kristian_s_oslash_rensen

February 13, 2005

"An ND filter is inexpensive and works a treat."

Only if you have several minutes to prepare for the shot. If you are eg. photographing dancers and want to blurr the motion of what you realice they will be doing in a few seconds, then you barely have the time to press a few buttons and turn a few knobs, you will not make it if you have to fetch a ND filter from a pocket and screw it in front of the lens.

"This is pretty silly. You really only need lenses optimized for the sensor at the wide end, at most you'll buy a D18-55, D14 or D16-45. All your other D-FA, FA, F, A, M and other lenses will be fine no matter what sensor or film you put behind them."

I have already mentioned the problem with the 85 mm f/1.4 which hardly can be considered a wide-angle ;-) Here are a few more examples.

My F* 300 mm f/4.5 will likely have to be swapped for a 200 or at least supplemented by a 200 mm because a 300 on a 1,5x crop factor camera will be too long for most of the tasks I use the 300 for with film cameras. This is because I bought a 300 mm instead of a 200 mm or 400 mm because its angle of view and depth of field suits the pictures I wanted to create with it.

Think of the dancers I mentioned above once more. You cannot just step a meter closer or a meter father away from them, because that would put you either in the middle of the dancers, out amongst the spectators or at the opposite side of a wall or similar obstackle. Therefore for sucha task you will be picking a zoom that allows you to get you anything from head & shoulder pictures on the middle of the stage to full figure pictures close up at that distance. By moving to a 1,5X camera you will have to swap this zoom for another one. And no, buying two dslrs and using two zooms and two flashes for fill does not cut it, because switching cameras under such confined circumstances is problematic, and because the extra cost of two cameras, flashes and zooms would render the cost based argument invalid ;-)

February 12, 2005

Now you got me thinking. I bought mine 2. hand from a major photo store in 1993 for the non inflation corrected equivalent of $35 ;-)

February 12, 2005

I had one in the FD mount. Actually I still have it but no longer have a functional FD body ;-)

Optically it apeared to me to be just as good as the Canon FD 50 f/1.8 S.C. I used alongside it. This was my impression from shooting kodachrome 25/64 and examening the projected images. I rarely made prints larger than A4 back then.

Mechanically the lever and spring mechanism that keeps the aperture open until right before the exposure broke on mine.

February 12, 2005

200 ASA is a problem when it forces you into using a higher shutter speed than you want due to either fill flash ot the desire to blurr motion. I notice that the competing DSLR's have the same problem. Aparently the sensors perform their best at this sensitivity and would give a worse image quality at a lower sensitivity.

With the advent of multi flash per picture fill flash enabling you to use fill flash at a faster shutter speeed than the cameras native sync. speed this problem goes away as far as shooting fill flash with a dedicated ttl flash unit goes. For other types of work you have to use a screw in ND filter.

<h3>crop factor</h3>

As have been mentioned above, the 1,5 X cropping problem/great luck is common across the DSLR's offered today. Aparently the D100, D70, S2, *isdD and *istDs uses the same sensor, made by fuji btw. So it is no wonder they all have the same cropping factor ;-)

It can be a blessing when using long lenses, since you can reach a certain angle of view/max aperture combination with a lighter, smaller and cheaper lens.

It is a calamity when you need wideangles. The affordable DSLR world ends at 90 degrees horizontal view at the time of writing :-(

It is tragic if you love the FA* 85 mm f/1.4 for portrait work, since it turns into the equivalent of a 132 mm lens which forces you to back away too far from the model for good communication and often forces you to shoot from the opposite side of a wall!

<h3>the future . . . </h3>

If you go out and acquire a few new reduced image circle lenses to get the selection you need for the 1,5X cropping factor, and then in a few years time a full frame >= 12 MP camera comes out, then you have a selection of nice japanese made paper weights/inert hand grenades.

Before digital slr's you could plan on your 35 mm SLR lenses and bodies loosing 50-70% of their value over a decade or so. And you could plan on being able to use them with any new gear you bought from the same manufactor during that period. It seems that at the moment you have to expect to loose 50-90% in as little as three years. Just look at what the hot cameras of a few years ago D1, or D30 sells for 2. hand these days.

