sebastianmoran

August 11, 2015

Mark, I'm sure you'll do well with your Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/2.8 lens.

Be aware that all the lens characteristics and quality measures change with the magnification ratio, and each lens has a sweet spot. The sweet spot for normal lenses is a low magnification, say 1:20 or 1:50, so they are lousy for macro but great (reversed) for high magnification. Macro lenses are designed for 1:3 or 1:4 (even if they focus to 1:1); your 55 Micro is fab at this magnification or at 3:1 or 4:1 when reversed. Enlarging lenses are probably optimum at typical enlarging sizes, say 1:6.

A few lenses are optimized for 1:1. The 75mm f/4 "APO Rodagon D 1:1" lens is one example; I understand "D" is for "Duplicating." Here's a page that shows the big change in image quality when this 1:1 lens is used at 1:2.5. The Olympus 80mm f/4 Macro is another 1:1 lens.

July 28, 2015

My approach for macro stacking has been:

- Nikon bellows

- Get the lens (front standard) into the right position

- Move the rear standard to shift the focus plane

- Combine the stack with Helicon Focus

Why? My theory is that leaving the lens in one place keeps the same point of view on the 3D subject.

For stacking non-macro subjects, I don't see how you can beat the Helicon Remote app, though I've never used it.

July 9, 2015

Hmm… Just thinking about the dimensions of choice here:

- Sensor size. Small in most P&S, but some with larger sensors. Affects DOF, High ISO.

- Prime vs. Zoom

- Interchangeable lenses. Do you want to change lenses?

- Viewfinder: Reflex vs. RF vs. EVF vs. screen. And, if screen, articulate?

For serious photography, interchangeable lens or quality fixed lens compact. Mirrorless or SLR.

For various special uses, right camera makes a big difference. e.g. DSLR for long tele shots. For ultimate DOF, small lens and small sensor. For bokeh, big lens and big sensor. For macro/micro, an articulating screen is fab. And so forth.

For less serious shooting, the smaller camera the better.

For ultimate convenience, can't beat the camera in the phone.

July 5, 2015

50 f/1.8 or f/2 AI. Or the Series E lens which is especially small. Enjoy!

July 4, 2015

FG durability? This is a great small camera. No, it's not as strong as an FM, FE, or F body. The biggest issue I've seen in considerable use is electronics rot, not physical breakage.

My answer: If you like the FG, buy two, they are so cheap today.

For an inexpensive film camera that's small and light-weight, the FG is great. A little bigger, heavier, more expensive, and more robust is the FM/FE series. All are good.

July 3, 2015

These are great cameras, any of them will make great images. If manual-with-no-batteries is important, then you want one of the FM cameras.

FG is tiny, and great to use. From experience and talking to repairers, both the FG and FE-2 eventually have electronics rot and are not repairable. My FG did so, the FE-2 is holding out. The FG is so cheap these days, consider it disposable; don't dry just buy another when it fails.

Go for the FG, especially since you like it.

June 27, 2015

Mirrorless is great. My go-to cameras for general use, especially indoor portraits. Compact and light weight, focusing on the LCD is fine, manual focus lenses are a pleasure to use, works for me for most photography except long tele (e.g. shooting birds).

June 10, 2015

I use the Sony A6000 with the earlier kit soon, the SEL1855 lens. It's manual zoom.

The 16-50mm current kit lens is better than you would think, actually pretty good. You do want to use the camera distortion correction or the lens correction in Lightroom, since uncorrected the distortion on the wide end is impressive.

May 20, 2015

The Sony/Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 FE lens is terrific.

May 20, 2015

I'm shooting the A6000 (24MPx, APS sensor).

I don't have the Oly f/1.2, but I do use the Zeiss 55 f/1.8 and a whole slew of MF lenses from Nikon, Olympus, Minolta, 50mm f/1.7 Zeiss from a Contax SLR, a 58mm Zeiss Biotar, and the terrific Voigtlander 50 f/1.5.

