c_j3

Thanks to everyone for responding. Brian, I enjoyed your photos using the lens wide open and stopped down a bit. Wide open it's a good people lens since it can smooth over details, but then I saw how that quality can be frustrating in other shots like the indoor birdhouse where you probably would have preferred more sharpness. The turkey shot at f/2 has vibrant color, and I didn't see any vignetting at larger apertures either. What is the Canon 7's viewfinder magnification to focus this lens?

 

Al, you make an excellent point about the importance of which films should be used. Maybe pushing them a couple of stops would help.

 

Andrew, Josh, and Donald, thanks for the links to better photos of the camera and lens.

 

Does anyone else find the way the Canon lens renders small background light sources superior to the way the Noctilux renders them? I find those circles of light distracting with the Noctilux unless they can be made to work in a particular photo.

 

The Canon lens produces a sort of gentle watercolor or pastel effect that Photoshop may be able to mimic but I doubt it can duplicate. These pictures remind me of the ones I used to take with my father's Kodak fixed-lens folding camera (a Tourist or something; sliding aperture lever with one s-l-o-w shutter speed; 620 film; unlimited accidental multiple exposures) when I was nine or ten. We would have considered them sharp back then, and they're pleasant in their own way.

 

If anyone has similar kinds of photos taken with the Noctilux, it would be interesting to compare them here.

I know that the Canon 7's 50mm f/0.95 lens has been discussed before,

but I didn't find any photos of it mounted on a camera in photo.net.

I found this on another site, and I thought people who had never seen

one might be interested in gawking. Imagine what it would look like

with a hood attached. It has a reputation for flare and distortion,

but that's only if it's used to photograph something. What would one

of these sell for today?

Around the corner<div></div>

I've been meaning to introduce myself to this forum, and this topic gave me the needed push. I've been a member of Photo.net for several months and only recently began uploading photos to my portfolio, mostly so that friends and family would have a convenient way to see them. But soon I noticed that I was scoring hundreds of views. Contrary to what someone wrote above, I don't think anyone can rate your photos unless you hit that "Request a critique" link, but they can leave comments. No one rated my photos until I formally asked them to.

 

A few days ago I noticed that one of the photos I'd uploaded had received 800 views in a week and a half, and buoyed with confidence I decided to hit the critique-request link for that and several others in my portfolio. As the saying goes, be careful what you ask for. The photo with the most views scored the lowest, a solid 3. Then I decided to track down who these people were who were rating my photos, all five of them out of the hundreds of the faceless masses just passing through. As another saying goes, it takes 20 men to raise a barn but only one jackass to knock it down. To top it off, only one of the raters of my photos bothered to leave a comment explaining their rating or suggesting how to improve my photography.

 

But anyway, when I checked out my critics for the lowest-rated photo, two out of five hadn't bothered posting any photos of their own, and another two hadn't requested that any of their photos be rated. It seems to me that if someone wants to rate photos, he should make himself just as vulnerable as the person whose photos he deigns to rate. Yes, that does leave him open to childish retaliation, but I tend to agree with a poster above: it's all a mind game and the smaller-minded people around here will try to intimidate anyone they can for self-gratification. After seeing some of the work that has received scores of 5.5 and better, I have to agree that there are abuses of the system that allow some (not all) members to game it.

 

Again, a few photographers whose work I have seen online and admired have rated my work, I believe fairly and kindly. But there are others out there who seem to have no knowledge or appreciation of various approaches to photography who nonetheless feel compelled to impose their orthodoxy on everyone else. That can be deadly to really young photographers, and as an older amateur I can say that it still hurts. I think that after this crop of rated photos has run its course, I will just upload my photos as I did earlier and seek sincere criticism and validation elsewhere--mostly inside myself, I suppose. It's a pity that the rating system can't be made into something that offers genuine feedback, but as it is anyone on the web can set up a membership here and trash anything that doesn't reaffirm his own narrow views of what a good photo is.