<h3> . . . is bright</h3>

Think of the many days you will be out shooting new pictures, instead of feeding film to a film scanner and cloning dust specks and scratches away from your scanned pictures.

If you are now spending as much time scanning and post processing film scans as you are spending creating pictures, then by going digital you can double the time spent creating pictures. Don't you think this far outweights the financial pain of having to buy some new lenses and stop using some perfectly good ones you already have that no longer give the desired angles of view?

July 14, 2003

To: Kelly Flanigan

The FS4000US comes without a SCSI controller.

It is unfortunately rather common that controllers bundled with scanners and other peripherals in the consumer-midrange segments are "el-cheapo no-name does not really comply with the standards" products. Maybe cards like that are part of the reason some people seem to have all sorts of strange SCSI problems? Such devices are to be handled with the utmost suspicion and often times it is best to throw them away strait away, especially so since a new top quality 20 MHz 8 bit Ultra SCSI-2 card can be obtained for around $50 retail.

July 13, 2003

I have an FS4000US and am running it using SCSI. The scanner is using the good old SCSI-2 speed, which is 8 bit 10 MHz that gives you a maximum transferrate of 10 MB pr. second and requires a 50 pin cable. Todays disks are attached using SCSI busses with 16 or 32 times faster transferrate, but 10 MB pr. second is more than enough for such a scanner. This means that if you want to go the cheap route you can pick up a 2. hand controller from a couple of years ago for real cheap and use it for your scanner.

The NCR 8xx series of controllers are very stable and performs fine. They are found in many high end servers from the 2. half of the 90-ties as well as on PCI cards for PCs. Adaptec has placed more advertisements with PC magazines, websites etc. and therefore are more well known among the average PC users. Their controllers tends to be very good as well, but they are rather expensive, in bad cases up around 5x as expensive!

SCSI ain't that hard to configure really. Remember to terminate the bus after the last devices on the bus, and not have terminating on any devices in the middle. Don't mix devices running at different clock frequences on the same bus, unless the controller explicitly supports this, and obey the limitations for maximum cable lengths for the bus clock frequency you are using, and you should be fine.

You can have 7 devices plus one controller on the 8 bit SCSI busses and 15 devices plus the controller om the 16 bit busses. These devices can all be used simultaniously. The devices on a bus can be both inside the computer cabinet and in external enclosures. These two aspects of SCSI makes it a rather versatibe bus technology, especially for someone with multiple scanners, CD burners, DVD readers, backup tape decks, external harddrives etc.

July 10, 2003

Speaking as a software developer with a decades experience, the short answer is "of course you can".

The slightly longer answer is that you have two issues to deal with. Data representation and physical storage.

<ol>

<li>Data representation

In 50 years humans will be able to write software that can interpret your image files written today (if the worlds population has not regressed down to a pre industrial age ability level for some reason, but in that case you have more pressing issues to deal with than retreiving old images) if they have access to a clear, unambigous and complete description of the data representation used to store your images. This means that if you use a data representation that is kept as a trade secret now, then you have a problem 50 years out in the future, but if you one whoes documentation is freely available and widely distributed, then the worst that can happen fifty years out in the future, is that someone has to read that documentation and write a piece of software to interpret your image files on whatever computer hardware they happen to have available at that time.

Therefore various camera, scanner and software product specific file formats with little or no publicly available documentation is a bad idea for long time storage, while formats such as tiff and png that are specified in freely available and widely distributed documentation is your best bet.

</li>

<li>physical storage

If, fifty years out in the future, there are no easy and adequately priced way to read the physical storage media you used, then you are in trouble. If the data has vanished from the media due to age, then you are obviously out of luck.

Since you can copy digital files without loosing information, you can get around this problem by copying the files to new types of storage media whenever it gets hard to find hardware+software to read the media you are using or the media you are using is reaching an age where data loss due to age is a concern.

</li>

</ol>

June 18, 2003

Are you using wide angle lenses?

