nemeng

<i>14-54mm</i><p>

I've been trying to buy one of these to replace the junk 14-45mm kit lens which came with my E500. No chance. Haven't been able to find anyone who has the f2.8 14-54mm in stock (and no, I refuse to look at ePray!).

Yes of course.<p>

Candid people shots, either hand-held or with a monopod:

<a href="http://4020.net/unposed/blad.shtml">blad.4020.net</a>

I'd be interested to hear if the Beverly Hills people are still around.

I tried to check the "rent a Noctliux" contact details a few months ago but couldn't find anything online.

I'd appreciate if someone from the USA could drop me a note if the FAQ entry is out of date.

If I was going to use a prism on a Rolleiflex, then the Baier Fototechnik Hasselblad prism mount-adapter is a pretty good idea:<p>

<a href="http://www.baierfoto.de/tlrenglish.html">http://www.baierfoto.de/tlrenglish.html</a><p>

This thing is so adaptable you could even use modern Hasselblad WLFs on the Rolleiflex. Frankencamera!<p>

Why not use a "real thing" Rolleiflex prism? Because they're old and heavy (and overpriced) and lack the multi-coating optical quality of modern finders.

Thanks for the +ve response Arthur - glad the film loading instructions helped.

What catches many newbie M users out, including myself at the time, was that if you come from SLRs then you've learned to NEVER close the back until the film is engaged with the film transport wheel.

With the "rapid load" Ms (M4 onwards) you do the opposite. How Leica.

Mind you this doesn't apply to the earlier M3 or M2, where you DO have to keep the thing open until you can see the film winding on smoothly. How Leica... again :?)

Before going "colour and nothing but" a decade ago, I used to use Kodak T-Max 100 developed in Ilford Perceptol (1+1 dilution).

No film speed loss & the negs captured the wide dynamic range of (my local) Australian sunlight without too much trouble. Perceptol is a v.fine grain developer too :?)

I've been looking at this option again as places in Sydney which can develop 120-size C41 film appear to be becoming scarcer every day.

Do it all the time.

Use an optical waist-level finder (eg. an accessory-shoe-mount WFL by Zeiss or Leica) and you can view & frame whether the mirror's up, down or sideways. The only thing you can't do is re-check the focus :?)

As for holding the camera steady, press it length-ways against the side of your chest.

Another source of "unsharpness" is accidental camera-shake when you press the shutter release. Many have no problems with this I know - but for me the movement destroyed half my shots.

So now I've set the camera "Anti-Shock" delay to 2 seconds. Useless for action stuff, but works fine for stationary subjects.

Compose, focus, press the shutter-release, the mirror flips up... and you've got two seconds to hold the thing steady before the shutter trips.

Camera-shake g-r-e-a-t-l-y reduced :?)

This is seriously OT for a Leica forum, so I'll keep it short.

Meta data _used_ to be effective. But following its abuse by porn sites in the 90's (eg. many of them added "Lady Diana", "Diana death Paris" etc. to their sites at the time of the car crash) - search engines had to become much smarter.

It's a bit of a black art, but what web-bots look at now is the actual text on the page. More text, greater hits. Furthermore weighting is given to headings and page titles. Then they also factor in other links to your site, especially from popular sites such as "photo.net" or "wikipedia.org" etc., to bypass people who try to use CSS hidden text to fool search engines.

Finally, you can also pay Google for hit result prominence :?)

A couple of things search engines don't yet index: the visual content of images; any Macromedia Flash content. This is the main reason major photo sites like "VII", "Sigma", "Corbis", "Magnum" etc. avoid using a Flash-for-everything design, and use lots of caption text.

You're off to a good start keeping your website simple & quick loading. I would strongly advise avoiding Flash as (1) many see it as an irritating waste of bandwith & time and (2) with Firefox growing more popular, many users have set Adblock to zap <i>all</i> "swf" content (!)<p>

A small suggestion if I may, provide a fair bit of text information for each photograph. That way if someone is searching for something, chances are it'll show up in Google.<p>

Sound far-fetched? Guess who is the #1 hit for the following search?...<p>

<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=eastern+bloc+photographs">Google - "eastern bloc photographs"</a><p>

:?)<p>

If you show up often enough in Google (and on forums like photo.net), then people will eventually link to your site and its popularity will snowball. Don't expect it to happen overnight though!

I've been using a Gossen Sixtomat Digital F for a few years now. Only 1 AA battery and it's compact and robust (been dropped a lot of times!). A nice feature is that it lets you measure the exposure contrast range by holding the button down and doing a continuous light reading.

I notice there's a new(ish) Gossen out, the "Digi Pro F". Appears to have the same kind of body as the Sixtomat, only the diffuser ball swivels and is much larger. I don't know if this is a good idea though. I wonder how many drops it would survive... :?)

 <br>

<center>

<<a href="http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=m3+repair+viewfinder">http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=m3+repair+viewfinder</a>

></center>

I stronly doubt you'll be able to afford a R7 if the R6/6.2 is too "pricey".

In which case, I'd opt for either the R5 or R-E as both fixed the snafus in some of the R4's (plural, not "R4s"!).

1. <a href="http://www.panotools.info/">http://www.panotools.info/</a> - tips, tools, tutorials etc.<p>

2. <a href="http://4020.net/vr/">http://vr.4020.net</a> - my own full screen QTVR examples with embedded stereo sound.<p>

I've been doing this sort of thing professionally for @ 10 years now. No you don't need to shoot onto MF film. I still use 35mm film + a (Leica) 16mm full-frame fisheye lens, but nearly every other VR pro now uses a DSLR with the Nikkor 10.5mm or Sigma 8mm.<p>

My dream setup though would be my Hasselblad 501cm with a 30mm f/3.5 CFI Distagon Fish-Eye. Yeah right, $US 7.4k for the lens (new).

