harry_akiyoshi

It's a shade soft wide open and pretty much outstanding stopped down to f/5.6. Other people have demonstrated that it has pretty nice bokeh and so forth, so I'm not going to post more pictures -- you can't see sharpness on a computer screen. If you want a longish lens for street work, it's an excellent choice, being compact and short enough to scale-focus on bright days.

Velvia has relatively poor reciprocity characteristics. It will shift noticeably towards magenta in exposures longer than about a second or so.

The only time I've ever really found TTL flash necessary is for macro work with a 35mm camera (you can't easily measure extension like you can with a monorail). I think most of the people using studio strobes are accustomed to using handheld flash meters. The market for a TTL strobe system is pretty limited -- if someone were to produce one, I'm sure they'd sell a few of them, but most of the people that shell out for the capability to completely control all of the light striking their subject want to work manually.

I'm not very knowledgeable about polaroid emulsions in general, but the Type 79 that I usually shoot limits out around 400 dpi. Negative film will be about 5-10 times sharper than that, depending on lens SQF, film alignment, etc.

The Autocord is actually somewhat reknowned among TLRs for good film handling. Even with a perfectly-aligned Ikonta C, which is a difficult thing to come by, film flatness won't be as good as with the Minolta. In terms of overall useability, the Autocord is simply in a different league than the Ikonta. If you want a really practical 6x9 rangefinder, you'd probably do well to look at one of the fixed-lens fuji models.

I don't know that the screens I'm talking about are directly comparable with the F or F3 screens. Those ones are made of glass and have their own little condensor lenses, I think (could be wrong).

I have an FA with a K2 screen. I was wondering how much of an

improvement the newer screens (released with the FM3a) are over the

original one that came with the FA. Also, I'm mainly interested in

quick focusing with telephotos -- is a b-type plain matte screen

better for that?

I'm curious about this as well. Intuitively I would think that the D70, or any camera with a non-cooled sensor, would be inadequate for very long exposures. If anybody has evidence to the contrary I'd love to hear it.

Reala is good. You might want to overexpose it a little in overcast conditions.

Thanks Eric -- that's good to know. Just the sort of thing I was hoping to find out.

I read a few places that the multi-sample metering system in the FA is generally less reliable than later versions. A lot of people seem to think that it was an important conceptual leap for Nikon, but ultimately less than effective as an actual tool. Just curious to find out from actual users how good/bad it is in practice. For example, if you were to switch on matrix metering and go shoot a 36-roll of Velvia 50, how many of those frames would be satisfactorily exposed (based on how you typically shoot)?

Plenty of people push Tri-X to 1250 in Diafine, which is pretty closely related to Acufine. You can actually still get Acufine, and many people do, but a lot of people feel that Diafine delivers superior results with Tri-X. Myself, I mostly use DD-X, but that's just what I have around these days. Looks pretty good at 800 -- tight grain, decent shadow detail. It's a good compromise developer in general, which might explain its popularity; it's just hard to screw up. Works fine on slow films/works fine on fast films. Tolerant of exposure and processing errors. It's not incredibly exceptional in regards to acutance, fine grain, or other qualities that people look for in a developer, but it does do a lot of things pretty well if not brilliantly.

Well, with FA & MD-15 combos going for about $200 in Ex- condition

these days, I finally decided to make the leap to the "technocamera"

of 1983. Every so often I need a camera with some degree of exposure

automation and a motor drive (telephoto stuff, you know), and the EM

I had previously used is dying of a lamentably unrepairable meter

fault. I guess ideally I would have gone for an F4, but they're huge

and still too expensive for something that I'll probably just use

until DSLRs get cheap.