All DSLR cameras on the market except the Kodak Pro14n and the Canon 1Ds have sensors that are smaller than film. Therefore you get the same effect as if you cut away the periphery of your images and only kept the middle.

On most of the DSLR's you are getting a narrowing in the field of view that corresponds to multiplying the lens focal length with around 1.5. So a 20 mm lens on one of these DSLRs will give you a field of view comparable to what a 30 mm lens gives you on a a fill SLR, and a 28 mm lens on a DSLR gives you a field of view comparable to what a 42 mm lens gives you on a film SLR

June 18, 2003

I have the scanner and the quality of the scans are very very good. While SCSI is faster than USB with this scanner, the main speed limit is the processing speed of the PC, since the dust reduction and color correction is performed in software and vuescan, which most people seem to end up using for driving the scanner, performs this work in between scans, not in parallel with scans. It takes something like a minute on an Athlon MP1900+. Vuescan does only use one cpu on a multi processor machine, so the only way to speed the process up is to get the fastest processer with the highest memory bandwith that you can buy that will run the software.

June 18, 2003

Steven Hupp is correct.

The comment about the F and FA lenses having inadequate focus rings for manual focus is wrong in my experienc. I have five of those lenses and are focusing them manually for most of my images without wishing for improvements in this area. I use an M 50 f/2.0 from time to time, so I have something to compare with.

June 15, 2003

Instead of the D-40 you could get the Sunpak 120J TTL, which aparently is the same unit sold under its manufactors name, rather than the Hasselblad brand. It is cheaper when it is called a sunpak than when it is called a Hasselblad. I cannot say for sure if there are subtle differences apart from the name.

As a sunpak the flash comes with a detachable foot, that adapts it to be a dedicated flash unit for many different manufactors, simply by substituting the foot for the one that fits the particular camera system. So to use it on a 503cw and an F5 you will need one flash and two feet for it, one for each camera system. I do not know if the flash accepts the same feet when it is sold under the Hasselblad brand.

Metz and other non-camera makers sells very good flash units with a similar detachable feet system, so they adapt to be dedicated flash units for many different camera systems. The D-40/120J TTL however has that big deep round reflector which gives a different light than the flash units usually seen on 35 mm slrs, so if you are after this kind of light, there are few alternatives to the D-40/120J TTL.

June 13, 2003

So far I have been using idle human bystanders for holders, partly to

keep the discs in place and partly to keep those persons from getting

in my way. It is interesting how giving people even such a small

responsibility keeps them in line ;-)

However I have recently started making photography in churches, and

had a problem that the setups for the silverware takes quite some

time, and the priest or whomever is there to watch over me and the

items gets tired of holding the diffuser/reflector for so long. Also I

quite often need more than one diffuser/reflector.

So I am looking for some sort of holder for these things. The main

dilemma is that they need to be easily portable yet at the same time

the chance of them falling over must be very close to zero, because

there will be i-replaceable fragile items near them.

The portability requirement rules out heavy weights to keep stands

from tipping over. Sandbags for weights filled locally, can work when

shooting in the countryside, but does not work when shoting in the

city simply because there will be no source of dirt/sand nearby.

Have any of you found a neat solution to this problem, either off the

shelf or do it yourself? Im considering suspending the discs from

strings tied to fixed points well beside the shooting area, either

stands placed where they can tip over without smashing anything or

whatever parts of adequate interior happens to be in the right place.

The discs ought to be easy to control this way, both with regard to

height over the floor, rotation around the vertical axis and around

the horizontal axis.

I will of course get the problem 10x when/if I start using artificial

light instead of reflected and diffused window light. So a solution

that also works for monoheads would be super duper.

June 13, 2003

Finders

Douglas introduced an interesting difference between the Z1-p and the LX . The LX has interchangable finders. You can get magnifying finders, chimneys, 45 degree finders, rotating finders etc.

How usefull are these? Well I have the accessory 90 degree zooming finder that clips on to the ocular, and I hardly ever use it, even though I do fair share of down in the mud/water macro work myself. I guess that either you really need them, or you don't need them at all, depending on if you have some very specific needs.