<i>It would also make sense for a forensic photographer to shoot raw and strongly archive those originals.</i><p>

Or as Howard - someone who earns his living doing this stuff every day - said: just shoot film and avoid the bother.<p>

I know some people <i>hate</i> hearing this, but regardless of what your Art Teacher told you, digital capture is not the <i>only</i> solution for <i>every</i> aspect of photography :?)

I won't bite on the "Nikon vs. Olympus vs. Leica" which-glass-is-better remark... :?) ... but for coping with stop-down metering, I've found using the E500's "Preview Shot" mode a help.

You re-program the "...[]..." button via the menus, and then take a preview shot when you think you've got the exposure right. If you're out then adjust the shutter speed and try again. Nothing gets written to disc, so the battery drain is minimal.

This way there's no guessing as you can see, with a histogram if you like, whether the exp. is right.

Of course previewing is awkward for fast action work, but in that case so too is using any manual lens (_not_ impossible - just slow) :?)

Lutz - use the latest stand-alone (free) DNG converter (v3.4) to create a DNG file, and then you can import this into any imaging app. which supports ".dng".<p>

To open the DNG file in CS1, you need to install the last ACR Adobe released for it (v2.4).<p>

This is how I used to get my Olympus ".orf" RAW files (not supported by CS1 ACR) into CS1. With this work-around who needs the bloat and expense of CS2?...<p>

FWIW - see Carl Bretteville's posts in the Leica forum at:<p>

<a href="http://www.leica-camera.com/discus_e/messages/3/206780.html">http://www.leica-camera.com/discus_e/messages/3/206780.html</a>

Ray - this is pretty old news :?) See for example the write-up I have in the Leica FAQ I maintain, with lots of links to press releases etc. at:<p>

<a href="http://nemeng.com/leica/007f.shtml">http://nemeng.com/leica/007f.shtml</a><p>

You won't be able to mount M lenses onto EVolt bodies as the lens-to-film distance is too short to allow infinity focus. You can however mount Leica R slr lenses with a lensmount adapter. Cameraquest make them, but I'm using the cheaper Roxsen. Works fine.<p>

One irritant, the Four-Thirds chip is so small you get a 2x cropping factor. So you better break out the R ultra-wides to get decent coverage - eg. the 15mm or 19mm Elmarit-R ($ ouch!).<p>

I'm currently using the Olympus E500 with a 50mm R-Summicron (see the "Leicympus" heading at the above URL). Works well, but it's effectively cropped to the equivalent of a 100mm.

Good timing Lutz! I'm going down this road myself - Olympus E500, Roxsen Leica R lens adapter.<p>

My current workflow:<p>

<ul>

<li>I always shoot RAW - 144 shots onto a Sandisk Ultra II 2GB CF card</li>

<li>Use the free stand-alone <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/index.html">Adobe DNG converter</a> application to acquire the images onto the computer and create archived DNG versions of the Olympus RAW files. The process also losslessly compresses each file from @ 13 MB to @ 7MB. The stand-alone DNG converted also works with the latest Adobe ACR, so you don't have to spend $AUD 450 to upgrade to PS-CS2 :?)</li>

<li>You can either then open the DNG files in PShop (via built-in ACR), or else process them in a different standalone RAW program.</li>

<li>I use the free-trial (mac) version of <a href="http://www.isl.co.jp/SILKYPIX/english/download/">Silkypix</a>. All the fine-tune options are switched off, but what remains is good enough to get the colour, contrast and sharpness close enough. Save the converted files as 16-bit TIFFs.</li>

<li>There's another free RAW converter known as "RSE Converter" - actual name is <a href="http://www.pixmantec.com/products/rawshooter_essentials.asp">Pixmantec Rawshooter Essentias v1.2</a>. Wintel only, so useless for me, but Bill's Slaves like it a lot. See this <a href="http://www.outbackphoto.com/artofraw/raw_18/essay.html">review</a> on Outbackphoto.com.

<li>Open in Pshop and fine-tune colour balance etc.</li>

</ul>

Sounds convoluted, but it's pretty straightforward: DNG Converter to get the files onto the computer as DNGs; Silkypix to crunch them into 16-bit TIFFs; PShop to fine-tune and finish; archive the DNG files for storage.

<i>that's what the flash sync terminal is for (at least it works that way on the digital backs for the Hasselblads).</i><p>

<a href="http://nemeng.com/leica/004f.shtml">http://nemeng.com/leica/004f.shtml</a><p>

(See the "Clip-on M digital back - impossible anyway?" heading)<p>

Syncing with via a flash cord will work, but alas it won't for the TTL Ms for speeds faster than X :?(

BTW, there's a range of adapter ring options at different prices. I've created a table of them in the FAQ I maintain at:<p>

<a href="http://nemeng.com/leica/002f.shtml#ring">http://nemeng.com/leica/002f.shtml#ring</a>

Depends upon your scanner and workflow I guess, but I gave up shooting indoor (QTVR) panoramas with NPZ because it was noticeably more grainy than Fuji Press (usually under unfiltered fluro), even if it did give better shadow and highlight detail.

Like all things, YMMV :?)

BTW I tried Kodak Supra 800 a few years ago and... er, add my name to the "Kodak 800 - I don't think so" list. I really like(d) the Kodak Supra 200 though.

Anthony, all the indoor shots (since 1999) for my "Sydney Unposed" project have been shot onto 800 ISO C41 film.<p>

<<a href="http://4020.net/unposed/">unposed.4020.net</a>><p>

Been using Fuji Press 800 for the last few years. Slightly more contrasty than Fuji NPZ, but it has (much) finer grain and is a fair bit cheaper too :?)