-old text that nobody knew about.

I have a sofa dated under the upholstery, in pencil on pine, to Nov. 10, 1847. Signatures are present but faint and unreadable. Exposure is part of the puzzle of how to read this; however, not now, as I'd have to compromise the upholstery to image it.

So even if you know how to expose, you still have to know good from better from best.

Lived there a decade. Now I'm up the coast -- an improvement in weather and very few people out-of-doors, I find, which is a boon to nature photography.

About the Monterey Peninsula:

The only fully authentic historical relics in the area IMO are the garrison buildings on the lower Presidio inside which you can still smell the WW I horse manure when it rains; but the base is now secured.

The historical artifacts from the 18th and 19th century have been rendered too cheesy to shoot, if you know what they ought to be, though they are plenty interesting to see.

Monterey has been wholly sanitized, courtesy of a mayor who paved over the disreputable organic scene at the Monterey waterfront, long, long ago; nothing left of Steinbeck's era. Nada. They say she objected to the cat houses, lowlifes, and bars.

1. For Landscapes: The most beautiful 'scapes of all are 5-10 miles south of Carmel Valley Road on Highway 1, beyond revered Point Lobos.

2. For closeups: Go to Rio Road at the mouth of Carmel Valley; walk down to the river bed, parking inside 3850; nobody thinks of shooting that. Avoid poison oak by accessing the river at the tennis courts. Be gone by 5:00 PM -- lowlifes, again.

3. For studying composition: Check out the California impressionist art at La Mirada.

4. Underwater: Kelp forests.

5. Low tide: Creatures and plants in the rocks. Avoid the water on 17-mile drive; raw sewage, esp. near the seals.

I'm going to watch tonight.

Strictly on a photography level, this https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160426101307.htm interested me and I don't think I can get it on eBay yet. Often enough, NASA picks up aging technologies from the classified world, but who knows...

I picked up on that syntax and smiled.
Excellence in story telling.

Asymmetric encryption can guarantee the integrity of a message, that is, of the EXIF data. Something Nikon could offer, maybe after Nikon enables us to name our old lenses with more than an integer.

If you are plugged into a hub, plug directly into the computer.

So I got some free sticker gum and paper when I remote-bought a used 60mm micro D AF lens. The barrel's flat surfaces and a non-flat ring exterior are contaminated but at least I know the seller's inventory number.

I'm looking to UHH for advice on how to get the rest of this generic sticker off of the lens so that the result is as if the label had never been there.

I could have returned the lens but I feel responsible to a well-crafted item. My goals are to not scuff or otherwise degrade the finish while getting the adhesive all off so the lens looks and feels (to my fingertips) as it should.

Well, not to argue at all, but this is not the whole story. There are very few mentions that if the metal has been painted... or treated...

"...Proving Ground Command conducted its own flight experiments that same month on the subject, only with painted planes having polished surfaces,..." http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/the-u-s-army-air-forces-strips-its-planes-of-paint/

Informative remarks all around, esp. the DoF ratio point of Nikonian72.

purplequid, the questioner, asked about variability across lens makers. I'll try to feed in some marginal points, about manufacturers' specification fuzziness as it applies to (1) flatness of field, (2) angle of view, and (3) maximum aperture. Then I'll offer a way not mentioned here to lessen the need for focus stacking, in response to purple's question about avoiding stacking.

Flatness of field is an unstated assumption of the DoF-ratio equation mentioned by Nikonian72. The focal plane is generally bowl-shaped, from the vantage point of the subject; ideally this plane is flat in macro lenses. The versions of both the Nikkor 55mm (1:2) micro (macro) and 60mm (1:1) micro are noteworthy for their fidelity to flatness. Not all so-called macro lenses have flat fields but flatness is generally seen as a fundamental attribute of macro.

So, per purple's second question, does the manufacturer make a difference? At the margins due to flatness. Also for lenses generally, angle of view can be slightly mis-stated, another minor thing. Finally, the maximum aperture is sometimes slightly understated, as, I am told is true of a Voigtlander 58mm f/1.4.

As to purple's last question, "if there was anything (short of stacking) i can to improve the DoF of my images": Just got a Nikkor 85mm tilt-shift lens, which lets us re-orient the plane of focus to cover more of, say, a lizard that is not conveniently perpendicular. That is, the rectangular plane of focus can be moved away from perpendicular to the sensor plane. This can make it unnecessary for the photographer to coax the lizard into the plane of focus.

Burk has a good take on infinity.

In photography, infinity is a surprising but practical metaphor, lacking any reality and any precision.

Many scientists forget that infinity is unobservable. So it cannot begin to be scientific (complete + correct + consistent).

Armies of scientists argue for infinity's reality, maybe because they need it. I'm pretty sure Einstein believed infinity is out-of-bounds for science but his successors by-and-large are unconcerned and horribly confused. They visit this confusion upon anybody who is listening.

Infinity is just a convenient, rich math concept/tool/whatever. And I like it -- as math.

A useful comment overall, but I'm not sure the following is discoverable in any detail: criteria to evaluate and it starts with ... types of glass and elements to reduce aberration, vignetting, distortion

True, Nikon's lens schematics will indicate low-dispersion glass in certain elements; but ED glass is not a constant formula and process from lens to lens. That's just for starters. Barely! And then there are the simulations that advise lens designers where to grind elements to preclude flare and so forth, with insights well beyond the abilities of mortals to analyze.

So why do I think this? I've tried to get a handle on these things, including coatings, but the useful content is closely held at Zeiss, Nikon, and Canon, probably with good reason. I have, however, pulled together a bibliography of especially useful discussions. Comments by the lens designer Sato now on nikkor.com will give you a hint how little we customers really know about the designs.

About the meaning of this imaginative image, its immediate power makes me think, but this power is amplified because the hand is youthful, yet a wheelchair is needed.

The realism of this image spawns dwell time. Maybe it is a downer for most but actually it can be ambiguous if not both an upper and a downer.

Would be interested to know the names of some of the lenses, thanks. "older super multicoated lenses which give much more contrasty and saturated images than most modern lenses."