Mirror lockup

Regarding the issue of mirror lock up. The Z1-p has mirror lockup, the Z1 doesn't. The mirror lockup is of the type where when you press the shutter or cable release, the camera stops down the aperture and flips up the mirror immediately, waits for 2 seconds, makes the exposure, flips down the meter and opens the aperture. I use it for something like 80% of tripod mounted exposures. The MZ-S has the same type of mirror lockup.

June 13, 2003

You do not have very much equipment, and it seems that each camera and each lens serves a practical purpose for you, so what is the problem? Maybe the person you refer to was either merely curious or envying your equipment.

If you had more than ten cameras and more than fifty lenses spread over three or more different film formats, then maybe you had a problem ;-)

June 13, 2003

I have been using a Z1-p for something like four years now, and a MZ-S for a little more than one year. The LX is a camera I have drooled over in shops and read about ;-)

The Z1-p has a wonderfull user interface. All features that you can dream of are there, and after having spent one hour with the manual once, I have been able to use all of them without ever having to refer to the manual. I can operate most features without taking the camera away from my eye.

As for ruggedness. After shooting with a Z1-p with the FA* 85 f/1,4 for 1,5 hour in a heavy downpour, the camera no longer reacted to turns of the ring below the shutter that is used to pick shutter speeds among other things. As soon as the camera dried up everything worked fine. If you take the camera apart, you can see that there is no sealing around this ring, even though the other rings and knobs are sealed.

The mechanism holding the pop-up flash is a weak spot. There is a screw set in a thread in the ABS housing inside the camera, the ABS around the screw cracked on mine, meaning the screw cannot be tightened. This leads to the pop-up flash popping up by itself now and then. Since the crack is in the camera itself, there is not a lot that can be done to repair the crack. The only practical problem this causes is that the flash might pop up, and thereby be activated without you noticing while you are holding the camera to the eye. The most easy way to get around this is to tape the flash in place ;-) The slightly more elegant approach, that only works if you are never using the pop-up flash anyway, is to dismount the flash, make sure the little contact that signals to the camera electronics if the flash is up or not is left permanently in "the flash is down" position, and cement the lid over the pop-up flash shut.

There are many stories of a piece falling off the bottom plate around the battery compartment. This happened to mine as well, but is entirely harmless.

Since the Z1-p is such a wonderfull camera to use, I recommend that you buy a few of them so you can enjoy them for many years to come, they are dirt cheap at $500 or below for new ones ;-)

The MZ-S appears more rugged and well sealed, though I have only had it for a year, ran around 50 rolls through it, and not yet abused it, so I cannot tell for sure. Its user interface is not as good as the Z1-p though, but still well above the medium good ones, ie. you need the manual for the custom functions, and you have to take it away from the eye to set some of the settings. Also the viewfinder is smaller and dimmer than the one on the Z1-p, but still very good.

The max flash sync. on the MZ-S is 1/180 s. where the Z1-p has 1/250 s. The MZ-S cannot do daylight balanced fill flash in the automatic modes, with flashes older than the one that was introduces along with it, since the old flashes expects the flash exposure compensation to be set on the camera, and this cannot be done on the MZ-S.

On the other hand the AF of the MZ-S is up-to-date, where the Z1-p has an AF system that aparently was considered very good back in the early 90'ties. But if you are considering the LX, then this is most likely of no concern to you.

Feel free to email me for more information.

June 8, 2003

<pre>Kristian Sørensen: "So agonizing over $300 in equipment purchase..."

Do you mean that I should invest those 300$ in Contax?

</pre>

No, I mean that you should ignore price differences this small. In the low end of the various manufactors ranges, the thing to look out for is cameras stripped of essential features ie. fully automatic point&shoot cameras in SLR disguise, and lenses that are so cheaply made that it affects the quality. When you have weeded these two out of the selection process, what you have left is equipment that is equally good with regard to optical quality, mechanical sturdyness and all other criteria the good photo.net users can think up, so a few hundred $ more or less will not be reflecting a quality difference, rather it will reflect differences in marketing strategies, production runs for the product and how the marketshares are divided among the manufactors where you are buying.

