ashleypomeroy

February 15, 2011

I have one of these, which I using a while back as a very simple strobist-type manual flash. As chap points out above it's limited to Manual Hi (1/1) and Manual Low (1/16) settings in that context, albeit that it pumps out a fair amount of light and costs almost nothing to replace. And the trigger voltage is benign.

As I understand it, the pre-flash you're experiencing is a legacy of A-TTL, which was Canon's big thing at the time of the T90. If you set it to Man Hi or Man Lo it should at least fire on your 350D, but the camera will have no control whatsoever over the duration of the flash or anything automatic. If it doesn't fire at all there might be something wrong with the foot. Oddly, my unit fires on my 5D MkII but not on my old 10D, although other flash units work fine on the 10D; it could be that certain digital bodies are unhappy with it.

I tried it on my old Kodak DCS 560 a while back (a Kodak digital back mated to a Canon EOS-1N film body, which used TTL flash). It seemed to work although not very well.

I would be tempted to sell it with the T90, assuming that it's still working, and buy a used 430EX (for example). I still have mine, although I've replaced it with a pair of those Yongnuo YN-560s, which are also manual-only, but far more flexible.

Posted February 14, 2011 · February 14, 2011

"Not many" is the answer. I recently got hold of a Vivitar 200mm f/3 and I've been having a go with it, mounted on a 5D MkII with a Nikon-EOS adapter. As per the above it's chunky, heavy, short, focuses very closely, has a built-in lens hood. Most chaps on the internet confuse it with the 200mm f/3.5, because most chaps on the internet are easily confused.

The bokeh is quite something. Very busy, grainy, but I quite like the effect. Here's a sample shot with the aforementioned arrangement:

On the other hand, if you right up close and use the close focus ability, the background mushes out quite nicely. On the other, other hand, at f/3, 200mm, four feet, the depth of field is tiny, and you're manually focusing a heavy lens.

Sharp? Not a bit of it. The sample looks sharp because I've sized it down from twenty-one megapixels. At f/3 there's a bit of CA and a lot of purple fringing, and it's not sharp at all. Almost no vignetting though. Doesn't get much better at f/4; does get better at f/5.6 but you don't want a 200mm f/5.6, do you?

It makes me wonder; why didn't Vivitar just lie, and call it a 200mm f/2.9? Nobody wants an f/3 lens. Or perhaps they did lie, and it's actually an f/3.2. Dunno.

December 26, 2010

"Could anyone tell these pictures were shot on Kodachrome if nobody told them?"

The sickeningly ugly purple cast is very distinctive - Kodachrome seems to have been very good at that. Thank the lord above that it's gone.

December 24, 2010

Over the last year or so I've collect a bunch of OM lenses, which I use on my 5D MkII. Most recently a 24mm f/2, which is excellent when stopped down, and pretty good in the middle at f/2.8:

<a href="http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/olympus-24mm-f2-stay-frosty.html">http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/olympus-24mm-f2-stay-frosty.html</a>

For Canon shooters the wides are very seductive because Canon doesn't sell any good small wide primes; very few good wide primes; and for that matter not many good wide lenses whether prime or not. And not for less than £1,000. Whilst writing the aforementioned blog post I found the following resource, which has sample images taken with OM lenses shot on an EP-1:

<a href="http://www.biofos.com/cornucop/omz_ep1.html">http://www.biofos.com/cornucop/omz_ep1.html</a>

The results seem unimpressive at the wider end of the range - not awful, but basically pointless if you have the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7. At the telephoto end the results are more impressive, but that's because he's shooting from a tripod at a static subject. I wouldn't like to manually focus a 400mm-equivalent f/4 lens at f/4 handheld with live view even with image stabilisation, certainly not on an EP-1. A 170mm f/1.2 would be horrible. I'm sure people have done it; I bet they gloss over the sweat and tears and missed shots, and in the end I doubt it was worth it.