From the way you framed your question, it seems that you were leaning toward film from the start, and that's perfectly legitimate. But then you seem to confuse things, and that's also understandable. Your AF/shutter-lag question is a digital vs. film question in disguise, but it stands on uneven ground. Just as you said that the 1V "proves to be a significant refinement over the EOS 3 only for some," so it is with the latest advances in prosumer digital photography vs. state-of-the-art film photography. You seem to have already decided that the 10D is a step down from the 3, in the same way the 3 is a step down from the 1V. Yes, that's one way of looking at it, but a better way would be to compare Canon's best digital, the 1Ds, with its best film model, the 1V, since the 1Ds is based on the 1V and the 10D is not.

 

The 10D fills the $6,500 void in Canon digital SLR photography that lies between the have-everythings and the have-somethings. It gives photographers near-total control over their output. It is an affordable digital SLR that produces images rivaling those of film SLRs, and because of this people like me are willing to sacrifice a few bells and whistles for a while until technology gives them a full-frame digital 1V with the same price tag as the film version. Or preferably a smaller one!

 

Not everyone is selling their film cameras when they get their 10Ds. In fact, I bought my EOS-3 afterward when I realized how much I liked wide-angle photography. If all you're looking for is "reliable, fast AF especially in low light," then the 3 is your answer. No digital darkroom expenses and archival/storage hassles, but no instant gratification and self-correction either. And no photos camera-ready for the Internet, printing, and e-mail.

 

"Format aside"? If format doesn't matter, then why not shoot without film or CF cards? I think you answered your own question. It's film.

For the EOS-3 manual, try this link: http://eosdoc.com/manuals.asp

 

Scroll down to where the reader comments begin, and you will find someone named Mike B who has an 11 MB .pdf file that he can send you via Instant Messenger. Send him an e-mail mailto:mike@butkus.org and he will send you his IM name. Unless you have an unlimited mailbox size, the manual will not fit in your regular e-mail box and will get bounced back. I got all this info from his message in the EOS Documentation Project.

 

Now if only someone can point me to a place where I can download a mini table of the CFs for the EOS-3 that I can put on the camera, that would be great. Canon doesn't have it.

I have also been experiencing many occasions of overexposure. I was puzzled since I was letting the camera's evaluative metering do the calculations, and I thought that my inexperience with the 10D could also account for it. But shot after shot those annoying blinking areas on the LCD screen persuaded me to leave compensation at -1/2, to the point that I forget to remove it before turning off the camera. I've found that exposures are fine in shady conditions, though. This is the first time anyone has mentioned exposure problems rather than autofocus problems.

 

Someone mentioned a firmware upgrade. Is that a fact or a hope?

http://www.keh.com/shop/product.cfm?bid=CE&cid=35&sid=newused&crid=5167680

 

(link to a hard copy of the manual in "Excellent" condition, $11 at KEH Camera Brokers--I couldn't find a downloadable version either, but I hope this helps)

From what I read here, I think I did the right thing, buying the Mamiya 7II with the 43mm lens to start. I recently bought a Canon 10D with its reduced imaging screen, which skews all the great Canon 35mm lenses to the long end by a factor of 1.6, so I decided to use medium format for wide-angle. I'm used to a fully manual (no internal light meter) fixed-lens 35mm rangefinder from the year 1 that my father gave me eons ago, so the Mamiya won't take much getting used to, and straddling "wide-angle" film and "telephoto" digital lets me take advantage of what both have to offer. My question to you all is, if I start with the 43mm and I want something longer, which is the better lens for less-than-wide-angle so that I don't need to carry two cameras around? The 80mm or the 65mm? Or is the 43mm enough if I just zoom in with my feet?

 

I apologize if this post isn't precisely on topic, but it does deal with the question of proper lens selection for the 7II, so I thought I could expand on it.

I was having exactly the same problem with my 10D. It turns out that you need to be in either Tv or M to see the H in the viewfinder. Switch to either of those modes and push the shutter to 1/250 and faster, and you should see the H next to the flash indicator.

 

Aperture priority will not show the H, no matter what you do. If you set the custom function for high-speed sync in Av mode, the 550EX works as it is supposed to, but without the H.

 

I hope this saves you a trip to the shop. I wish Canon wrote better manuals.

The acrylic protectors can be found on eBay. I bought one and duly proceeded to mess up the adhesive backing, but the vendor is giving me a new one for no extra charge. The protector also fits perfectly on my 10D's LCD without cutting it.