albert_smith

<I>...but I hope nobody is suggesting that commercial C-41 print film is better than current digital.</I><P>

I agree that in terms of image quality, digital is fine compared to straight C-41 from a basic lab.<P>

What is not equal is when you strive for selective focus with moderate focal lengths. Here the full frame 35mm film and sub-85mm lenses allow images that digital, at least Nikon digital can't offer.<P>

I shoot digital on less-than full frame and do all of the mental "this (digital) lens gives this (film) focal length's angle of view" calculations, but angle of view is not the whole thing. A 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor at full aperture shot with film gives an image that can't readily be replicated on digital... unless you are shooting with a full frame Canon. Until Nikon gives us a full frame capture (if ever), I'll still be loading up my film cameras and exploiting moderate focal length selective focus.<P>

Lutz's photo is credited to the <I><B>50 'cron pre-asph</B></I>, and David's post mentions this lens version also. I have the latest 50mm f/2.0 Summicron which is a conventional design.<P>

Did I sleep through the release of an aspheric Summicron? Even if they did produce this lens as an aspheric version, I am not good enough to get the most out of the conventional Summicron.

Just my experience, but when I was doing wet B&W and just getting into Leica, I went through most of the generations of the Summicrons from the 1950s up to the current optical formula.

I personally found the earlier pre-1969 chrome models to have a bit less contrast than the newer black lenses. The resolution was pretty good from any Summicron, but the contrast was different enough that I adjusted my developmenmt times, and often had to use different contrast filters when printing. This can work for you if you like shadow detail.

These days, I mostly shoot color, and I like contrast, so I use the most current Summicrons.

I have hundreds of very nice slides shot in my XA back in the early to mid 1980s. The XA gave way to the Minox ML when I realized that I'd rather have a set of DOF scales with a slow lens over a rangefinder, especially such a short based rangefinder.

Both cameras were good "carry everywhere" models with good control (such as tricking the meter by using the (then) ASA adjustment) for the shooter that did not wish to lug the big camera.

Found another one.

This shows good sharpness across the frame, but also show what I mentioned in the post above about the lack of snappy selective focus. You can shoot at f/2.8, but the background is going to distract from the subject.

Still, this is the weakest performance for this lens. A stop or two down, and you can shave with it.<div></div>

<I>i was wondering if you guys have any pictures from your 24mm f2.8 wide open for comparison.</I><P>

I usually go to my faster 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor if I find that I need to shoot wide-open with my 24mm f/2.8 Nikkor, but not because it is not sharp wide-open. It is because the DOF at full aperture is such that you don't get that "pop" of selective focus, but a more gradual in and out of focus transition, that makes the overall photo look soft if there are multiple planes of focus.<P>

The times I do shoot wide-open are when I can justify it based on two things. First is that the angle of view is required (over the 35mm lens). Second is when the subject matter is at or close to infinity so that everything in the frame is in focus. It should be noted that infinity starts pretty close with wide-angle lenses, so this is not a problem. Here is a photo that I shot on a mountain in Korea with my 24mm f/2.8 Nikkor at f/2.8 on my FE2. The sky was so overcast that even at this aperture, I was right at the hand-holding limit. The photo is sharp edge to edge.<div></div>

<I>Is that Sekonic meter a flash meter?</I><P>

No, it is, uh was, a Studio Delux. It was incident and reflective and had no battery. I arrived in Spain with my Leica M3 and that meter and before the first frame, the meter hit the ground and exploded into a dozen shards of plastic. A good working understanding of the sunny-16 rule (and its variants, cloudy bright, hazy, etc...) saved the day.<P>

Today, I use the tiny and great Sekonic L 308 which does meter flash, as well as ambient.

<I>So my question is, is anyone on this forum still using a Nikon F regularly,...?</I><P>

I do. My Ftn meters are all dead, so I located a couple of pointy prisms a few years back, one chrome and one black. The meterless Nikon is not a problem for me because I got into photography when we had to learn what an f-stop was and how it works along with a shutterspeed.<P>

When I was in the military, my black F was my sole camera on numerous "adventures" in the middle east deserts, in environments that I did not wish to subject my more modern Nikons. It never failed in heat levels that had to be felt to be believed.<P>

While today the F3 and FE2 would be my real workhorses, I still take the F out for "exercise" and to keep my eye-for-light sharp.<P>

The good thing about the F is that after you take a photo good enough to frame with it, the camera can be used to drive a nail in the wall to hang it. ;-)<div></div>

<I>...But then again the prints that I scanned these from are a lot sharper than the 800px wide files you see here. I wish the web was better for showing images than it is. Nothing online yet beats looking at a real print...</I><P>

Just for the heck of it, I downloaded one of the shots from above and did some tweaking via some image enhancing software. The shots can be improved quite a bit for sure from the way they are presented. The second shot is the one I worked on, and there is a lot of potential for greater sharpness just from that small file. I can see nice, crisp backlit hair, that does not come through before processing.<P>

I agree that real prints look better to me than jpegs, but these can still look closer to the prints with a bit of post-scanning processing.