Having said that, the previous poster is unconvincing, to say the least, on so many levels. I can understand how the tightly-packed pixels of an EP-1 might not flatter a full-frame lens, but the difference between the pixel density of my 21mp full-frame sensor and e.g. a 400D (with its "ES-type lenses") is not that huge. This chap seemed to have no problem with his OM lenses on a 550D:

<a href="http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1031&message=32641098">http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1031&message=32641098</a>

December 1, 2010

I'll add that, even after all this evaluation and angst, I was never particularly enthused with the 24mm f/2.8. It didn't make me feel good. I felt as if I had bought something inadequate, and that I was trying to convince myself to love it, when in reality my eyes were drawn elsewhere. People are like that with their girlfriends, or cars, what-have-you; they can't have their dreams so they end up with something they don't want, and they drink in the hope that the alcohol will make the bad things look good, and they lie and say that's what they always wanted. Like characters from a Tom Waits song. The same is true of most of the photography here. It's not as good as the creators hoped, there is a huge gap between aspiration and resources and the final result, but it doesn't matter because it's just transient, it gets posted to a discussion thread and - zap - it's out of sight, out of mind the next day.

No, the 24mm f/2.8 depresses me. It's good enough, better than the rest, based on the samples I have seen only the 24-70mm f/2.8 and the tilt-shift 24mm are obviously, crushingly better at 24mm, amongst all of Canon's lens range. On an emotional level I felt nothing for it. People like the 35mm f/2 because it's the underdog. People have an emotional attachment to it because 35mm is a good classic focal length and it's fast. I felt nothing for the 24mm. It was just a piece of plastic and glass. But then again I'd rather feel nothing that feel sickness and disgust, which is what I feel when I think about the 28mm f/2.8. Sickness and disgust. The crappy zooms are crappy, I can accept that. The 28mm f/2.8 aspires to something more and fails badly. It's the gap between aspiration and failure that gets me down, not the failure per se. Too much.

December 1, 2010

Interesting question. Back in March 2010 I went on holiday to Barcelona, and I took with me a 5D MkII plus a 24mm f/2.8, a 50mm f/1.8, and a couple of other manual focus lenses. Most of the time I had the 24mm on the 5D. After looking at all the options, resolution charts etc I decided that the 24mm f/2.8 is essentially the only decent non-L wide angle full-frame Canon prime lens, which is why I took it, although it's still inferior to a second-hand Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AIS. I would have taken the 50mm f/1.4 if I had it, but I didn't so I didn't. Both the 24mm and the 50mm are sharp in the middle from f/2.8 upwards and even across the frame at f/8 and f/11 on my 5D MkII.

When I say "even", I mean that the extreme corners aren't particularly sharp, but they at least have a fair amount of detail. The 28mm f/2.8 I used to own had a lot of CA, and the extreme corners were just a blurry patch of mush even when stopped down; the samples I have seen from the 35mm f/2 have the same problem, they're sharp in the middle but the corner quality goes to pot. The 24-85mm I used to own had a lot of distortion and it was full of dust and again the corners were ropey. And if the corners are ropey there's no point using a full-frame camera, you might as well ditch it and buy a 550D and Sigma's 8-16mm.

I have an old Oympus 24mm f/2.8 lens that I use on the 5D with an adapter. It's better than the Canon 24mm, and also smaller and lighter, but I wanted something with autofocus. The Canon lens felt well-built, and it didn't extend or rotate when focusing.

If money had been no object i would probably have opted for a Panasonic GF1 with a 20mm f/1.7, and whatever ultrawide there is for the Micro Four Thirds system, and a little tripod. Or the aforementioned 550D and a Sigma 8-16mm plus the 50mm, or a 35mm f/2, depending on my mood.

December 1, 2010

Have you considered keeping the 40D and buying a nice fast moderately telephoto lens? Shooting concerts is one of those things where there's no cheap solution; you're going to need a fast telephoto at some point, and moving to a 5D is going to rob your 50mm f/1.4 of some of its reach. The 80mm f/1.8 is a lovely thing in any format, keenly priced too. Concert photography is an expensive thing whatever flag you fly.

I know it’s the fashion to include a picture with a response, usually something completely useless or irrelevant to the discussion, such as a tight crop of a street light shot outdoors in daylight (for example). I'm not going to do that however.

November 17, 2010

May I be the first to suggest that you buy a used 350D, and a new 18-55mm IS kit lens to go with it - not the earlier 18-55mm, but the modern one with image stabilisation - or one of those Sigma 18-125mm lenses or similar. You'll have to buy a few new batteries but these are cheaply available on eBay. You'll be able to sell the lot in a year or so, assuming you don't break it, for not much less than you paid.