None of these beat the Zeiss 55 f/1.8. Then consider the modern Zeiss has AF and works flawlessly with the camera. I don't think you can beat the Zeiss.

May 15, 2015

My understanding and experience is that the 28mm f/2.8 AIS lens is really tops at close range but only ordinary at distance. That makes it great for 16x20 for some shots, but not for landscapes.

See Björn Rorslett's <a href="http://www.naturfotograf.com/lens_wide.html">commentary on this lens</a>.

I have the same question as others: What's a really good wide angle lens for Nikon FX? 25-50mm f/4 zoom? 24mm f/2.8 AIS?

May 5, 2015

For a backpacking trip, I jury-rigged a camera bag in front, a little below chest high. Supported it with D-rings on the shoulder straps of the backpack. Worked great. Could do with many medium sized camera bags.

March 9, 2015

Down in FL at Ding Darling early February. This formation of Ibis flew overhead.

Nikon D300, Nikkor 300mm f/4 AFS, 1/1000th, f/4

March 7, 2015

There's serious and more serious when it comes to bird photography.

I want to be able to move around. I use a 300mm f/4 either AF-D or AFS. With a crop sensor camera on a monopod. Go somewhere you can get close to the birds (Shark Valley, Wakodahatchee, Green Kay, or Ding Darling are my spots). Shoot at 1/800 minimum. F/4 or f/5.6 work well. Works for perched birds or in flight. Expect to do some cropping.

Enjoy!

February 26, 2015

If you are still wondering about the focus, a photo of the rig might help. If not, no problem, I wish you good shooting.

February 24, 2015

Mary, I suggest you post a snap of the lens and camera. That will make things a lot clearer.

February 23, 2015

Mary, with the Yashica lens on an adapter, turn the focus ring. Does the lens move in and out? It should with the lens mounted normally. This will alter the focus. I suspect with the lens out enough to focus at 3", you just aren't seeing it. Put the camera on a tripod of macro focusing rail and I think you'll see a difference. The focus range will be very narrow, perhaps only 1/4" either by turning the focus ring. In a macro setup with a non-macro lens, the focus helical becomes just a focus-fine-turning, not the focus range you are used to

Maybe you can post a simple snap of your setup?

With the lens mounted reversed, turning the focus ring does not change the lens to film distance, so it would not affect focus. (With some lenses, it can affect the close range correction and affect image quality.)

Shooting macro, greater than 1:1, is different and challenging.

February 22, 2015

For the OP -- What magnification are you seeking?

My recipe with 28mm reversed:

- Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 AIS, reversed

- on a bellows, racked out

- Set the lens focus ring for the film-to-subject distance. Obviously this doesn't change the focus, but it moves the CRC elements into position for the best close correction. In this configuration, the "close correction" is for the closeness of the film to the front of the lens.

- I do focus stacking with Helicon Focus for anything more than 1:1. See their web site for fabulous examples of insect photography.

You'll have a short working distance and roughly 9x magnification. Caution: it's very challenging to make images at this magnification

If you want better, that would be one of the specialized macro lenses: Olympus, Minolta, Macro-Nikkor, Photar, Luminar. These are expensive.

On good authority (Dan Fromm), and my own experience, the Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/2.8 reversed is a "world beater" at 1x to 4x. See <a href="/filters-bags-tripods-accessories-forum/00Hh4q">Dan's excellent advice here</a>.

February 22, 2015

Here's an article on <a href="http://www.decentsecurity.com/#/holiday-tasks/">how to clean and optimize your windows computer</a>. Written by somebody "who actually knows." I follow this author regularly, good bona fides, @SwiftOnSecurity of Twitter fame, probably more than you want to know.

On a more serious note: I'm a techie, I just took a serious course on Economics of Cyber Security. Key conclusions: be careful out there, keep all your software up to date, a vigorous dark industry is creating new threats all the time, all the security product vendors are playing catch-up.

