JamieK

<p>Rangefinders are called "Rangefinders" because they have Rangefinders in them. If you're used to the M6, you won't be very happy with live view focusing, I'm afraid. You should be patient and try to find an M8 for $2000 or less. It has problems, of course, but it's a real rangefinder. jamie</p>

<p>your question about contacts has been misunderstood and misanswered. the purpose of the ground glass is to place an image focused by the lens at optical infinity for your eye. if you can see it well, you should be fine.</p>

<p><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=2403817">Rodeo Joe</a> is right. Modern focusing screens are no good for manual focus. too much of the light comes straight through without being scattered by the screen. your eye can adjust to make this light sharp, but it won't be sharp on the sensor. Sorry for my ignorance, but can you use live view?</p>

<p>still a great camera without the upgrade. for me, the allure of the M6 is that it doesn't cost so much. putting a lot of extra money into one seems odd to me. take pictures! best, j</p>

<p>Sigmas are great in general, but they seem much more variable in quality than do Canon lenses. I've heard many people swear by the Sigma 70-200, but my example was soft even at f/5.6. best, jamie</p>

<p>Aperture's low price compared to the competition makes it seem like a gift from Apple to those who buy it's computers. When I bought it long ago, I think The British Journal of Photography reported that the Raw convertor was quite a bit better than Lightroom's. I doubt that's still true, but Apple will probably provide updates longer than Adobe will. When Adobe releases a new version, they will probably stop supporting the old, forcing you to buy the new version if you buy a new camera. That may not seem likely, but you never know. In either case, it's difficult to transfer from one to the other, so the decision is pretty binding. best, jamie</p>

<p>I think the focusing screen is important. If you want really good focus, you need the super-precision screen or live view. I have a super-precision in my Canon 5D1 and Live View on my Canon 5D2. Live view is best for wide lenses, a good focusing screen is best for long lenses, in my experience. best, jamie</p>

<p>I study how the human visual system corrects for differing illumination. Tim, you have highlighted the reason why it's difficult to explain this to people who don't study it - the human system works so well that we hardly ever notice that it's doing anything at all. Over 100 years ago, Ewald Hering wrote that a white ball of yarn would look deep orange when viewed under lamplight if it weren't for this phenomenon, which is now know as "colour constancy."</p>

<p>Cameras can't do as well as we do, but the very fact that colour constancy works so well in your own visual system means that this will sometimes catch you by surprise. I would set the camera to save raw files. Then you should have all the information that the camera captured, and you can adjust however you want to. What I said above means that this is sometimes unavoidable.</p>

<p>Lastly, digital sensors are much more sensitive to infrared light that film was. Some cameras have full infrared blocking filters, and some block almost none. Infrared sensitivity can cause unpredictable effects.</p>

<p>You could try a filter in a store. Take the same picture with and without an infrared filter. Adjust the two pictures in Photoshop so that a reference white object looks the same. If other objects look different, then you know you have insufficient infrared blocking, and the camera will see scenes with a lot of infrared energy differently than you do, because it is invisible to you. The infrared filter might be a valuable investment in that case. best, jamie</p>

<p>I think you should be able to get a Voigtlander Bessa L for about $120. An Industar lens would probably be only about $30-40. The camera is fantastic. No rangefinder focusing, but you won't need that for street photography. The lens is also good, but some examples are better than others. </p>

<p>I have the 135/2.3 and the 28/1.9. They are superb, and much more interesting than the zooms. Why would anyone want an old zoom? Zooms have improved massively over the last 30 years.</p>

<p>I have made presentations before, so I am quite familiar with how to do that. I tried making a new presentation several times over the past few days, and when I add images, only one can be added, no matter how many times I try to add more. Can anyone up there fix this? Thanks, Jamie</p>

<p>Wow. That's tough. I had similarly bright white spots with a Miranda 35-mm SLR because of a pinhole in the shutter curtain. The spot was oval and blurry all the way around, but the situation was similar in that only a small percentage of exposures were spoiled. The pinhole was very small, so if two exposures were taken in rapid succession, there was no time for the frame which had moved past the shutter curtain to become spotted. It seems that you may have a similar problem, but that the pinhole could lie near an overlap of two pieces of curtain, explaining the almost-but-not-quite sharp, straight edge. There is a very great deal more light directly behind the pinhole, allowing the spot to creep past the edge there. If this explanation is correct, then keeping the lens cap on when dark slide is removed, except when making the exposure, should greatly reduce the problem. If it's a problem with the dark slide or film holder, the lens cap should still help.</p>

<p>just how young are you, cupcake?</p>

<p>What the 5DII does unimaginably better is low light. I find this really helpful with portraits, so that I can balance more toward natural light and away from flash. Have a look at the "Portraits - Scientists" folder in my other account (kraft jamie) if you're curious. I'm quite pleased with the results, and they were taken rapidly with a minimum of gear.<br /> <br /> The other thing the 5DII does is give you a sensor 250% the size of the other camera. That will also help with portraits.<br /> <br /> It is much better, but you'll be ok with the old one if you can't manage it.</p>