I owned a 300D briefly as a hasty emergency backup for my 5D; it was the absolute cheapest body available and it used the same batteries and memory cards as my 5D. The image quality was fine, but I wasn't greatly impressed with the camera itself. In almost every respect it is obsolescent in 2010 - it will produce lovely six megapixel images, but everything that has come since is at least as good and in most cases better. The 300D is surprisingly big, but feels lightweight and flimsy; you'll get frustrated waiting for the image to save to the card and then appear on the monitor; and the silver body looked naff. I was worried that the body would conk out as well (do a google search for "300d sub-mirror" to find lots of broken cameras). It is however of considerable historical interest; it is symbolic of the days when banks would lend any old Tom, Dick, or Harry £1,000 to buy a digital camera.

In the UK the 300D has depreciated to their minimum, about £130 eBay prices, at which level they're basically disposable. I surmise that in a few years they'll be as scarce as a Morris Marina (an awful car that was popular in Britain in the 1970s - Austin sold 800,000 of them, and apparently only 746 were still running in 2006, because no-one wants or cares about them).

At the time the 300D's big brother was the 10D, which predated it by a few months and cannot use modern EF-S lenses. It has a bit more functionality but the same resolution. Used 10Ds regularly go for slightly less - I bought one solely to converted it to infrared, because it was the absolute cheapest options - but the 10D will complicate your lens options and it's just as big and slow as the 300D. Its unique selling points are meaningless nowadays and its amusing to read the old Photo.net threads where rich men boast about their brand-new 10D. Shadows and dust. The earlier D30 - my own first digital SLR - and D60 had horrible autofocus and are also slow and also limit your lens options. Some of the older used Canon-bodied Kodak DCS cameras very occasionally pop up cheaply but they are too eccentric for ordinary people.

Given a budget of £250 I would suggest a good used 20D - *the* stone-cold classic used digital SLR - with an 18-55mm IS and a 50mm f/1.8 and some cheap eBay batteries and memory cards. Less than that, a 350D. The 30D doesn't add much to the 20D and the 40D doesn't add much to the 30D and the 50D doesn't add much to the 40D, although it adds a fair bit to the 20D, albeit that if you're a rubbish photographer at eight megapixels you'll be just as bad at fifteen megapixels. Later models add video.

One other thing. As far as I know the 300D predated the wave of eBay accessory knock-offs, and so although you can pick up a cheap portrait/battery grip for the 350D for £30, there was never a clone of the BG-E1, and so you'll need to buy the original. Assuming you want one. Also, the 300D had a relatively limited set of firmware options, although it's not hard to update the firmware unofficially (some Russian chaps converted the 10Ds firmware to run on the 300D - you get spot metering and ISO 3200, amongst other things).

For the record my chain was D30 - 350D - 5D - 5D MkII, with a parallel chain of Olympus E-20 - 300D - Fuji S2 - Canon 10D for curiosity, and a further parallel chain of Kodak DCS 520 - 460 - 420 - 560 because I was fascinated with the Kodak DCS cameras. Keep them well and sell them again, think of depreciation as a hiring fee. Laugh at the old Photo.net threads where men argue about them and defend them as if they were maligned girlfriends.

The one lens that I have kept all that time is a 50mm f/1.8. Bought one; sold it; bought another; kept it.

November 16, 2010

"it represents the cheapest entry into full frame digital"

There's also the Kodak DCS SLR/C, which in the UK seems to go for about £400-500 depending on condition; the 5D MkI seems to have settled at £700, give or take a few pounds. I bought my 5D MkI for £700 in late 2008 and sold it earlier this year for about that. By most accounts the 5D is the better camera, and you can still have it repaired, whereas the SLR/C has a host of problems. But if you're desperate it exists. The Nikon-mount 14n goes for even less, although it has even more problems.

Like a lot of people I sold my 5D to help fund my 5D MkII. I could have bought a 7D - in may respects a more capable camera - but I came to the conclusion that the 7D will depreciate more painfully than the 5D MkII. Men have a romantic attachment to full-frame sensors. It clouds their mind. The 7D will go the way of 50D and so forth, despite its strengths, whereas the 5D MkII will hold its value because it has romantic appeal.

"I frankly don't know what more people would want in a camera, without the emergence of new technologies"

Interesting observation. There are a bunch of things in the 7D that I would have loved to see in the 5D MkII; the electronic spirit level, the wireless flash trigger, the better autofocus and body, the 720 video, and ultimately it's a shame that Canon didn't wait a year before releasing the 5D MkII. I suspect this has put them in a bit of a bind.

