prime lens

Try a Bessa T. The separate focusing "tunnel" (a tiny circular hole) is highly magnified. The RF has a long baseline. Works for me. The CV external VFs are extra money and hassle, but the view is a revelation!!

-- Steve

Loaded in a dork bar?

Sorry, somebody had to say it!

(Edward -- this is an old chestnut. One may search PN for Leica forum threads conatining "dork bar" ...)

-- Steve

Here's another one.

-- Steve<div></div>

2 Springs ago, I tested my new Bessa R2 and freshly-acquired M-Rokkor 40/2 (CLE) with a roll of Kodachrome 64 down at the rail yards. I made these not-so-great scans on a cheesy HP 3970 scanner, and edited them with Microsoft Photo Editor. The original slides look pretty good, despite the harsh midday lighting. (Now to install PS Elements 3...)

One of my friends told me recently that one can get into trouble poking about railway facilities, because they are part of the transportation infrastructure. It has apparently been standard procedure to detain trespassers at rail yards and even to rough them up gratuitously, with very little recourse for the aggrieved.

I imagine that after dealing with bums riding the rails for the last hundred years or more, railroad security personnel can be somewhat callous.<div></div>

Nice work, Trevor.

-- Steve

My repeated experience has been that in general, Fuji films (both slide and print) go a lot greener under fluorescent lighting, a lot faster, than Kodak films (both slide and print) do.

I'm not trying to contradict Nadine, just offering a contrasting perception. I think that Kodak VPS 160 or whatever they make now is likely to be hard to beat, but even Gold 200 (or Royal Gold 200) is quite tolerant of mixed lighting.

I think that managing filters under mixed lighting conditions is difficult at best. Do they really make green filters for a Vivitar 285 to match the fluorescent lighting so the strobe comes out white after making its way through the filter over the lens?

I've had some luck with mixed lighting at home using my digital point-and-shoot camera on a tripod and setting the custom white balance for the ambient lighting conditions.

Lacking a similar option, you might be able to get scans of your film at processing time and either adjust them yourself or have the lab do it. One problem is that most labs provide scanned images only in the .JPG format.

I really don't like the degradation that comes from repeatedly saving a .JPG file. Even adjusting a scanned .JPG once and re-saving it as another .JPG causes a loss that I can see. "Everybody" says it's all right if the image is big enough and you aren't printing large, but I can't stand it.

I save my intermediate processing steps in .BMP, uncompressed .TIF, or another lossless file format, and only convert to .JPG if necessary -- and as the last step after post-processing. (Not that any of the files I've uploaded here are adequately processed -- I have a history of using nothing more than Microsoft Photo Editor, which doesn't have "levels," "curves," or "unsharp masking." I have purchased PS Elements 3, and hope to provide more exemplary digitizations in the future.)

If you could get a lab to scan the film and give you a CD, DVD, or whatever with files saved in a lossless format, you could adjust the color balance or have them do it without the artifacts and loss of detail that go with .JPG files. Keeping unmodified copies of the original files is always essential.

I know this is my subjective, personal view, but I feel strongly about it. Two weathered maxims from the days before political correctness come to mind: "There's more than one way to skin a cat," and "One man's drink is another man's poison." On the Web, people now write "YMMV" -- truly one of the more inane Web-isms.

-- Steve

For simple machines, thread-locking compound or "Loctite" is often used. It locks strongly and is hard to remove. For delicate setscrews and electronic applications, it's too rigid and too permanent. You can destroy a small screw to which locking compound has been overzealously applied before getting it loose.

Back in the electronics shop, we used to use fingernail polish -- as much to make tampering evident as to hold the screw. Each tech had his own color. I used "Mocha Malt" for years, and then switched to iridescent pearl (that I got for a buck at the dollar store). My old mentor used clear nail polish: the "stealth" approach. He noted that dried nail polish is also an excellent insulator, having a dielectric strength of 1,000 Volts per mil (0.001 inch). He called it "Thousand Volts per Mil," as in "got any Thousand Volts per Mil?" (I think it sounded better to him than asking for the nail polish!)

The Japanese guy who runs the best local computer store uses something red that looks and behaves like nail polish on the mounting screws for the disk drives in the boxes he builds.