Actually I seriously mean that if you are going to use no more than ten rolls of film a year, then you would probably be better of with an automatic point&shoot, because you will not get the experience and training neccesary to benefit from equipment that gives you more control over what happens.

<pre>Regarding the user interface - I hope I'll be

able to visit one of the good camera shops in the

following week to test how all of those systems work

and fits in my hands.

</pre>

Good. This is one of the few areas where the five manufactors you have in mind do differ in ways that has significant influence on your photography.

June 7, 2003

How much do you plan to spend on film and processing per year?

Today I used 10 roles of slide film in 90 minutes photographing a karneval parade. With processing and mounting the total cost will end up at around $150-$200 depending on which lab I choose to use.

So agonizing over $300 in equipment purchase, for equipment that you will be using for maybe 10 years, seems downright silly, unless you only plan to use less than half a dozen rolls of film a year, in which case agonizing over equipment at all seems silly because you will never get in training as a photographer with so little practise and therefore your lack of training not the equipment will be the limiting factor to the quality of the images ;-)

The optical quality of the lenses and the feature set of the cameras are going to be very close, so make your choiche based on which set has the best user interface. That is an area where the manufactors are not equally good, especially with their cheap cameras.

BTW. you will most likely need a wide angle and a tripod if you are serious about landscape and nature photography. A 28 mm is not very wide, and a tripod is really hard to do without if you want near-to-far sharp landscape pictures, which madates f/16 and slow film, thereby giving you a shutter speed far too long for handholding in anything but bright sunlight that is the least usefull landscape light, the most usefull being dawn and dusk.

June 7, 2003

Don't let the "only top of the line AF lenses and SLRs made within the most recent two years can be used for proper photography - all other equipment are useless junk only used by idiots" mentality so prevalent on photo.net, affect your equipment choiches.

On my walls at home are images made with a no-name 3-element 200 mm lens that I bought in a shop for a price equivalent to five rolls of sensia 100 without processing. Also on the walls are images made with $1500 lenses. Visitors tend to point to an image made with the cheapo 10 years ago, of a fast moving circus artist, and say "ohh you should turn pro, it looks just like the images in the magazines". The camera behind the lens at the time of exposure was a Canon TX - their bottom of the line SLR from 1975. Did I just get lucky? No the rest of the roll has very nice images as well, not blurred and correctly exposed.

The reason I obtained better equipment was that the old stuff was falling apart, and I had the money to replace the cheap stuff with a comprehensible selection of very good lenses and two bodies.

What has the fancy top of the line equipment given me that I could not get with the 20+ years older bottom of the line stuff?

<ul>

<li>Better sharpness and color fidelity of long teles</li>

<li>Better coating == better contrast with light sources near or in the image</li>

<li>The ability to use fill flash with a shutter speed of 1/250 s. so it can be used for dancers and the like</li>

<li>TTL flash, especially with good center weighted or matrix meters</li>

<li>Zooms that has a prime-like optical quality</li>

<li>Auto focus, that results in more sharp images of fast moving subjects than manual focus, but is of no use in all the cases when I want to be carefull about focus and depth of field. It is also usefull at parties when you start getting too drunk to focus properly manually ;-)</li>

<li>Cameras with built in spot meters</li>

</ul>

If nature photography means a tripod mounted camera in front of a landscape, then do as the masters do, and buy a 4x5" large format camera (or larger). A good second hand set of a camera and three lenses can be obtained for less than a 28-70 f/2.8 wunder zoom, and yields much higher technical quality due to movements and due to the wastly larger film area. The are damn good at macro as well. If the cost of the film per shot for LF is a problem for you, then get any solid old 35 mm SLR and a bag of second hand lenses for the same amount of money, to put on your tripod.