On a rational level the best thing for Canon would be to copy Nikon, save a bit of money, and develop the 5D MkIII and 1Ds MkIV in parallel, using as many of the same technologies as possible. Instead they seem to have interleaved development, which can't be all that efficient.

But, yes, buy the MkII now. It will hold its value unless you drop it in the sea. Five years from now you will sell it for a tidy sum, assuming the global economy still functions. Five years from now camera shops will still be able to have it fixed if it breaks. Five years from now the resolution and high ISO performance will still be decent - not brilliant, but not ridiculously dated, and it will still have a place. Ultimately, five years from now the sensor will still be huge. There won't be many full-frame cameras five years from now, not many full-frame lenses, and the 5D MkII will still have that on its side. The sensor will not get any smaller.

Look, bloody Photo.net, when I insert a paragraph break I want ONE CLEAR LINE in between the paragraphs. I don't want my message to look like a lengthy stream-of-consciousness rant. It deserves better than that.

July 16, 2010

I've been shooting a lot of video with my 5D MkII, and although I have a variety of specialised lenses I really need a kind of all-purpose lazy zoom. Something like a 28-200mm, for those occasions when I'm not shooting with a narrow depth of field or with an extremely wide field of view; a boring normal everyday lens that I will probably use for 90% of all shots.

Now, I know Canon makes or made an apparently unimpressive 28-200mm, but I have a few other requirements. I almost always use manual focus, so I would love a lens with a good manual focus control. Autofocus is in fact completely superfluous. A one-touch zoom with a manual focus ring that doubles as a zoom control would be absolutely idea. Absolute optical quality is not a huge priority on account of the relatively low resolution. A wide aperture is not a huge priority either. This is going to be my stopped-down-to-f/8 lens.

Ideally it would be analogous to my Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Series E, which has a loose and sloppy zoom ring that is ideal for quick focus when shooting video, or my similar Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5, but with a wider range. There is an enormous world of old general-purpose zoom lenses from the past on eBay, but which stand out in particular? The old Vivitar Series 1 28-105mm f/2.8-3.8 sounds interesting; the same company's non-Series 1 28-200mm f/3.5-5.3 seems to have a very minor cult following, the Series 1 35-85mm f/2.8 is similarly fascinating - I'm going through a phase of reading about the old Series 1 range - and there are loads of old Tamron Adaptalls and Tokina AT-X lenses out there.

Usually, discussions of this nature revolve around sharpness, but for video I'm more interested in general utility. Can I hold the lens? Does it easily mount filters? Does it zoom and focus smoothly? The more I think about the more I conclude that a vintage one-touch manual focus zoom from the 1970s or 1980s would be a super all-purpose video lens, but which one? It's complicated for me by the fact I live in the UK, and eBay.co.uk has a tiny selection of overpriced junk, which is a metaphor for Britain in general but I'm straying from the topic.

July 9, 2010

"I've seen TV shows where the "photographers" using film cameras were holding their equipment 10" away from their face I am thinking they were using live view. I gotta try that with my Yashica or Smena."

There's a good example of this over in the Vintage Photography forum: <a href="../classic-cameras-forum/00WoGm">http://www.photo.net/classic-cameras-forum/00WoGm</a>

From a Toyota advert: <img src="http://static.photo.net/attachments/bboard/00W/00WoGm-257409684.jpg" alt="" />

It's bizarre. They obviously wanted to evoke a kind of timeless stylishness, but they had no idea what the past was actually like. And yet surely the model and the photographer must have wondered why it was so hard to see through the viewfinder, holding it at arm's length?

This is presumably related to the phenomenon whereby computer displays still tend to have green-on-black text and wireframe graphics, or a made-up operating system that is controlled by bashing the keyboard very quickly. And the phenomenon whereby, whenever we see through the viewfinder of a journalist's camera, it is either a split-image type or it has a sniper-style crosshair. How many typical cinemagoers nowadays were even alive when journalists used film SLRs with motor drives?

July 9, 2010

What would we do without Chuck Westfall? I hope that when he dies someone pickles his brain. The stuff he has in there is too valuable to lose.