<p>I have read that Ektar came about as a side benefit of research for a new cinema film. If true, that would help explain why Kodak might spend money and time developing a fundamentally new and finer-grained film so late in the history of film as a medium for still photos.</p>

<p>I usually reserve film for black-and-white and digital for colour, but I enjoy shooting Ektar. It does seem to go a bit blue in the shadows, and when it first came out a lot of people recommended rating it at iso 50 (to increase exposure by one stop). I tried this and preferred the results with the nominal film speed.</p>

<p>I use one of the Epsons, and I think it's great. The screen is very good, and it allows you to stop worrying about deleting bad pictures on the camera. That situation also means that if you delete one and then decide that doing that was a mistake, you can download it from the chip again. The battery lasts a long time, and the data transfer seems reallly fast. You can also get a car charger. Epson sent me this accessory free.</p>

<p>Scharp Comment! Very good point. I even have an old EOS 1 (no letters) to take bw with Canon lenses. <br>

Anyway, you shouldn't have to worry about cameras. The M9 will be too expensive not to worry about.<br>

And I think you shouldn't worry so much about cleaning your sensor.<br>

Or just use the lenses wide open. They're Leica, after all.</p>

<p>I agree with <a href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/user?user_id=179905">Mats Nilson</a>'s comment above. A further consideration is that digital sensors have lighter colour than film and reflect much more light. This light can then be reflected back toward the sensor by the final element of the lens unless it has a proper anti-reflection coating. As I understand it, this was not necessary for film lenses.</p>

<p>I have both 35/2v4 and 35/1.4PreAsph. I have thought about selling one, but I would never do it. They're different. The 35/1.4PreAsph makes women look fabulous. Really, women who always hate pictures of themselves actually like pictures from that lens. It's not blurry at all. It's just flattering. I usually use it it low-light situations.</p>

<p>Don't buy the M6. It will make all of your SLRs seem like weird stage props from "Gulliver's Travels." <br>

I spent a week walking the West Highland Way with an M6 TTL and two lenses. I couldn't believe how big my DSLR was when I got back. It felt very strange.<br>

And... M6s are crazy cheap for what they are. You can sell it later if you decide it's not your religion.</p>

<p>Three little comments: </p>

<p>1. Those lenses are surprisingly expensive. I have the Sigma 70-200/2.8. The Sigma 2x extender gives reasonable results considering the price of the combination compared to the price of an un-extended prime or longer zoom. The extender wastes 3/4 of the light, though. It's like having a tiny sensor, except that you also need extra glass elements in the light path. Avoid using an extender if you can.</p>

<p>2. My sister shoots wildlife with the 100-400/variable-max-aperture (no-IS) on a 1.6x crop body and often uses the (400x1.6=) 640-mm equivalent. That's only 1/3 x 1/3 of the frame your 200-mm, after all. Make sure you get the length you need. Your camera has superb low-light sensitivity, so don't worry too much about maximum aperture. </p>

<p>3. The lens mentioned above and other pump-action zooms will suck debris into your camera. I don't think they're a good idea. </p>

<p>I'd buy the 400-mm prime. I envy your trip.</p>

<p>Aperture shape does have an effect, but it isn't the most important aspect. In-focus rays go where they're supposed to go, obviously. Less obviously, perhaps, out-of-focus rays do not go to a well-defined, out-of-focus location in the image. Better lenses generally produce better bokeh, but I suspect that it is because bokeh has been considered seriously in their design. I have included a link to an image of mine that has particularly terrible bokeh because the out of focus light is strangely well focused, just in the wrong place. Otherwise, I think this lens, the Sigma 20 mm, f/1.8 is really good. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.photo.net/photo/8381851">http://www.photo.net/photo/8381851</a></p>

<p>Interesting problem. All of the hypotheses above might be true, but the mirror (or some other obstruction) seems by far the simplest. If your images were taken at wide aperture, then there might well be coloured fringes from an obstacle far from the image plane because at wide aperture, the rays are traveling from nearer the edge of the lens and rays of different wavelengths take different paths. Try taking identical images with different apertures. Also, I have blurred your two images along the vertical axis to see what the coloured edge looks like. Here they are.</p><div></div>

The Sigma 50 mm/2.5 macro might do both jobs for you. I picked up this lens pretty cheaply used, and I figure, perhaps

wrongly, that the fact that it is optimised for close focus can't be such a bad thing for portraits.

Decisiveness is the key. When you put a normal lens on the small-sensor body you are wasting 60% of the image area

(based on squaring the 1.6 linear crop factor), at least that much of the glass, and an even greater fraction of the artistry

and cleverness in the lens design (the edges are the difficult bit). To me, that's a sub-optimal, short-term solution.

 

The larger sensor allows for a lot more artistic leeway, but if the small sensor does what you want, just get lenses

designed for it.

 

I have a 5D and a 350D. I paid very little for the 350D, and I keep an inexpensive lens on it. It's the light camera that I

can cheerfully write off if it gets damaged or stolen.

The Sigma 20/1.8 is great, and it is still very good on a full-frame body. It may be a little larger than you wanted, but that's

the problem with small-sensor bodies. You're going to waste more than half of the glass unless you get a small-sensor

lens, and there still aren't enough designs.