richardcook

Accck! Bought a couple of replacement batteries for my Alpha and find that the

camera won't work with them. Although the Alpha doesn't use the InfoLithium

system to tell you how much charge is left, it does apparently look to see if it

is a Sony-brand battery and won't let you proceed unless it is.

 

Very disappointing. The OEM batteries are about60% of the price of the

Sony-branded ones. They look otherwise identical.

 

Anyone have any different experience?

Which Metz SCA adapter works with the Sony Alpha? Have you tried it? I'm looking

for a way to make the TTL and HSS features work with a Metz flash rather than

just getting the just the basic manual flash to fire. Thanks!

I have one of the Voigtlander VC2 meters that fits perfectly on the top of the M3. It is very small, stays on the camera, trivially easy to work, and quite reliable. It is, as others have pointed out, a reflected rather than incident light meter but I haven't found that to be a great disadvantage. The key thing for me is the simplicity of the resulting system.

Terrific. What lens(es) did he use?

No idea what will make you happy but you are certainly setting up to carry a lot of equipment with you and must have a great tolerance for carrying around different format film! You will find that the M 7II blows away your other gear, especially if you can afford to get the 43mm lens. If you want to use the 150mm you would be well advised to experiment with it a good deal before your trip. The lens is at the limits of what you can focus precisely with a rangefinding mechanism and it has little depth of field. May is a good way off. You can always sell an M 7II and its lenses for near what you pay for them if you decide later that it is not your style. Check KEH for used gear and estimate your costs accordingly.

Neil's comment about the station wagon full of mag tapes is particularly interesting. It comes from a time when we used lots of reels of tape. My estimate (based on 6250 bits per inch; 10 bits per character; 2400 foot tapes; an average size station wagon from the era ) for 240 reels. [bTW, that's something like 1700 pounds of tape...a lot more than you should put in your station wagon!] At my University our routine local connection into the office is 100 Mbps (10 million bytes per second). The kids are on Christmas break now so our network is pretty fast; if I get to use half the bandwidth (5 megabytes per second) during download it will take a little over 14 minutes to download the contents of the station wagon. Of course, the mileage you get may vary.

Recommend you check the photos of Ed Ng, Don Corbin, Wilfred van der Vegte, or one of the other really good Contax photographers -- www.contaxg.com, www.walkeast.com, http://www.zyworld.com/DonCorbin/Home.htm, http://www.vandervegte.com/ -- just for a view of what the G2 can do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/technology/10archive.html?th

 

"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to

take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management

Services, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional

photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work."

Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with

most of the shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive...."

 

The prosecution rests, your Honor.

Gee, I just paid $700 for a VG cond. M3 and thought it was a good deal.

Actually, I still think so. I'll add one of the new Voigtlander VC2 llghtmeters for

$130, making the camera an $830 invesment. The alternative was a new MP

for $2695 and here I have an all manual camera of comparable quality for

less than 1/3 the price. And this one already has that nice patina of use! ;-)

 

Richard Cook

Chicago.

Personally I would take the F4E. It's really hard to get maintenance done on it these days and the thing eats fuel, but you can really have a good time on a Saturday night with one of these things.

 

 

http://aeroweb.brooklyn.cuny.edu/specs/mcdodoug/f-4e.htm

I have an acratech ball head and love it. A wonderful device and quite a bit lighter than the Arca-Swiss. I put these on a Gitzo 1228 trekking style tripod and use Really Right Stuff plates for all my camera gear. If you want something less involved, a bean bag that you can use to steady the ccamera against a wall or a ledge is rather useful. Cheap tripods and heads are probably useful and you may be able to find a Velbon for a good deal less than you would need to pay for the Gitzo/Arca/RRS kit.