On a more specific level, I'm using the 5D to make timelapse movies by shooting lengthy video sequences and then speeding them up with Virtualdub. I find this a lot more flexible than assembling thousands of still frames, and it is presumably a lot less wearing on the shutter. For this reason a monopod would not be appropriate. The footage has to be as still as possible. When viewed at normal speed, the footage appears more or less steady, with the occasional small jitter from the wind. It's not very disturbing when the footage is viewed at normal speed, but when sped up 10x the intermittent small-scale jitters become distracting.

I'll add as well that the last bunch of footage I took was on London Bridge, which wobbles on account of the traffic passing over the bridge, and also the nearby underground station; the ground around the bridge is hollow. This is why I am fixated on image stabilisation. As far as I can tell, short of isolating the camera from the ground in a kind of steadicam harness, not even a very solid tripod will help in a situation where the ground itself is moving.

In practice, Deshaker seems to be a very good job - I suspect that in this particular situation there is no other solution. Here's what I came up with, by the way:

<a href="http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/07/no-1-london-bridge-again.html">http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/07/no-1-london-bridge-again.html</a>

As you can see there are instances when I am standing on a wobbly bridge, shooting footage of a solidly-grounded building that isn't on the bridge. The ideal solution would be some kind of hovering anti-gravity platform that can keep the camera at an exact point in space, but sadly that kind of thing does not yet exist.

July 8, 2010

I've been shooting a lot of video with my 5D MkII, with the camera mounted on a Gorillapod. I've been using an old Canon 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5, because it's small and light and optically quite good; and I'm shooting mostly at f/11 and the slowest shutter speed I can use in daylight. I am shooting bandit-style, as lightweight as possible.

The tripod is nice and stable in still air, but England is plagued with gusts of wind which make the tripod wobble intermittently. I can mitigate this by shielding the camera with my body, and I can generally cure it in post-production with Deshaker. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the tripod is non-negotiable, and that I can't enclose the camera in a streamlined fairing. I've tried talking to the wind - trying to negotiate a settlement - but sadly my words are all carried away. The wind does not hear. In fact the wind *cannot* hear.

Therefore is there a technological solution for the problem of intermittent camera shake? Can I beat the whites with the red wedge?

My first thought is an image stabilised lens, but I'm not sure how Canon's implementation of image stabilisation operates when the lens senses that it is on a tripod. I am under the impression that the image stabilisation simply turns off, but I could be wrong. Nonetheless, can anybody suggest a lightweight, small, image stabilised full-frame lens with a handy range? Sharpness is less important in this context than effective geometric and CA correction. For filming in daylight on a tripod I do not mind if the lens has to be stopped down to f/11 for good results, because I will be shooting at a slow shutter speed. My 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5 is in fact generally ideal except for the lack of image stabilisation and the limited telephoto range.

The 28-135mm IS springs to mind. The 24-105mm f/4 L IS is another obvious option although it's large and heavy and expensive. I can't actually think of another full-frame image stabilised general-purpose Canon zoom lens that doesn't weigh a tonne. The 18-55mm IS would be ideal but of course it is not a full-frame lens. Is there something from e.g. Sigma, Tamron? Bueller?

July 8, 2010

I wrote a whole lengthy series of blog posts about the Canon D2000, last year:

<a href="http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2008/12/canon-d2000-kodak-dcs-520-let-me-take.html">http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2008/12/canon-d2000-kodak-dcs-520-let-me-take.html</a>

It was ahead of its time back when it was new, and the general layout and interface were carried over to the Canon 1D. In terms of image quality I was surprised at how decently the lower ISO values held up, although it's really only a historical curiosity nowadays. It has Pong as a menu option and you can unscrew the infrared filter. 1.5x crop, presumably compatible with digital-only lenses from Sigma etc, but not EF-S lenses. Oddly-positioned vertical shutter release. Huge, heavy batteries. PCMCIA cards. Microphone. Built-in interval timer.

I subsequently bought a Kodak DCS 560, which was sold as the Canon D6000. It had a six megapixel, APS-H sensor and was a kind of "1Ds Mk 0". It originally sold for $28,500 or thereabouts and it was a beast. In fact I had a fetish for these cameras; I also owned a DCS 460, a Nikon-bodied six-megapixel APS-H camera from a few years earlier. The DCS 460's image quality was on the verge of horrible outdoors, whereas the DCS 560 was much better, and I still used it seriously until I sold it again; the colour was never very good, but the output was sharp and detailed, and the interface was fast.