 

I mainly picked up the FA because I liked the way it integrates with

the MD-15 motor drive (it'll run on just the AA cells) and I need at

least center-weighted aperture priority from time to time. However,

all of this multi-segment metering stuff has me intrigued. I plan to

test it pretty thoroghly when it arrives, but to satisfy my curiosity

until it does, how bad is it? Good enough for print film? Is it

ever accurate enough for chromes, and under what circumstances? I've

read that using the camera in vertical orientation makes the meter

act weird, but besides that, is there anything to watch out for?

 

One other thing, on a slightly unrelated note: how much better are

the newer focusing screens for the FM3a than the old ones for the FE-

2, FA, etc?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Andrew

I use a Bogen 3262QR ball head on my Gitzo. It's not a bad ballhead for the price, and pretty good for use on a monopod. I prefer it to using a tilt head.

It's pretty bad luck to get a Jupiter-12 that won't make sharp 4x6s. Mine will make sharp 11x14s at f/5.6. The Zeiss Biogon design it's based on is no slouch.

What you actually want is a Zorki-4k with either a Jupiter-8 (50mm) or Jupiter-12 (35mm) lens. It'll be a better shooting camera than the Zorki 3 or Fed 2. The Fed 2 has the potential to be quite good, but quality control isn't so great.

 

The Kiev rangefinders are decent cameras, but it's somewhat harder to find lenses for them -- many more lenses were made in LTM than in Contax mount.

At 24x36", both of those are compromise solutions. The D100 will have less grain, and a drum scan from a 35mm slide will resolve slightly more detail. It really depends what look you want. For subjects without a lot of very fine detail, like portraits, either one would probably look fine. The quality of the print depends a lot more on the skill of the person making it than it does on the difference between a 6MP DSLR and scanned film.

Actually, you can use a much larger radius that 2 if you don't intend to actually sharpen the picture. "Local Contrast Enhancement" is basically a method for using unsharp masking to boost apparent contrast without losing highlight or shadow detail. It increases the tonal seperation between adjacent objects.

I wouldn't recommed using B&W filters on your 10D. It's very, very simple to simulate their effect in Photoshop using the Chanel Mixer, and you would still have viable color images should you want them.

What print sizes are important to you? I've never needed to print a headshot larger than 8x10. At that size, it's pretty much a tie between a medium format setup and a new D70. Right now, I'd take the D70.

 

What about your current system are you unsatisfied with?

I bought my 4x5 monorail for a couple of hundred on the auction site. It does what I need it to do.

 

A lot of large format cameras are sold to enthusiastic hobbyists, and the use of the camera is part of their hobby. A Sinar or Arca-Swiss camera is simply a joy to use, and people pay more for that feeling of solidity and precision.

 

Note, however, that most pros are buying stuff like Cambos and Toyos -- bare-bones, functional cameras that do basically the same things as the expensive models at a fraction of the cost.

 

Inexpensive large-format cameras ARE out there; saying that all large format cameras are expensive because Linhof or Sinar cameras are expensive is sort of like saying that all 35mm cameras are expensive because of Leica and Contax.

Do the obvious and pick up a used 105mm 2.5. They're cheap, sharp, and well-built. Pretty good bokeh -- better than the 85 f/1.8 AF.

If you're only going to use the camera on a tripod, think about something like a Mamiya RZ67. They're bulky, but the lenses are pretty good and they handle wonderfully on a tripod.

 

For something a little more portable, you might also consider the Pentax 67II. Both of those cameras are sturdy, reliable, and offer good optics and features for the price.

Yeah, the guide number is a little optimistic. I'm not sure it's a full stop off -- it depends somewhat on how fresh the batteries are, among other things.

Which polaroid film are you shooting? Most color polaroid film has horrible reciprocity characteristics beyond about 1/15 or 1/4 of a second.

 

At any rate, barring reciprocity error, an exposure that looks correct on 100 ISO polaroid stock will usually still look correct on 100 ISO film. They're not identical, and it takes some practice to figure out exactly how to interpret a polaroid for proofing purposes, but generally, if a polaroid is too dark (not enough exposure), then the negative will be too light (also not enough exposure).