Wide Ideas From Voigtlander and Leica

If you are into landscape photography or architecture with the Leica, Fujifilm X-Pro1, Olympus micro 4/3, Panasonic Micro 4/3. or similar cameras that can take the Leica M-mount lenses, here are two very good ideas.

The first is the Voigtlander 21mm Ultron f:1.8lens. It has an integral metal lens hood as part of the mount but also has a filter thread on the front. heavy, solid construction and 1/2 stop detents between the full stop markings on the aperture ring. Apertures down to f:22. We have one for sale new at $ 1195.

The second lens is the multi-focal type from Leica. The 16-18-21 Tri-Elmar is intended to be used without an additional view-finder - eminently suitable for the Leica M or the new Leica T with the appropriate adapter. It is a little more - $ 6365 - But you can console yourself with the thought that the RRP is $ 7000.

Circle The Wagons - Here Come The Native ISO's

The question about natives is...are they friendly natives?

The answer to this question sometimes depends on which side of he conversation you are on. ie. Don't ask General Sheridan and expect a comfortable answer...

In the case of the native ISO of digital cameras, this seems to be fixed around the 160-200 mark. I suspect that it is a characteristic of the actual component and is a function of the composition of the silicon layer and whatever the current state of division thereof. I have discovered that these sensors are manufactured by a very few companies - and in many cases well-known camera companies are using sensors that are manufactured by business rivals.

And they are all perfectly okay with this as each manufacturer takes the sensor and then does different things with the signal - one optimises it for one thing and one for another.

I was apprised of this by reading a book this weekend - " Mastering the Fujifilm X-E1 and X-Pro1 " by Rico Pfirstinger. It is a Rockynook book obtainable at Boffins Bookstore in William Street.

In the chapter that deals with ISO settings it makes the point that the native ISO of the two cameras it deals with is 200, and the camera always takes its picture at this 200 - even if you set it to ISO 1600 or higher. What it is doing to present you with a picture at that higher ISO is underexposing the image and then dealing with that underexposure through software. And apparently doing it very well.

This strikes me as true of all of them, and explains the improved characteristics of each new model of camera from any one manufacturer - they are not adding a new sensor in many cases - just re-writing the mathematics of the signal processing. Then I realised I was not reading carefully enough...

Fujifilm has a different sensor from others - it really does have a different pattern of receptor sites from most of the others, and can benefit users greatly in the way of resolution and clarity. The X-trans sensor may very well be quite different indeed. But I take it that it still looks at the world at 200 ISO and then just shuffles the electrons to get up to a clean 6400.

Who'da thunk it?

Reading The Book

" I don't know anything about cameras but I want one to take good pictures and I'm going away tomorrow and which is the best one? I get discount."

Good thing , that. Not the discount bit, mind... the going away part. You'll have a good 3-6 hours on a Boeing with your knees in your chin and you can balance the camera instruction manual on them. If you can't become an award-winning iconic master in that time well where is the world coming to.

You're in good company - a long line of Australians have headed to Singapore, Bali, and Bolivia with a new 35mm camera in a leather case and a little Japlish instruction book in the bag. The ones who took a boat were better off as they had more time to read and were not likely to have their ( mostly blank )  colour slides back from the processor until they returned home. It was disappointment deferred.

It was a bit better in the 1960's as there was a longer time-frame for a number of things. Items came from the eastern states at a slower pace and people in the west accepted that they might not get what they wanted inside a fortnight. There was no instant view of an item bouncing on a screen to promise them instant delivery. The wise ones used the time interval to study up on what to do with the new camera that was coming. The less-wise just opened the instruction book ( " Thank You for the buying to this fine instrument...") and winged it.

I must complement the writers from Japan. They now make an instruction book that instructs - it may be plodding and patronising, but it actually explains what happens when you press the button. The more cynical members of the trade sometimes feel that there are too many features offered ( full-time birthday face recognition predictive AF exposure compensation for pets being one, particularly when the Schnauzer is in HDR...) but people want to push buttons anyway so you might as well give them buttons to push. It keeps their fingers away from the front of the lens.

As for right now, please remember to put your instruction book into airplane mode before you buckle up.