Aas far as I know the actual very first Canon-bodied digital SLR was the Kodak DCS 1, or DCS 3, or DCS 5, which were also based on a Canon EOS 1N but with the older, unscrewable DCS 200/400-style back. No LCD display screen. You had to dismantle the camera to take out the battery. Ken Marcus used one, only God and Stan Disbrough knows who else.

July 8, 2010

I would be tempted to buy one of those Flip-style miniature HD camcorders. Unless you plan to make a professional film out of your kids, a digital SLR isn't really appropriate. In addition to the lack of effective autofocus you're also going to run up against the maximum clip length problem - remember that digital SLRs typically only shoot a maximum of 12 or 29 minutes or so, which you're unlikely to exceed BUT you never know.

On a personal level I would be tempted to sell the 50D, and put the proceeds towards a 550D and a Flip-style miniature HD camcorder. That way you'll at least be able to experiment with digital SLR video, and you'll have a backup option.

July 8, 2010

I vote for the aperture selector in the popular Holga plastic toy camera. The camera has a fixed aperture of something like f/13, plus a control that will supposedly stop the camera down to something like f/20. In practice it does nothing at all. The aperture control mechanism works fine, but the actual aperture - a disc with a tiny hole poked through - isn't fitted in the factory, and so the mechanism is completely pointless. At least, it wasn't fitted in my Holga. Apparently newer examples fix this problem.

The whole thing puzzles me. If the intention was to save money, why not just delete the aperture mechanism entirely? It's as if the people who designed and made the camera had copied something they didn't understand, and they were too institutionally rigid to fix the problem once the camera had entered production. I am reminded of the tale of the Russian bomber that was copied from a shot-down American B-29 Superfortress; they copied it exactly, even including the bullet holes that had brought the aircraft down, either because (a) they didn't know any better or (b) Stalin told them to copy the plane exactly, and there was no way they were going to defy Stalin.

I would like to add all those old Russian cameras which had the shutter speed dial coupled to the shutter in such a way that it rotated whenever you took a shot, catching your fingers, and you had to cock the shutter before changing the shutter speed, otherwise you would break the camera. Or was it the other way around? Did you have to set the shutter speed and then cock the shutter?

July 8, 2010

For the record, when I had the shutter in my 5d MkI replaced, it cost £54 for the new shutter and £170 or so for labour. I surmise that it would cost roughly the same for a 40D, 350D etc, as you move down the range. For a 5D this extra cost makes economical sense. For a second-hand 300D it would be cheaper to throw the camera away.

Shutter count is one of a number of ways you can use to build a portrait of the camera's life history. It's not the only thing, but it's nice to know. Has the camera spent six months being used to shoot one frame per second for hours on end in order to make timelapse movies? Did the previous user do a tonne of three-shot HDR bracketing? If it's a professional camera, did it spend its time on Earth firing eight frames a second almost constantly for the duration of an entire season of 90-minute football matches? Unfortunately, very few cameras let you see how many times the shutter has been activated. The old Kodak DCS cameras had a menu option and I believe the 1D / 1Ds models have a count in the EXIF file.

In the days of film it was less of an issue, because most people didn't shoot as much. 50,000 frames divided by 36 shots to a roll equals just under 1,400 rolls of film. Even when you take into account the fact that people in the past would buy a camera and keep it for years and years, the average man would never have shot that many frames. And so eBay is filled with piles of film cameras with working shutters that nobody wants. They were over-engineered.

June 8, 2010

I think it's important to clarify the distinction between "vintage" and "classic". As I see it, a vintage photograph is one that is so old and antiquated that it no longer provokes an emotional response beyond a kind of condescending amusement. It is a harmless curiosity from a bygone age. Vintage pornography is pornography that is no longer sexy; a vintage car is a car that men no longer lust after; vintage comedy is comedy that is no longer funny. Vintage anything has had the life drained out of it.

If something is "classic",on the other hand, it may or may not be very old, but it still provokes an emotional response. It is awe-inspiring or happy or sad or sexy or otherwise impressive.