Used carefully and sparingly, nail polish has never caused any problems that I know of. We always let it dry thoroughly before putting the cover back on to avoid leaving residual fumes inside the equipment. It's not hard to break it loose by cranking slightly on the screw. It usually fractures, leaving a dried gob that can often be removed in one piece.

-- Steve

Bill --

The notion that Divine intervention doesn't exist because events that are unpleasant from a human perspective are allowed to occur seems simplistic.

-- Steve

Fans of the T2 are very enthusiastic about its optics, but it has a squinty viewfinder and only an approximate readout of the shutter speed. I don't think it has full manual focusing.

However, the 35Ti is probably so close in optical quality as to be equivalent, and has some unique advantages: full manual focusing (or passive contrast-sensing autofocus), aperture-priority AE or programmed AE with program shift, LCD shutter-speed readout in the large, bright illuminated finder, 2 sets of accurate parallax lines that light up at closer focusing distances, spot-on 3D Matrix metering, and the ultra-cool analog chronometer dial readouts.

The 35Ti is bigger than the T2, but still "pocketable" (in a big pocket). It's a lot smaller than the Hexar AF, and has a 1/500 shutter speed (as well as f/22 minimum aperture and ISO 1600). The 35Ti has good depth-of-field at its closest focusing distance of 1.2 feet at f/4 and above. At f/2.8, the DOF is a bit small at the closest focusing distance.

The well-known Achilles heel of the 35TI is the little flash buttons you have to hold awkwardly to force the flash-on or flash-off modes (although you can set the camera to a constant flash-off mode via the highly opaque menus, which require the highly-opaque manual to set). The flash is oriented toward fill-flash applications. I have had very good life with its CR123A batteries.

I got fewer ruined shots in 1-1/2 years of actively using mine than I probably have with any other film camera. It produces exceptionally bright and vivid colors. While the bokeh does not keep up with my 40/2 M-Rokkor (CLE), or even the 40/3.5 Zeiss Tessar on my Rollei 35, it is only very rarely objectionable.

Mine is also still for sale, with the eyepiece diopter adapter, case, strap and manual. I got it from KEH in "LN-" condition, and it has suffered very little in the interim. There's hardly a more beautiful camera in the history of photography (except maybe a Leica CM, or certainly an M2 or M3).

-- Steve

I think it was not the acid that did Janis and Jimi in, but the junk.

-- Steve

At a wedding...

-- Steve<div></div>

Dr. Hofmann is a real hero.

One of the people who participated in the clinical trials of his discovery in the 60's was Cary Grant -- who credited it with helping him greatly to improve his emotional life, especially with regard to his feelings about his parents and his upbringing (a troublesome subject for most of us).

Many others benefited similarly, until it became a political crime in the US, rewarded by unduly harsh and lengthy penal servitude.

-- Steve

I had a roommate in college who said he thought he could get along with me because I had a good dirty chuckle.

-- Steve

Nice stuff, folks!

Thanks for starting this one, Monkey -- it's one of my favorite subjects. I really like your opening salvo.

Please forgive this bad scan of a mediocre 4x6 Type R print. I made this image on Ektachrome 100 with a Rollei 35S in 1990. I have a really nice 11"x14" Cibachrome of it hanging on the wall.

Seeing Lutz's photo, I had to contribute my own, despite the poverty of the scan. I walked by the puddle and felt the reflected heat of the sun through the sleeve of my windbreaker. I pulled out the trusty Rollei, and a passer-by gave me a funny look: "taking a weird picture of a greasy puddle, are you?"

-- Steve<div></div>

Gabriel --

"Loco" is just a marketing element based on the name of the proprietor's original (and now sister) restaurant.

Cómo hinchado? No tiene enfermedad!

(The inverted punctuation isn't getting through...)

-- Steve

Trevor, is that what you call a "light lunch?" (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Actually, there are Indian saints who are reputed not to eat, and to live on light. Matter is energy, eh?

Here is my lunch from a recent Thursday at a local establishment.

-- Steve<div></div>

Panasonic's Venus II LSI Engine is very interesting. The luminance signal necessary to construct the final image from all of the sensor photo-site inputs is derived from the red, green and blue channels -- not just the green channel, as with most processors. The interpolation algorithm is designed to minimize "jaggies," and there is supposed to be a concomitant reduction of purple fringing effects.