<I>"...would you buy it or just get the cheaper ais f2.8?"</I><P>

I went through this choice in the early 1980s. I thought back on my use of the 24mm focal length over the years (on Pentax prior to buying into Nikon), and it was clear that for me, the 24mm is a deep focus type of lens. At least 90% of the time, again for me, I set the focus via the DOF marks for a specific range or zone of focus, and not to a plane. This made my choice easy. I went with the 24mm f/2.8 AIS Nikkor, and today over twenty years later that lens is still in my bag as one of my most used lenses out of over 24 Nikkors in my closet.<P>

If I get into a low light situation, the 24mm lens comes off, and I go to the 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor.<div></div>

<I>What is this about DOF problems with the G7? </I><P>

Not only the G7, but most small digital cameras have such a small capture surface that selective focus is all but impossible unless you are shooting at very close range at tyhe long end of the lens wide-open... and even then a real 35mm camera with a simple 50mm lens will let you get better selective focus.<P>

Yes, you can control the aperture, but DOF expereince that works for 35mm does not apply on these small cameras. I use this "problem" to get zone and hyper focus at wide apertures.

<I>Any other Leica-M shooters have experience with this little gem?</I><P>

Here is a very detailed review. The writer says it is a good camera, but has some negative things to say about the value versus the price, especially compared to other Canon cameras.

<a href="http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Canon/canon_g7.asp"> Canon G7 review </a><P>

The author of the above review, on the same site reviews the current A-series cameras (A620, A630 and A640), and feels they offer so much for the price. The current A640 is a 10 Meg model with a swing out finder.<P>

I have been useing a canon A620 (7.1 meg) for going on a year now, and it has proven to be a very nice camera. While a P&S on-paper, the amount of contols it offer allows some serious overides, and should offer no limitation for a general use camera. Don't overlook that multi-angle finder. It has allowed me to shoot many shots that kept me very stealthy since I could compose with the camera at any level or position not dependant on where my eye was.<P>

The A630 and A640 improves on the A620 by increasing the finder size, and uping the resolution from 7.1 to 8.1 (630) and 10.1 (640), but the operation is mostly identical.<P>

Do check out the reviews on that site for these A series cameras. For 300 Dollars, an A630 could be a good way to experiment.

I have both. My f/1.8 is a late large tube AIS model. There was also a smaller lens that looked a bit like the Series E model, so my comment is about the larger lens.

I have done a lot of informal testing, not scientific, but shooting real-world subjects with both lenses. My findings are as follows: Once you get to about f/2.8 (maybe f/3.5) to about f/11, you could shoot with either lens without fear. At full aperture, the f/1.8 lens has better contrast, and a somewhat flatter field, meaning that subject matter at the edges of the frame that are on the plane of focus are rendered better with the f/1.8 lens.

The f/1.4 lens can isolate a bit better if you exploit the narrow DOF, but in my opinion, neither the f/1.8 or f/1.4 lens has a good out-of-focus rendition. There is a double blur that makes it look too jagged for my taste, but I might just expect too much because I also use the Leica M system, and their 50mm lens has a beautiful blur. IMO, the best Nikkor for a good blur effect is the old pre-AI f/2.0 lens.

FWIW, I'll post two images from one of my tests. This is full aperture shot from both lenses to check edge-to-edge sharpness (top and bottom due to vertical composition) and the difference in selective focus from that fraction of a full f-stop.<div></div>

If the meter is giving a realistic exposure combo, say f/16 @ 1/125th in bright sunlight with ISO 100 speed film, but the resulting film is over-exposued, I would check the action of the aperture blades. You can do this right away without shooting film.

Take the lens off of the camera and set the aperture ring to the smallest f-stop (f/22 or there abouts). Now locate the small lever that actuates the aperture for the exposure on the back of the unmounted lens. Flick this lever and observe the action of the blades. They should close and open with no delay or stickyness.

If there is any delay, then the camera may be set to say f/11, but the actual taking aperture could be several stops wider because the shutter could actuate prior to the blades fully closing to that f/11 setting. The result could be that 3-4 stop over-exposure.