The Answer Is Right/Left To Hand

Yesterday I was discussing camera operation with one of our clients - he had just finished a trip to take surfing and landscape shots up through some wild country in the Dutch East Indies.

He was using a couple of the bigger DSLR bodies for his work, and was very successful in his capture - the surfing shots are perfectly timed and the village and lagoon images are wonderful art. All good for him, but he mentioned the difficulty he had in trying to operate a camera while he was travelling on a motorcycle.

The M/C had a throttle on the right handlebar and trying to operate a standard DSLR while controlling the bike sounded like a juggler's nightmare. Lucky he and the cameras are still in one piece. Right-hand operation being the absolute for all cameras now, he was in trouble.

Readers will remember that film Exakta cameras were left-hand operation, but this was a long while ago and a long way away. No-one seems to have been inclined to repeat  the design for the digital era.

Puzzling - the operation of digital cameras is electronic. That means the shot is done with the closing of an electrical switch. It might then cause a lot of electronic commands inside  but it starts with two bits of metal touching because you pushed your forefinger down.

Well, you can push your left forefinger down as well as you can your right one. More particularly, if the little designers in Japan can make a bolt-on camera grip with a trigger that sits on the right of the camera, they can make one for the left hand side as well. All it's gotta do is close that first circuit...

AND WOULDN'T THAT BE A HELLUVA WAY TO GRAB THE CAMERA MARKET AWAY FROM YOUR COMPETITORS?

You could dial into 30% of the population right there and you wouldn't have to redesign the main body. Just make a LHS grip with a switch.

GO, Boys. DO it. And remember that I could use another trip to Japan as a thank-you for the idea...

A Conflict Of Disinterests - Camera Choice For The Perplexed

Working at a camera shop is wonderful. You can play with cameras all day.

Working at a camera shop is horrible. You have to play with cameras all day.

Neither of the sentiments above apply if you are a customer. Then being at a camera shop is exciting...but totally confusing. The modern world is presenting you with so many choices and alternatives that you are hard pressed to make a decision. You might want to press the button, but unfortunately Kodak is no longer there to do all the rest.

The keen enthusiast dives into the internet and reads every forum and rumour site there is.  If they are of an (ahem)..."older generation"...they look out CHOICE magazine from the local library and photocopy pages of advice. I can say this because I am of the same generation and go to the library regularly to look at the lingerie magazines. Readers of CHOICE would do well to remember that every public library has a fiction as well as non-fiction section...

Okay, armed with a looseleaf of papers and a mind full of internet camera equipment flame wars, the prospective customer comes in the shop. If they know what they want, see it on the shelf, open their wallet and whack out their credit card, the whole thing is easy. If they present 5 different opinions about 5 different cameras gleaned from other sources, it all starts to look like the battle of Verdun on a wet night.

One of the smartest things that the prospective camera buyer can do is draw up a list for themselves...in their own handwriting...of what they are NOT interested in. If they don't do portraits in the studio they don't need a portrait lens. ie. they don't need an 85mm f:1.4. If they don't want to go out taking landscape shots of the beach they don't need a 10-20 f:3.5 lens. If they are not interested sports shots they don't need a pro-DSLR with 10 fps capability. And so on...This can eliminate a lot of worry.

After the person thinks out what they don't want, they can think what they do want. Family shots, wedding coverage, fungus in the forest at f:4...whatever. Just as long as they are honest with themselves about their core interests.

Finally, they can see if there are any really odd things that would be fun, but not be absolutely necessary. Automatic toast recognition. HDR food baby sunset mode. With star trails. No matter what the customer can think of, they cannot think wider than the Japanese designers, because the Japanese designers drink at lunchtime. The trick with this category of features is not to make them the central point of choice.

Or CHOICE, if it comes to that...

Adapt That, Sunshine!...With Fuji And Sigma

Having watched one of my workmates go through a little fit of adapting strange and horrible lenses to his mirror-less Olympus camera...with all the resulting distortion and confusion that you could predict, I vowed never to follow suit. The Olympus lenses he had were wonderful and the old lenses from the back of the drawer were terrible.