Don't buy Lenovo who just got <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/02/man-in-the-midd_7.html">found out pre-installing a horrendous security flaw on their laptops</a>.

February 11, 2015

You gave your client unlimited and unrestricted use. You didn't give them exclusive use.

I think you own the copyright and you can sell rights to others, as long as you do not restrict the rights of your original client. I think you did a good job with the original contract.

But, I'm not a lawyer.

January 31, 2015

Ki --

Good luck with your adventure in MF. I did a similar exploration during the past few years. Here are a couple of points to add to the excellent advice above:

1. The bigger cameras while perhaps hand-holdable are too big to carry anywhere. For me, they stayed in my shop and were useless. I'm talking about the RB67, the Mamiya Press, etc. Maybe the Pentax, Fuji, TLRs, and 6x6 SLRs are easier to take out and make pictures. A TLR is surprisingly compact and modest weight. The 645 cameras are better still in this regard.

2. I like a sharp print, one you can pull right up close. Scanning with a V500, I'm happy with prints of 6x or 8x the linear dimension of the film. That's a 12x18" print from a 6x9 negative. Pretty close to the sizes that Ken mentions just above.

3. I understand you are in Japan. If near Tokyo, there are many used camera shops. The very best is Fujiya in Nakano, one train stop from Tokyo.

Here's a sample from a 6x9 negative, V500 scan, shot with Mamiya Press and an excellent lens. It's the famous Cheers Pub in Boston. Here's a <a href="http://2under.net/images/100201-Mamiya-100-f28-Cheers-Img6-v500-12x18.jpg">large file for the image</a>, ready to print at 12x18".

January 22, 2015

Manual focus with legacy lenses is actually very good with the Sony focus peaking. You have to try it; it's not worth trying to describe.

January 21, 2015

My Zeiss 32mm f/1.8 Touit is a fab lens, but did not do Phase Detection and Hybrid AF on my recent Sony bodies (espec. A6000). This makes a big difference in AF on my Sony A6000.

Just recently, <a href="http://www.zeiss.com/camera-lenses/en_de/service/download_center/touit_e-mount.html#improvements">Zeiss finally announced an update</a> to the lens firmware to support this feature set.

Go there, fill out the form, send them your lens, easy and smooth.

The big surprise: I got the updated lens back in a week! Works perfectly in Hybrid AF.

Thank you, Zeiss!

(Yes, we would rather have had a downloadable update. But, I'll take the mail-in update over none at all, especially with the fast response.)

January 21, 2015

After long use of Nikon, I took a mirrorless experiment.

For the past year, I've shifted pretty much to Sony mirrorless. I'm using the A6000 with Zeiss and Sony/Zeiss 55 f/1.8 and 24/2.8 prime lenses and the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8. The results are terrific in image quality and high-ISO performance. AF is excellent. The whole rig is smaller and lighter. I like my Sony because I think it has the best "focus peaking" assistance for using manual focus lenses. Everything else is fine with the current cameras (which fixed the crazy menu system of prior bodies).

I think you'll find the image quality very high with all these systems. The camera market is so competitive now, and the review so easily available, I doubt any system could survive with inferior image quality. The battle is on features and handling, very possibly different users will prefer different systems. For example, I tried and did not get on well with the Fuji XE-2.

For fast moving subjects and long-lens nature photography the DSLR still rules, but for most work I'm using the mirrorless gear.

January 14, 2015

Pretty sure you have a light leak. <a href="http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=108016">Here's a thread</a> about my light leak, explanation, and my approach to testing for this. (Mine was on a different camera, but looks similar to yours.)

In my case it was at the film door hinge, onto the wound film previously exposed, and some internal reflection to produce some unusual thin bands. Key diagnostic: Look at the negatives, look for dark areas outside the image area. Dark areas outside the image area are good sign of light leak.

Here's a sample of my light leak (light area up/down in the middle and a funny thin line to the right), all this varied from frame to frame:

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Posts posted by sebastianmoran