<a href="http://www.muenchphotography.com/">David Muench</A>

<a href="http://www.billatkinson.com">Bill Atkinson</A>

<a href="http://www.outbackphoto.com">Alain Briot</A>

<a href="http://www.clydebutcher.com/">Clyde Butcher</A>

If nature photography means flying birds and other wild animals moving around quickly, then you are best off with a pair of 35 mm fast long image stabilized lenses such as a 300 f/2.8 and a 600 f/4.0 combined with wimberley heads and fast SLRs. This is not exactly cheap, so get an old 300 f/4.0 + 1.4 TC or 400 f/5.6 with a matching SLR and spend enough days chasing wildlife with it, that you feel confident it really is something you want to pursue seriously before thinking about spending the big money.

June 7, 2003

You have to suffer for personal as well as pictorial beauty!

Basically there is no way I could have made 95% of my landscape and nature images without a tripos. The low light around dawn and dusk requires shutter speeds in the 1/20 s. - several seconds range to give f/8-f/16 to get adequate depth of field with 100 asa film. Polarizers eats some light as well.

Without a tripod you would be restricted to shooting when the sun is high, the clouds are few, the shadows are hard and the color of the light and its reflections cold and hard. The only exception being when you can find a tree or something to press the camera against for stability for the longer exposures.

A fast lens is no substitute for a tripod, because you need f/8-f/16 to get adequate depth of firld for images where you are having both a foreground and a background and you want both to be in focus. Only wiht images without foreground and middle ground and pure background can you get away with f/5.6 and larger apertures, but such images are a minority among landscape images.

I am routinely carrying a Manfrotto 055 with an Arca B1 ball head and their wonderfull quick release system. It has been with me on many bike trips, strapped to the bike, it has been carried up and down muddy slopes and deep into forests to be set up in the middle of streams and carried around on foot for many km at a time. For short bicycle trips of only a few km. I just hold it in my hand while driving.

June 6, 2003

There is quite a sizeable selection of digital backs available for Hasselblad cameraes. You attach the back where the film back usually sits. There are some limitations though, not all Hasselblad cameraes can be used because the back needs to communicate and coordinate with the camera something not all Hasselblads can do. As far as I know there are no digital backs for the 200 series of cameras.

Kodak, <a href="http://www.phaseone.com">PhaseOne</A>, and quite a few more companies manufactors these backs and has done so for something like a decade, so you should be able to find some 2. hand for relatively cheap.

Be aware that many of these digital backs are multiple shot or scanning, rather than single shot, which means it takes time to make an exposure, up to 15 minutes actually. This is no problem with arcture and products, but if dancers or kids are your favorite motif then you need one of the single shot capable backs, that gives you exposure times comparable to film based cameraes. Also most but not all of the MF and LF backs require a PC or a Mac and an external power source such as a quantum battery to be connected to them, they do not take batteries and flash cards. The bright side is that you can get a much better contrast range than with this approacs, and a high resolution as well. The current top of the line PhaseOne scanning back gives 132 million pixels pictures, and an awsome contrast range.

June 5, 2003

Do you have the special AF 35-70/2.8 zoom that came with the ME-F and allows it to do AF? It is easily recogniseable due to a big protusion on the underside containing the focus moter. If you do have the complete set, then maybe it can be sold for a fair price to a collector. It is after all the first AF interchangable lens SLR on the market from any manufactor.

The poster above is correct, that apart from the extra AF feature, the ME-F is a regular "ME super", that takes the full line of Pentax/Takumar lenses all the way back to when the K-mount was introduced, and all the way up to the lenses they manufactor now.

<a href="http://www.bdimitrov.de/kmp/">Bojidar Dimitrov's Pentax K-Mount Page</A> is the place to look for details, data for Pentax K-mount lenses etc.

June 5, 2003

I have been using a 20 mm f/2.8 on an SLR for portraits and other types of people photography with good results. You only get the distortion if you want it, as soon as you understand why you get it, and therefore also how to avoid it. Find the book "40 years of photography" by Jean Loup Sieff, to see one of the top french fashion photographers getting away with using a 21 mm on a little old Leica M for fashion shots for Elle, Harpers Bazaar and the like.

