John Seaman

One more thing, The normally bright finder goes really dim when the camera is switched off, I think this is because with no mirror. the sun could cause damage if the lens cap is left off. So it stops the aperture right down to avoid this.

Thanks for the comment. I should explain that the picture is a combination of two shots of the same scene in my garden, one with the old Rokkor 135, one with a modern macro lens. Hence the sharpness of the flowers vs the painterly quality of the background. The vignette is a result of the MF/AF adaptor used, and was not added by me. I cropped in slightly to reduce the strength of the vignette, as the first uncropped version was criticised by a judge because of the strong vignette. Also she didn't like the buds or dead heads - this was my first version:

The ebay lot of three “ex-college surplus” cameras consisted of a Pentax with a 35-80 lens, a Nikon F401 with a 28-85 lens, and the 5MP Olympus Camedia E-20p. I mainly bought it for the lens on the Nikon. Looking at the online pictures, the Camedia didn’t seem all that exciting, it looked to me like a typical plastic bridge camera of a certain era, with no real indication of scale. When it came I was surprised to find a quite large and heavy metal bodied camera with a very nice fixed 9-36mm F/2.0 lens. It needed some TLC, in particular the hand grip had deteriorated to a sticky mess, so I scraped and cleaned it all off leaving a smooth surface. Otherwise it was in surprisingly good shape for a 2001 student camera. It came with the original lens cap, dedicated Camedia case and strap It runs off four AA cells, I had problems at first as it was quite demanding on batteries. Once I had it powered up I began to work out what everything did, the handbook being still available online. User interfaces have become somewhat standardised nowadays, but back then the controls seemed to be scattered randomly over the body. There are a lot of external buttons and levers, but they are well labelled and it seems clear Olympus wanted to allow access to the various functions without delving into the menus. It didn’t take long to work everything out It has an era typical 1.8 inch LCD, which has limited tilting facility. I thought at first the viewfinder would be electronic, but no, it’s a very decent optical finder. For this is indeed a full SLR rather than a bridge camera. Instead of a mirror it has a fixed Porro prism which diverts the image onto a secondary sensor, enabling live view. It was only the second DSLR with live view, the first being its very similar 4MP predecessor, the E-10. Although it’s only 5MP, and the ISO and shutter speed ranges are very limited, I enjoyed using it , it has grown on me with use. I found the images taken in good conditions very pleasing, surely printable to A3 with a little care, and the lens has no obvious distortion. There are dual memory slots, for Compact Flash and Smart Media cards. It records images as JPEG, Tiff and Raw (CRF) - the CRF files can still be processed in the CS5 Raw converter . The E20P was angled towards professionals, with just P,ASM modes, no consumer “scene modes” . It had a hefty price tag of $1700, still much less than many DSLR’s of the period. Here’s the camera and a couple of its images. That’s it and thanks for looking.

Taken with a very old near circular aperture Rokkor 135mm f/4. Mounted on my Sony A900 via a Minolta MD to AF adaptor. Comments will be appreciated thank you.

Wild Garlic (the plants in the foreground). This would have been a better picture for "Stream in the Woods".

Rolleicord

Secular Hall, Leicester

"Mayer Optik Gorlitz Dominoes 4/135" It's actually a Domigor, not a Domiplan as I'd expected.

Health and Safety

That's a crazy price for a kit lens. I see B&H have a used one for $75. But yes, look for something better.

Some photographers preferred plain ground glass screens for precise focusing. Some Fresnel screens have a plain area at the centre for this reason. I've got a 3.5F fitted with what I think is the original Fresnel, I find it bright enough. It just has a horizontally split image focusing aid, which I tend to rely on.

I find aperture priority mode works fine. Of course the latest flashguns have fabulous functionality - but they also have instruction manuals running to hundreds of pages. Trying to get my head round the complexity of them makes my poor old brain hurt.

Alas poor Yorick

That's interesting, thanks for the comments. It's worth mentioning that these guns work very well off rechargeable AA batteries, unlike some which need expensive alkali's. I should add that on the 1100D it's necessary to set custom function 2, flash,sync speed in AV mode, to "/200 to 1/60 auto" for the 1/60 speed to show on the LCD. Although the speed is still set to 1/60 even if you don't do this.

I acquired an EOS 1100D a few days ago, but got frustrated trying to get a Jessops 360AFD flashgun to work properly on it. Now I have a couple of old Canon flashes, a 199A and a 277T, which were designed for A and T series cameras probably 40 years ago. So I decided to see how well they worked on a DSLR. There’s a lot of misinformation about this online, so I thought it might be of interest to summarise what I found. First, they are both totally safe on digital, with trigger voltages less than 6V. Second, the non-TTL auto exposure control, with a sensor on the front measuring the light returning from the subject, works very well and gave excellent histograms. Unlike the E-TTL 360AFD which consistently over exposed (and its auto zoom function did not work). Third, they have surprisingly good compatibility with the EOS digital SLR, despite being decades older. They both operate the flash ready signal in the finder. And they automatically set the shutter speed to 1/60. So why use them? Well, they just work, and are very simple to use. On the more powerful tilting 199A you just select the ISO and auto flash range, then read the aperture off the dial and set that on the camera. For example at 200 ISO on the Green range, the aperture is f/8. On the smaller non-tilting 277T, first set the ISO, then you have a choice of apertures via the F.No.SET button. There’s no zoom on these apart from add-on wide diffusers - so what? It seems ironic that a whole generation of film era TTL flashguns, which read the light reflected back from the matt film surface, are pretty much useless on digital. Jump back a generation and it’s a different story. Here are the two guns mounted on the 1100D, the 199A on the right, showing that the speed is set to 1/60.

Olympus OM1

This suggests extra lubricant won't help (although WD40 is a water dispersant rather than a lubricant). By all means pop off the baseplate and try and narrow down the problem. Just watch out for any loose bits which might fall out.