FWIW... I saw this same thing when I got back 8 rolls of film from my FM2 and AF 35mm f/2.0 Nikkor. Most every shot was ruined due to overexposure. When I did that lever check that I mentioned in the previous paragraph, it took almost 10 seconds for the blades to close from f/2 to f/22. Of course, the camera assumes this action is instant, and the shutter fired while the true aperture was way more open that what I had set.

The aperture is set via the aperture ring, and while the ring clicks on full stops, you can adjust it in minute increments anywhere along the path of say f/8 to f/11. If you go to full manual exposure and zero the exposure on the bar, you can then tweak the aperture ring slowly while observing the display until the indicator moves along the bar in the marked 1/3rd increments. While you do this, the aperture will no doubt be at some in-between setting thast has no click-stop, but this is fine.

If shooting in some auto-exposure mode, you can adjust either the ISO or the exposure comp in perfect 1/3rd increments, between each exposure. If working from a tripod, this can be done pretty quickly without changing the composition between exposures.

Bracketing is a way to get a proper exposure when metering is unable to get you where you need to be based on variations of tone within the scene, and by its nature it is a non-perfect science. Don't over-think the math and worry about a fraction within a fraction. Pick your starting point and tweak the aperture ring in the direction you want to skew the exposure, then repeat. You may find as I have that more than one of the slides are good, different, but still good.

I have both lenses, but only shoot on film cameras.

A couple of observations from my experience:

The weakest part of the f/1.4 lens at the widest stops is at the edges, but on a digicam, this weak image will fall outside of the capture area.

The bright finder of the f/1.4 lens can aid in focusing in lower light, even if you are stopping down for the actual exposure.

The focusing action of the 55mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor is very abrupt. In the normal range of say 4-12 feet, just a few degrees of rotation gets you to where you need to be. This is a personal opinion, but in actual photography in the normal ranges, I am quicker with the 55mm lens over the 50mm because of this focusing action. With the 50mm and its more gradual action, I find that I am doing the back-and-forth action more before settling on the proper point of focus. With the 55mm, it is very obvious when you hit the focus and obvious when you are going past the point (or plane) of focus. Be aware, others feel the oposite about this process.

The 55mm f/2.8 has very good resistance to flair, much better than the faster lens dure to a deeply resessed tiny front element. With the 55mm, I can shoot almost directly into the sun, a situations that would result in low-contrast and washed out colors with the 50mm lens.

The f/2.8 aperture of the 55mm lens would be slow if the lens still needed to be stopped down to get good, but I shoot at f/2.8 all of the time,and the image is very sharp and contrasty at what should be the weekest stop on the aperture ring. On the 50mm lens, f/1.4 is there, but for good sharpness, you need to stop down a bit.

While a "macro" lens, I shoot 90% of my images with the 55mm in the normal range that I would use a 50mm lens for, and never felt any limitations in light that would allow f/2.8 to be fast enough. This lens is great right out to infinity.

Again, just my experience, but I have had two 55mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkors (stupidly sold the first one) with just over 20 years of use in environmental extremes like steamy jungles to frozen tundras, and on both lenses the aperture blades worked perfectly fine. I keep reading about the"problem" with this lens,but I guess I must be lucky. My lens goes from f/2.8 to f/32 in the blink of an eye.

And just to make the choice harder... I would not be without either. They are never in the bag at the same time, but they are there in my lens cabinet for me to choose from when preparing for an outing.

My digital P&S is a Canon A620 (sorry Nikon fans, but this Nikon SLR user found it to be the better P&S over Nikon's offerings in this range) and yes, right out of the camera, this 7.1 Meg modest zoom (35mm-135mm equiv) camera allows very nice 11 X 14 inch prints. I was stunned when I picked up my first trial prints from a lab that put them out in an hour via the Fuji Frontier machine.

I knew to get prints this nice from my SLR, I would have needed to tweak the image on my computer and then download the corrected shot to a disc, and then drive to the shop to load it into the Fuji machine. With the P&S, I slid the SD card right out of the camera, inserted it into the terminal at the shop and picked my images to print. I was sure they would be less than ideal, but no... they were great!

The two things that make me keep using SLRs are the ability to get nice selective focus with moderate lenses (can't do that with the P&S at the wider end), and the lack of decent low-light performance based on the lack of lens speed and noise.

In good light, the little Canon set to aperture priority and with the lens set for manual focus (to speed up the lag time) lets me get nice street shots just like I can with my Nikon SLR.

Just me, but...

Manual focus lenses have the "feel" for manual focusing. This is a quality that can't be measured, but they just seem more precise in my experience. Even if the optics are the same, I pick feel when selecting tools. On a manual focus camera, manual focus feel is something that you will deal with for most every shot, so it means a lot.