Charlie Chaplin is "vintage", the Marx Brothers are "classic". An old Model T Ford is "vintage", a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost is "classic". All those Victorian photographs of awkward-looking dumpy naked overweight women posing like greek statues are "vintage", the portrature of Julia Margaret Cameron is "classic". The Ramones are "classic", Sham 69 are "vintage". You know what I'm getting it.

May 14, 2010

Since posting the above - ah, May 2010, heady days, I remember them well - I have got hold of one of these lenses. Mine is in Nikon mount, because I wanted something I could mount on both my Kodak DCS 760 (an ancient Nikon F5-bodied SLR with a six megapixel APS-H sensor) and my Canon 5D. And also the old Canon 10D I have lying around, although it doesn't make a lot of sense as an APS-C lens. I have written about my experiences in the following blog post:

<a href="http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/05/samyang-14mm-f28-action-time-and-vision.html">http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/05/samyang-14mm-f28-action-time-and-vision.html</a>

As Mr Keinath points out above, PTLens has a template that will correct the distortion. Otherwise it is not a great choice if there are straight lines in the frame e.g. if you work for an estate agent, and you want to photograph the inside of a property, and you don't have time to mess around with PTLens, it is a poor choice and you'd be better off with a Sigma 12-24mm.

I compared with some old samples I had shot with my Sigma 15-30mm, and the Sigma lens is much less distorted (in fact it's very good in this respect). It's also cheaper on the used market than the Samyang 14mm is brand new. But it has "Sigma yellow" and overall the Samyang lens seems to be sharper around the borders, and is very sharp in the centre when stopped down, and indeed not bad in the centre at f/2.8. It's ropey around the edges at that aperture though. CA is very mild, much less than my Olympus 21mm f/3.5.

At some point I will have to determine the optimum file size and field of view that can be derived from a 21mp 5D MkII original, after correcting for CA and distortion and then cropping off the imperfect borders. I surmise it would produce a flawless 17mp image with something like a 16mm field of view, but I need to work on this more.

May 5, 2010

There's a thorough-looking test at Lenstip.com, here:

<a href="http://www.lenstip.com/index.php?test=obiektywu&test_ob=239">http://www.lenstip.com/index.php?test=obiektywu&test_ob=239</a>

They evaluate it on a full-frame Nikon D3x, but also consider its worth on a 1.5x crop sensor D200. In the latter case it has massive but uncomplicated barrel distortion - over 7% - but the resolution and other optical properties are very good. On the D3x it has the odd distortion profile noted above albeit that the resolution is still very good. It almost looks as if the company designed it for an APS-C sensor and then stretched out the edges. The colour reproduction looks more accurate than my old Sigma 15-30mm, which gave pictures a strangely yellowy-red cast.

One concern the review notes is that the process of correcting this distortion will compel you to crop off the edge of the image, which gnaws away at the rationale of using an ultra wide angle lens on a full-frame camera. Will a corrected image have greater edge resolution than an uncorrected image from a stopped-down Canon 17-40mm f/4? I don't know. Are all copies built to the same optical standard? Presumably, as with the 85mm, the Opteka, Falcon, Vivitar, Bower, Wolseley, Vanden-Plas, Morris, Austin etc versions of the lens will have different nameplates but will come off the same production line.

As far as I can tell the only places that it can be bought from are eBay, and direct from Samyang's Polish arm.

April 30, 2010

Well, that's an interesting question. In my opinion the only solution currently is to split the video into individual frames, as you say, then apply a batch edit job to all of them, and then reassemble the result into a movie.

However, I reckon that in February 2010 - just a few weeks in the future - a man called David Horman will write a plugin called "defish" which does the exact thing you require, for AVSynth, and he will announce it in <a href="http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1396228">this thread at Doom9.org here</a>. You do not know this man; he does not know you, and yet you move in a similar motion.

And subsequently you will use this to create possibly the world's first ever defished full-frame fisheye video which you will write about in <a href="http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/04/defishing-video-2.html">this blog post here</a>. And the plugin will look like the following image during operation:

April 23, 2010

"'What I like, you see, is the stalking,’ he explained of his lack of interest in the finished product, 'I have no use for the meat’."

April 23, 2010

I have never read a good word about the 20mm f/2.8, and the corner softness in the samples I have seen is unacceptable. I used to own a Sigma 15-30mm, and it was very sharp in the middle at 15mm when stopped down, but the edges were nothing special and I didn't like the colour. It had a distinctive "sigma yellow" that seems to be common with that generation of Sigma lenses, whereby the image assumed a slightly yellowy hue, and reds became a bit orange. My copy was softer in the right side of the image than the left, which is something that put me off Sigma lenses in general. It might be good on a crop body, but in that context there are smaller, more practical options.