Digital sensors are prone to increasing noise as more megapixels are coaxed out of the same size of sensor. If P'sonic could adopt strong software noise reduction a la the Fuji F10, it might be a very workable approach.

In the infancy of digital imaging, solutions to the common problems are still evolving fairly rapidly. I'm waiting for a biological sensor. There was a joke back in the Seventies: "I just bought a Playtex living bra, but I don't know what to feed it."

-- Steve

Last Wednesday. These aren't actually my feet, but they are my shoes -- size 10-1/2 to 11 (American Men's sizes).

-- Steve<div></div>

Using the 40/2 M-Rokkor (CLE) on my Bessa R2, I have found that the 50mm framelines are nearly perfect at distances of 2 meters or less.

At distances greater than 2 meters, the 35mm framelines are very close, indeed.

If I had to live without the ability to switch framelines at will (as do some of you poor Leica users), I would use the 50 mm framelines and "think outside the box" a bit.

-- Steve

My Nikon 35Ti is on the auction block (in sort of a passive way).

I may have to make and post some drooly photos of it with proper post-processing to spark up the level of interest...

-- Steve

Richard --

The way that the viewfinder "draws" one into the composition inevitably affects the way one "sees" the composition -- as well as the recorded image. Finding a camera that facilitates one's emotional involvement with the subject matter can be a very important quest.

One day, I found myself "drawn into" the viewfinder of my Nikon F3 with a 24/2 wide-angle lens while photographing a weeping willow tree in the park. I had a wonderful little vacation in the world into which I was drawn. Unfortunately, the resulting photographs were unremarkable, but I still really felt something happening.

Later, I was using a small portable tripod and a cable release with my Bessa R2 and 40/2 M-Rokkor (CLE) at night to make photographs in a church parking lot. The 35mm framelines work well with the 40mm lens at focused distances of 2 meters and beyond, and the 50mm framelines work well at less than 2 meters.

I showed my girlfriend the view through the viewfinder, and she was inspired to pull out her Olympus Infinity Stylus Epic and try a couple of exposures. She immediately remarked on how small and distant the subject looked through the viewfinder of the Stylus, and how the bleak composition of concrete slabs and cheesy ground cover seemed less involving than it did looking through the Bessa R2.

These feelings were supported by the photographs when we got them back from processing -- the ones from the Bessa R2 were "better." She suddenly became slightly more interested in the subject of viewfinders (upon which she had previously been intransigent in her recalcitrance).

Fueled by this experience, I sold the Nikon F3 system, taking a bath in the process, and added a Bessa T, a CV 75/2.5 lens, and CV viewfinders for the 40mm and 75mm focal lengths to my Bessa kit.

The view through the external viewfinders is the brightest, most engaging, and most inspiring view I have ever seen through a camera. The 75mm VF has a 1:1 magnification ratio that allows shooting with both eyes open, and the 40mm is incredibly bright and "open." Both are much brighter than the viewfinder in the Bessa R2.

Getting used to the parallax error (especially at close focusing distances, and particularly with the longer lens) can be a bit maddening, and is enough to turn a number of folks away from this approach. People who are wedded to the SLR experience can have a particularly hard time with the transition.

Still, the "rangefinder look" that shooting with an external VF provides can be very valuable, despite the frustrations and limitations of this approach (such as having someone's face cut off or blocked in the photograph, even though it was visible in the viewfinder).

Now if only there were an affordable equivalent to the Epson R-D1!

-- Steve

Paul --

Don't forget the Nikon 35Ti.

The 35Ti's lens is extremely good, within spitting distance of anything I've used, but perhaps without as subtle a bokeh as the CM might have.

I worry about the CM's internal battery -- I have the impression that it has to be replaced at a factory service outlet.

The 35Ti has a really nice viewfinder, with 2 additional sets of accurate parallax-compensation brightlines that appear at closer focusing distances.

Unique among compact P&Ss, the 35Ti has full display of and contol of focused distance and selected aperture, with the shutter speed shown in an LCD readout in the viewfinder.

The 3D Matrix Metering is excellent, winning universal acclaim.

My 35Ti is available -- please drop me an e-mail if you have an interest in it.

-- Steve