Then I got a Fuji mirror-less camera that would accept X-mount adapters, and visited a camera shop that had adapters for it and of course I bought one. I am nothing if not inconsistent - constantly so, in fact.

All seems to be well. Western civilisation has not fallen any further than the Crimea and they still make beer in breweries, so we may be able to carry on. But the adapter business is starting to make me nervous. Not on the question of resolution or  distortion - more just a worry about the physical forces that are called into play.

Any time you stack a long lens onto the front of a camera you have to think how you are going to support that lens. This applies equally if you are coupling up an adapter as well as a lens - there is a strain on the lens mount. Okay if you are cradling the lens and taking the weight there - the camera body just goes on for the ride. When you have to attach the body is where it gets bad - the moment of force on the big lens can be fierce, even if the lens has a short focal length.

Good adapters would have feet like telephoto lenses so that they could become the fulcrum point. The one I bought doesn't, and if I am going to clap the Sigma 8-16 lens on the front of it with the Fuji X-E2 on the back, I am going to have to figure out how to balance the assembly - I don't want to ruin the tripod mount on the underside of the body.
This sort of thing is probably catered for by Manfrotto or Velbon but I have a feeling that it is also amenable to a little shopping at Bunnings.

You can get a lot of camera accessories at Bunnings, and power tools as well. If you go on Saturday they also serve sausages in a bun. Which might just work for the Sigma 8-16...

Like Peas In A Pod - With Fuji

Are all mirror-less cameras the same? Are the systems really identical - like peas in a pod? Can you buy one camera and use other lenses? Should you get a body here and the accessories there? How many forums should you read at any one time before your brain explodes?

To give you a quick series of answers; no, no, yes, no, none.

There are at least 6 mirror-less systems that I can think of and only two of them share similar lens mounts. With a bit of a fiddle and two trombones you can adapt some of the other maker's lenses to some of the other maker's bodies but you always drop some of the maker's automatic features...and you frequently pick up optical distortions that make the whole thing an exercise in futility.

While I love to hook up unlikely combinations of optics and sensors - after all I work in a camera shop - I have come to the conclusion that in general you really should stick to the lenses on offer from the particular manufacturer of bodies you have chosen. The exception to this rule would be if  Zeiss offers a lens for your chosen lens mount. These are likely to be very good lenses indeed and you will be asked to trade many potatoes for them.

All the above leads to the subject of this post: the new Fujinon 10-20 lens for their X-mount cameras. Fujifilm are forging ahead with the APS-C sensor cameras - the new X-T1 being hot at present - and they needed to supply a wide angle zoom for the landscapers and interior shooters. The 10-24 will give the same angle of view as a 15-36 would on a full-frame camera, but with a fast autofocus or focus peaking on suitable bodies.

Note: The focus peaking really does work well for manual focus in a studio situation - it makes it easy to see in dim conditions when you are dead on for focus. It also costs a few potatoes but is well worth it.

No Gripe With This Grip

If you are going to purchase the new Sony A7 or A7r mirror-less camera, please consider purchasing it from Camera Electronic.

Why?

Because you will get a FREE VG-C1EM battery grip for your new camera, that's why. With the front and rear command dials and two control buttons as well as the shutter button, this give the Sony user all the professional handling of the larger DSLR cameras...but at a much lighter weight.

The shape is a direct fit to the camera body and exactly duplicates the body line. If the body fits your hand, this grip will too.

Yet another reason to think about getting that new Sony from us...

One Roo More Or Less

Our Australian readers will groan at that pun, but at least they will be rewarded when they come to the end of this blog post...they will get to turn off the computer and go and get some work done. The North American and European readers may puzzle at the image and the title.

Well, the farm cart that you see is a traditional one that was used in Australia since before the turn of the last century. It was also adopted for use in wartime for water supply to Australian troops. As they gathered around it to draw water for their sections, they would pass the latest gossip...or rumour...amongst each other. Thus any unconfirmed bit of  news or plan - that might very well prove to be false - was termed a furphy.