Focal plane shutter type cameras may be damaged by long exposure of the focal plane to strong light. This was a noticeable problem with the rubberized cloth shutters such as the 35mm Leica. Long exposure to bright light with the lens open allows light to fall on the rubberized shutter and, after a long while, has been reported to cause pinhole defects in the shutter. Most MF cameras are not focal plane but instead have a metal shutter in the and more or less unaffected by light. This is one reason that MF lenses are expensive -- they contain shutter mechanisms as well as the lens elements, diaphram, and focusing machinery. (There are MF cameras with focal plane shutters.) Many people protect their lens with near-neutral colored filter such as the 81A "skylight". The filter keeps dust and fingerprints off the lens and can be replaced as needed. The filter does not protect against light damage to a focal plane shutter.

This is an interesting thread. It may be that we are so used to experiencing scams that such a rare find puts us into unfamiliar territory. While I don't think that harry zet deserves such severe criticism as has been offered, neither do I think that the congratulations are in order. Perhaps there is some responsibility that attaches itself to such an occurrence? I hesitate to suggest what that might be but perhaps it is the continued preservation of both the pristine artifact and the story of its life in the closet? Perhaps harry zet might return to this man and record the history of his life on tape and imagine what photographs that life would have produced. Surely this man must have lived through interesting times and if I am sad about the outcome it is not that he has given up a camera for a small fraction of its value but that he gave up, every day, the opportunity to make some record of his life and experience -- the wife, the children growing, the world changing. It is something on which one might meditate.

I have the 1228 with an Acra head and the M7II works wonderfully. You'll need Really Right Stuff plates for your cameras so the total will be ablout double what the 1228 costs alone.

Mamiya M7II is the closest to an MF direct substitute for your Leica M series, indeed being very much like an M6 (non-TTL version). The lens complement is quite similar and the operation of the camera would be very much the same. While the Fuji 6x9 cameras would more closely approximate the 35mm frame ratio, these are fixed lens cameras and no longer produced while the M7II is still in production. Of course the Hasselblad 645 format H1 camera is a Fuji in mufti and but that format is quite a bit smaller than the 6x7 or 6x9cm.

 

If you are a fan of German cameras and money is not the issue, the Rollei 6008AF and a set of lenses would be a good choice. I've only ever held one in my hands, sadly, but after calculating the price of the system, I immediately put it down. It is a beautiful and powerful full sized MF camera. If I win the lottery, I'd certainly uy the '8AF.

 

A word of warning: the Fuji 670 and 690 series and the Mamiya 7II are arguably more rugged than the other established MF machines but none of the MF rigs will match the ruggedness of your Leica M and all of them are a good deal larger and heavier than your M.

 

All in all, I love my M7II and recommend it to you with confidence. Because you are already a rangefinder user you will have a lovely experience with it. The one thing that Hasselblad has that the Mamiya lacks is the the cachet (at least in the broader public) of the red dot.

The 43mm finder has a bubble for leveling which can be seen

from above the finder and also through the viewfinder itself. It

allows you to level the 43 mm les, which is important because of

the extremely wide field of view of that lens. The other detachable

viewfinder for the Mmaiya 7 series is for the 150mm lens, not the

50mm. It has no bubble.

You may want to look at the Acratech ballhead, available at B&H and Adorama etc. I find it to be exceptionally easy to use, free from lockup, very sturdy, and delightfully lightweight. http://acratech.net/

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/pancam_techwed_040114.html

 

may be interesting to some...

"The pictures (nothing special by themselves)..." They are really quite nice and therefore are, themselves, special!

On reflection, I think that the most Zen experience would be to use a digital camera after replacing the flash card with Write-Only-Memory.

The way that can be spoken of is not the way.

This past weekend, I visited our local (big) camera store in Chicago and looked at their MF/LF stuff. The prices are quite remarkably low, even when compared to a couple of years ago. Moreover, very little space is now devoted to this gear. I agree with the comment that that it is not GOING to be the trend, it already IS the trend and there does not seem to be anything running counter to it..

It is highly doubtful that anyone will make a 6x9 digital back for ordinary use. Even with perfect yield, one would be able to have only one or perhaps two chips come out of one semiconductor wafer, making it prohibitively expensive.

Nope. There is a 55mm which is as wide as they go for this camera body.

See http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/pressReleases/pr20030925-01.shtml