June 5, 2003

The quality of a 28-200 lens depends on if you are planning to use it as artillery ammunition or just for ordinary hand throwing!

The MZ-5n is a splendid camera with both a good user interface, a small weight&size and a very capable set of features. You are going to spend above $1500 to get something that is an order of magnitude better, and since the photographer, the light, the film, the tripod and the lenses all has more influence on the image quality than the SLR, switching camera to get better image quality is a waste of time and money.

I tend to have focus problems now and then, when I do MF and need new glasses ;-) Try putting something easy to focus on dead center over the AF sensor a couple meters away, set the focal length somewhere in the 50-100 mm range and use AF for focus. Do this with the lens stopped down 2-3 stops from its maximum aperture, f/11 being the one for the 50-100 mm range on that lens. If that image does turn out unsharp, then something has been dropped and bend.

The very cheap Pentax FA 28-70 f/4.0 AL has a good reputation for decent optical quality, though I have not personally tried it. I am myself using the somewhat more expensive but still rather cheap FA 24-90 f/3.5-4.5 a lot and getting very good results with it, except for wide open in the wide end where it distorts noticable, but you are hopefully not buying a zoom this slow to use it wide open anyway, that is what f/2.8 zooms and primes are for. Most of the time I put in on f/8-f/22 and on a tripod out in nature. There are a few images made with it handheld and at a wider aperture in the gallery here at photo.net - click on my name below to get there. I can send you some more if you want, just email me.

Of course you should not be without some lens that opens up to at least f/2.0 and does a good job at it. Both the AF system and your eyes will have a much easier job focusing with such a lens, you can handhold with good 100 asa film in most daylight situations where you do not need enormous amounts of depth of field, and the optical quality willbe very good so you get an idea of where the limits to your images technical quality is due to the equipment and where it is due to your own lack of skill and training. The FA 35 f/2.0 is splendid, and there are no shortage of 2. hand manual focus 50 mm lenses out there available for real cheap.

June 5, 2003

Not being familiar with that particular model, but with many other pentax SLR cameras, I had a look at the manual for it that was posted earlier in this thread. It does look like a strait forward and very uerfull camera.

There is aperture priority, shutter priority, manual and program mode. Set the aperture ring on "A" and select a shutter speed to get shutter priority, the viewfinder tells you how far your setting is off with regard to the meter reading. Same procedure with the shutter ring on "A" and an aperture of your choiche for aperture priority. You get manual by taking both aperture and shutter rings off their "A" settings. Guess how you get program mode ;-) There is AE lock as well.

It has a depth of field preview button at the usual position above the lens release knob.

It will read the DX codes of off film rolls so you do not have to set film speed manually.

The flash sync is 1/100 s., it does not have TTL flash metering, but that goes with the vintage, it an take advantage of dedicated automatic flashes either Pentax or compatible units. This gives you a flash ready light in the viewfinder, and can control the aperture for you when the flash is in auto.

The metering is good old center weighted. That is what you should expect from the age. Spot metering was just about to become standard on the high end models (Pentax Z1, Nikon F4 etc.) aroung 1988-1990 where your P3n was manufactored, so you won't find it on the low end models from that age.

You can use AF lenses on it. You will not get AF of course, since most of the AF system is in the SLR not the lens. The metering could not care less if the lens is AF or not, that is one of the beauties of the Pentax K-mount line - compatibility going back tot he start 3-4 decades ago.

You can mount MF lenses on the AF Pentax bodies as well. The camera will tell you when you have the focus right, but you will have to turn the focus ring yourself of course. You can even do trap focus with some of the AF cameraes and manual focus lenses, where you focus the lens on a spot, and the camera makes an exposure as soon as something moves into that spot. Nice for fast moving subjects like athlets, animals in the wild etc.

Go to http://www.bdimitrov.de/kmp/ for more technical inormation on the Pentax K-mount equipment

June 4, 2003

BTW. click on the name below the posting to see a handfull of my images here at photo.net, just to see that I can make images with my gear, not just talk about it ;-)

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Posts posted by kristian_s_oslash_rensen