We have them here in the photographic trade as well. Of course a lot of them can be rejected out of hand as nonsense...the planned introduction of the atomic powered helicopter bubble car camera that made full chicken dinners out of a little green pill has long been exploded. Apparently that was disinformation put out by the LOMO company when it was still run by the Soviets to prevent sales of the similar product by the Flapoflex company in America. The American one did sell in small numbers in Florida and Minnesota but was never a commercial success. The organic fur-covered slime monster camera took all the sales...

And that is how it still works, but this time the manufacturers merely have to prod the enthusiasts who write for the internet and let them do the speculation and/or lying to each other. There are enough people in the " don't-know " to make it work. The people in the companies that really ARE going to introduce a new product - or delete an old one - are probably bemused by what the enthusiasts say to each other. Possibly they make notes on it and steer the R&D department into new fields.

Whatever, we can definitely say that rumours always prove to be either right or wrong or none of the above. If we predicate our purchases upon the forum wrangling we might miss out on opportunities to get real equipment right now and then to go out and use it to make images that can never be repeated.

Think about the chap who went out to Lakehurst, New Jersey one evening to take a picture of the German zeppelin HINDENBURG  as it came in to land. He probably had an old Speed Graphic and a couple of plate holders that his editor had given him. Now, he could have been at home reading the trade press predicting the next fast lens and how much better it was going to be to take pictures of airships and he might have waited...

Oh...

Big 1000 - The Blog Post That Turns The Corner

Social media is like social disease - everyone has read about it, hardly anyone has seen it for themselves, and no-one wants the old-fashioned treatment for it. The little umbrella...

Writing for it requires a combination of Charles Lamb and Woody Allen; serious essay and one-liner. Plus a dash of Ansel Adams - plonkingly complex technical advice clothed in  art. It is an exhilarating experience when it goes well but very sad when there is nothing inspiring here in the shop. That is also when it becomes most dangerous - you start to think on a tangent and pretty soon the irate customers start beating on the windows with rocks.

We have a company slogan: " We Love Photography." and by-golly we do. Everyone here on the floor is a photographer and we actually do what we talk about  - in most cases with the stuff we sell to you. It is the best way for us to get knowledge - if we can do it we can show you how.

Sometimes we can show you how not to do it, as well. Every one of us has approached a job at some time and shot it in the best way we could and had it look like a horrible mess in the end. Sometimes we have been consultants for other people doing the same thing. This sort of experience is wonderful, particularly if you survive and the warrants expire.

Are we doing better than the anonymous writers on the forums? I think so - in the end we can actually demonstrate the gear in front of the customer, and even if we need to have a shop-huddle to all figure out how to make the device work, at least we all learn.

We are always asked which camera or lens is best. The answer is, of course, yes. Or no, depending upon the prejudices of the questioner. Some people really do want advice - some just want a fight. Quite a few want a place to eat their lunch when it rains. In the end, we ask as many questions as we answer, and sometimes the customer actually does their own answering. Then we can argue and eat lunch.

It is fun, the business of selling cameras. Not as much fun as social disease, but you don't get itchy in awkward places in hot weather.

Uncle Dick

Round The Houses Again

Nothing like a fine spring day and a 40 year-old Novoflex accessory that has just turned up at the back of the shelf to get the blood singing. As I take aspirin, it sings in a thinner voice...boom,boom.

No, take a look at the rig. The bottom is a Novoflex turntable that you can still get and the top is a Novoflex focussing rack that was made in the 1960's . It would be unfair to show youthese xcept for the fact that you can get a modern version of this from Novoflex right now. The tripod is the Copter from Cullmann.

Why?

To take full advantage of the panoramic feature on my beloved Fuji X-10. This allows fast and dirty panos at 120º, 180º, or 360º but since it allows precise central rotation in the vertical axis, the panos stay quick but come up clean.

The Fuji has the tripod socket offset under the camera - the macro slider allows me to recenter it over the vertical axle. I levelled the rig on the top of a convenient rubbish bin ( Oh we are sophisticated in Stirling Street...) and spun the camera as directed by the internal program. Perfect pano.

Note that you can change the direction of rotation for the actual shooting. I realised this after the fact - look at the hideous distortion of the cars in the 180º shot.