I have the same problem as you and have settled on two solutions. Firstly I have bought a second-hand Olympus 21mm f/3.5, which I use with an OM-EOS adapter. It is sharp in the centre at f/5.6 and is inoffensive in the corners at f/8, f/11, although not bitingly sharp. On a physical level it is very small. The major limitation is colour fringing, which is pronounced and hard to correct. And it is only f/3.5, but then again you have a 5D MkII, which has live view and a lovely ISO 1600. There are cheaper, wider manual focus lenses from the 1970s - a Tokina RMC 17mm, which is tested at Photozone.de, but frustratingly on a crop body, and I believe a Tamron 17mm as well - but I haven't used them.

As I understand it the two uncompromised ultrawides that you can practically mount on your 5D are the Nikon 14-24mm and the Carl Zeiss 21mm. The former requires a special adapter because it does not have an aperture ring. The latter is available in native EOS mount. They are expensive albeit that they are worth the money. I cannot justify the expense of either lens and so my second solution is to never shoot wider than 24mm. I will miss shots that I could have taken if I had a 14mm lens; but I will miss shots that I could have taken if I had an 800mm lens, or if I had a helicopter.

If you think in terms of the finished file rather than the process, there's always panorama stitching. Also of note is a 14mm f/2.8 lens design by Samyang, which is on the verge of release, and it is not much more expensive than a used Sigma 15-30mm; except that based on the samples I have seen here it has awful waveform-type distortion and might not be your cup of tea.

April 23, 2010

The distortion is a shame. The odd thing is that early samples of the lens were not distorted in the same extreme way, e.g. as per the comments in this blog post from September last year:

<a href="http://www.photographyblog.com/news/samyang_14mm_f2.8/">http://www.photographyblog.com/news/samyang_14mm_f2.8/</a>

I could see distortion then, but it wasn't as bad, it didn't bulge out in the middle so much. I understand the company reworked the design during early production, so perhaps they traded one bad thing for another. The 85mm f/1.4 is optically excellent with the one caveat that it is not especially sharp; in terms of distortion, vignetting, colour fringing, bokeh and so forth it is on a par with much more expensive designs. had hoped that the 14mm f/2.8 would have the same nexus of qualities, but apparently this was too much to hope for.

The distortion can be corrected with software, but that is yet another thing to add to the workflow. I surmise that a company can apply brute force and lots of glass in order to design and manufacture a 85mm f/1.4, but a 14mm f/2.8 requires guile beyond Samyang's reach. What's it like in the extreme corners of a full-frame image at f/8? Is it soft, like a woman? Or sharp, like a fox?

January 19, 2010

Men,

In my spare time I amuse myself by stretching out full-frame fisheye images so that they become ultra-ultra-wide rectilinear images viz the following link (scroll down to near the bottom): <a href="../learn/fisheye">http://www.photo.net/learn/fisheye/</a>

I use PTRemap, a subset of Panotools. NB other software will do this as well, although PTRemap is free. Defishing is addictive and fun, and the results are always visually striking, even if the subject is boring. It's a great way to capture people's attention without spending a lot of effort, but it's limited to stills photography, which is becoming increasingly old-fashioned nowadays.

Given the existence of full-frame video; given the existence of crop-sensor fisheye lenses; is there a piece of software that will stretch out fisheye video so that it becomes ultra-ultra-wide? This would not have to be in real time. The result would have a Cinemascope-style aspect ratio although I envisage cropping off the edges down to 16:9, which would improve overall image quality a great deal.

I am not an expert on digital video. I imagine that it would be a simple matter if the video could be broken into individual perfect frames, which could then be run through a Photoshop batch process, and reconstituted as with e.g. timelapse photography. But as I understand it most HD video formats as used in current digital SLRs do not lend themselves to this.

The first person who can apply this technique to the field of either advertising or porn will be famous. And given the fact that I don't know how to do it, it probably won't be me. Which is melancholic but there you go. All of the Google returns for "defishing video" are about fishing, i.e. hooking fish out of rivers. I don't want to do that.

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Posts posted by ashleypomeroy