Wide-angle lenses are able to be zone-focused and hyper-focused based on the depth-of-field at moderate and small apertures, so the ability to fully exploit this technique is important. Manual focus lenses have more comprehensive DOF scales, making deep focus or zones of focus easy to accomplish. A pre-focused lens is already "there", so it can make the shooting faster than auto-focus. I kept all of my wide-angle lenses manual AI / AIS models even when I got into auto-focus just because of the DOF scales. In these focal lengths, you give up little with a manual focus lens is you can use those scales.

Lastly, I have never ever had to give up a single manual focus lens for any mechanical problem. I treat my gear hard and never baby it, yet every manual focus AI / AIS lens (most over twenty years old)in my collection of nearly two-dozen lenses continues to operate flawlessly. I have owned 6 auto-focus lenses, mostly primes, and three lenses have failed mechanically in a very limited amount of time. Based on my experience, I'll pick a manual focus lens for any once-in-a-lifetime photo opertunity, especially on an extended trip where I have to live with the gear in my bag. My own history says this is the smart way to go.

So, feel, functionality and longevity whould make me go with manual focus.

<I>So, what's the story with these series E lenses?</I><P>

The story? Back in the day when Nikon was king, every lens with the word "Nikkor" on it was assumed to be the best possible lens in that focal length and speed. There might have been three different 35mm lenses for example (f/2.8, f/2.0 and f/1.4), and for sure the faster lens was great, but even the slow f/2.8 lens was in every way a Nikkor... built like a tank and with performance that was fine within the constraints of the speed.<P>

When Nikon decided to bring out a line of "less than" pro capable gear for the consumer, it did not wish to reduce the status of the "Nikkor" moniker, a status built by real world use of this gear by people that made their living from using it. So the Series E range was established. The range had a nice set of primes from wide to telephoto as well as a set of zooms covering the most used focal lengths for the amateur market. The lenses did not have the stout construction of the true Nikkors, and the optical formulas had more simple designs, with less complex coatings, but they were still very good alternatives to the third party lenses that a lot of consumers gravitated to because of cost.<P>

In short, Series E lenses exist because in the 1980s, Nikon was more upfront and honest than most companies. They let you know by the badge that a certain lens was not a real Nikkor, and let the consumer decide if it was good enough or if they should spend up to get the better lens. Today, Nikon puts "Nikkor" on every piece of plastic junk lens that they put out. People just getting into the brand don?t know what that word once meant. If this were the 1980s, Nikon would have to put out a Series E minus range. The old Series E lenses were built much better than many lenses that today have "Nikkor" proudly displayed. <P>

<I>Does anyone have any experience with these older lenses (good or bad)?</I><P>

As for experience, I use mostly real Nikkors in the AI/AIS manual focus versions, but I have used a few Series E lenses. The 50mm f/1.8 Series E was not as good as my Nikkor version until about f/4, but it is not bad. The one Series E lens that I still use and will never be without is the classic 75-150mm f/3.5. This lens is just great, even at f/3.5. To get a constant aperture lens (just a fraction of a stop from f/2.8) in this focal length range at this size and cost is amazing.<P>

<I>I just wondering how many of you have a black lens on your chrome body?</I><P>

My first 4 Leica Ms were chrome, and I started to upgrade to more modern (black) lenses long before I got my first black M body. If there was some problem with the cosmetics, I didn't care because of the enhanced performance of the newer glass.<div></div>

Don't forget that the LCD of the F3 is giving a shutterspeed in full stops, while the actual speed can be (and most often is) a fraction of a stop. That displayed 1/125th could be say 1/94th or 1/199th of a second. So it may not be as far off from your XA as it would seem, especially when you factor in the angle of the meter from both cameras.

Dial in the 1/125th shutterspeed (take camera off of "A") and then see if the apertrue ring needs some tweaking to get the plus / minus display to come up equally. That f/16, might need to be half way to f/22 to give a proper exposure in the finder display.

This is where the FE2 / FM3a is good since the shutterspeed is shown as a stepless range by a needle rather than as a whole number, and it is almost always an in-between speed in the real world while working in aperture priority.

It is not about being "nuts", but simply being able to see what does and doesn't work for you.

Not everyone is a rangefinder kind of shooter. If the 35mm lens is a problem for you, the fast telephotos won't be easier through the same finder.

Just my opinion, but once you get past 50mm, the SLR starts to get pretty good. The ability to see the selective focus in the finder (and not when the film comes back), and ease of focus on ground glass may make the SLR better than the rangefinder with the lens focal length and speeds you seem to like.