Note also that you can do this sort of thing with the Panomatic but you might have to do a bit more setup.

Boring Photo...Don't Look...

Here is a very boring photograph taken out the front of our shop five minutes ago. Dull day, nothing happening in the street, muted colours.

Nothing to see in the picture. No distortion, no chromatic aberration, no out-of-focus area, no electronic noise. Just a picture taken at 35mm on a full frame sensor.

Might as well have taken it on a medium format camera, I suppose.

Didn't. Just took the Sony RX1r out the front, put it on Auto and pushed the button.

I suppose you could do the same -if that is the sort of performance you want.

A Dangerous Camera For Sale - Beware...

Please do not look at the camera. It will not be good for you. You will be unhappy.

What? What kind of a sales pitch is this?

It is the old reverse double hook with the half gainer. In reality the camera is good. Very very good. And people who use it regularly will regularly be rewarded with images that are of the highest quality - I mean nearly medium-format quality...and this in a compact camera.

It is the combination of a Zeiss Sonnar 35mm f:2 lens and the FULL FRAME Sony sensor that does it. The whole combined in a metal camera body of the most precise construction. This is a potent camera - works in low light, has no visible distortion, shoots fast. It is the sort of camera that sees the world as it is, and shows it.

The hot shoe has space for a Zeiss finder - an additional dangerous purchase. You look in the finder, you push the button, that is it.

The real danger is when you compare the files from this camera with the ones that your own camera takes. I did that and now have a residual dissatisfaction with my current setup. The detail and fidelity of the Sony RX1R is just that good. If you don't need a zoom lens for your subject, this is the photographic answer.

Price? Commensurate with the danger...

The DSLR And The UFO

Some little time ago we were shown photographs here at the shop of UFOs taken at a property here in Western Australia. The photographs were taken with a top-quality lens on a then-current DSLR - and it was a top-of-the-line model too. I was a little disappointed with the resolution of the alien craft - they seemed to be little more than fuzzy grey spots.

I can only surmise that the aliens were employing some form of force field to shield them from observation. Perhaps it was not working very well, hence the blur. One of the salespeople here suggested that this was just dust on the sensor but the photographer assured us this was not the case. I rang up the Air Force to confirm the sightings but they are a rude lot and rang off. And the language...

Just on the off chance that you are also seeing alien craft when you take pictures of a clear blue sky, make the experiment of also photographing a clean light grey piece of paper. If the spots are still there they are likely on your sensor. If the spots move it can be a sign that they are small movable particles that are shifting around on the sensor surface - perhaps moved by the sensor cleaning mechanism in your camera - or they are small bugs moving on the grey cardboard. Persist.

Just this week I sold a kit to a person for sensor cleaning that is made by Promaster. it consists of two wands with clear plastic gel pads on the ends - one is a large stamping block and one is a small pointy poking one. The soft plastic is meant to pick up particles from the surface of the sensor - you then transfer this to an even softer plastic pad to remove it from the wand. When the sensor is all clean, you wash the pads and wands in distilled water to get rid of the dust, put it away, and are good to go again.

I hope it works - we'll get a report from the customer in due time. I am not sure if the pads will remove real UFOs but at least they will go back to Betelgeuse looking a lot fresher and cleaner.

Big Blog Day - Gorgeous New Lenses Just Unpacked

I am starting to be surprised by the improvements in the packaging of new photographic equipment.

 Oh, sure, as a sales person I still complain about the way SOME manufacturers package new cameras in a way that you cannot get the component parts back into the box so that the customer can take it home - and SOME manufacturers of inkjet paper have such confusing packaging as to harm their own sales...but there is a new run of goods coming that have benefitted from real imagination in the shipping.

Case in point are the new Touit lenses from Zeiss. Of course the lenses themselves are beautiful, as one would expect. These are the specials intended for use on Fuji X-mount and Sony E-mount. We've gotten examples of each type in today - the 12mm f:2.8  and the 32mm f:1.8. The boxes they come in are so nice I have just opened them and photographed the wrapped lenses - I shall leave it to the buyer to go further and expose the actual lenses.

I particularly love the way the Zeiss people have stated on the top of the box that you opening it is the moment they live for. Clever, clever marketing.

It Is Now That We Are Laughing At The Humour, Is It?

I see from another website and our own ordering department that those fun-lovin' folks at Zeiss have introduced some new lenses.

I'm a great Zeiss fan - got a set of them on my Hasselblad 500 cameras and I note that you can get them for all sorts of cameras these days - Nikon, Canon, Leica, Voigtländer...Well now you can also get them for Fuji X-series and Sony E mount.

Yowza - all good news. Particularly good news for the Fuji people as it indicates that their mount is opening up to the other suppliers in the market. You can't decry the factory Fuji lenses, but it is nice to contemplate a whole new stream of other glass to experiment with.

The new lenses are 12mm and 32mm and come with removable lens hoods. They are reported to be well-built and reasonably light for pro glass.

The part that gave rise to the heading image is the names. The lenses are the Touits.

I checked up with my on-line dictionary to see if a touit was something noble in the German language. Or scientific. So far my investigations have not turned up anything...leaving me to fall back on the old joke about doing something when you get a round touit...

This seems a great deal more vulgar levity than normal from a major lens manufacturer, either in Germany or Japan. They might caper about in masks at Fasching or the Hello Kitty Festival but they generally don't extend to cross-cultural puns. I suspect I have missed something somewhere and need to search further for an explanation.

If it just turns out to be someone in the advertising office drinking at lunchtime - and remember that is what gave us the 1974 VW Passat - we can only hope that the excellence of the lenses and the overweening dignity of the Zeiss name will prevail. I should put a bit of gaffer tape over the name on the lens if were using one - that or be prepared to laugh at the same joke a thousand times.

The Best Tool For The Job

The best tool for the job - is frequently a debated point. One practitioner points to one item, another holds up something different, and the argument is on. If the job is a technical one the rest of the populace stands baffled.

Suppose you are a dentist who wants to take pictures of teeth and jaws - or a skin specialist who wants to illustrate surface lesions for lectures or books. Or a mechanical engineer who wants to show tiny little parts and mechanisms. You reach for a digital camera with a good close-focus setting and try your luck.

If you have the light just right, and the white balance just right, and the auto focus on and you don't shake too much, you might succeed. Equally you might be too much in the shade, or too blue, or too wobbly.

Rethink. Get yourself a decent DSLR or mirror-less camera. C, N, P, S, or O come to mind...clap on a decent macro lens that will allow you to stand back about a foot from your subject. Put the Metz Mecablitz 15 MS-1 digital macro flash onto the lens, set the flash to take orders from the camera and go for your life.

Note: experienced clinical and macro workers do not try to use the auto-focus on the lens. They set the thing to manual and lean into the subject until they see it in focus.

The Metz people have been making flash units for decades - I have my original Mecablitz 45-CT1 from 1975 and it is still producing saleable pictures - and I've added three more of them from garage sales...Suffice it to say that Metz is the standard of the small flash industry when it comes to reliability.

The 15 MS-1digital fastens to the front of the lens with threaded rings - rather like some of the filter systems these days. There is a quick-release for the flash if you need to do something else with the camera straight away. Metz also supply a funny little clip - rather like a hair clip - that you can see in the main illustration. It is used when your DSLR has a pop-up flash.

The idea of the 15 MS-1 digital is that it can take TTL synchronising information from your DSLR in the same way that remote flashes do. The clip goes over the pop-up flash to prevent visible light flooding the subject while the IR information that instructs the flash goes out the side.

In addition, there is a standard PC socket at the side of the flash to take firing instruction from cameras that do not have a commander flash.

The two tubes mounted either side of the lens are movable - they can toe-in to illuminate subjects at very short range. There is an integral diffuser that you can rotate into position to reduce the intensity of the light.

The GN for this unit is 15 in the metric system - 49 for the imperial. More than enough for intra-oral and full-face shots. It runs on AAA batteries and will poot out 140 to 200 shots at full power.

In short, Doctor, the 15 MS-1 and the C,N,P,S, and O will be OK at TTL for IO and FF.

But that is just my initial diagnosis...