michael_darnton1

John is right--modern zooms aren't parfocal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parfocal_lens ), but rather variable focal length--they need to be refocused when the zoom length is changed. You will find that infinity is placed differently with different focal lengths, so the mark can't work for all of them.

I have no direct experience, but if you read around a bit you will discover that the Mamiya 7 has the reputation of having some of the very sharpest, nicest optics in the business, bar none, including the other high-priced brands, and the body has the rep of feeling like something you'd buy in the toy section of K-Mart, but is still reliable.

I know you might find this unbelievable, but there was once a time in this country when people could actually tell the difference between a camera and a gun, and made an effort to make the distinction before they panicked, started screaming that the sky was falling, and called the police.

Plastic doesn't dent. More likely, there's a piece of crud jammed in somewhere that needs to be cleaned out.

The tool you have in your hand affects the way you think. There's no way around that. I use mostly primes because I'm more aware of the possibilities for the lens that's on my camera than I was when I had no particular lens (a zoom) on it.

The Coolscan can't drag resolution out of air if it ain't on the film, and it ain't.

I suspect blaming government regs was just another way to avoid saying it COULDN'T be done. They certainly had a long enough try at it without showing, if I remember correctly, even one single working prototype. There's some valid reason that my D300 weights about 2X+ my FM, with half the sensor size, and is the size of a Hasselblad, I suspect.

I have heard several times (from people who don't have one, usually) that the Graflex FP shutter has vibration problems, but they forget that the worst knock comes after the shutter has closed, when the curtain stops. If it didn't work, it wouldn't have been around for about 80 years in some form or another.

One of the things that has impressed me most about digital is the resolution compared with film. When I look at my old prints, mostly from Leica and Olympus negs, they're definitely worse than what I'm getting now, in absolute terms. Perhaps if I'd been shooting some high-res film, it would be different, but I'm comparing ISO125 film to ISO800 digital, and digital buries film. I was just at an art fair, and one photog there bragged about shooting film, not digital. Basically, her stuff just looked soft, compared with what I'm used to now.

It may be the look; it certainly doesn't have the retro friendliness of the others. Re, your question, I'd vote for one of the later Speed Graphics, because of the focal plane shutter, but that's because I like to mess with various pieces of non-shuttered glass.

I think people are spending too much time on the silly brick wall.:-) Real

photos mean much more, and in the airshow shots, there's an obvious and striking

problem on the left.

"Am I "reading" here that I may be better off using the Pentax K10d with the Tamron SP Di 90mm 2.8 Macro 1:1 on a tripod ???"

 

Compared to a flatbed, definitely yes. My D300/60mm micro combo gives me absolutely clear grain right out to the corners from my Tri-X negs at f8-11--I don't know what more I could ask for.

 

If I weren't at a workshop right now I'd throw up a picture of my rig, which is comprised of the camera and lens mounted on a focusing rail with a block of wood screwed on to one end of the rail. The camera-facing side of the wood is squared to the camera, and I glued a magnet on that face. I have two pieces of glass hinged with tape, with tape rails for sliding the negs along between (like a glass enlarger carrier), and that's held to the block with another magnet. I take the negs, put them in the sandwich, clip them to the rig with the magnet, and shoot the copy using a light table as the light source, with the camera handheld. It takes about two minutes to set up one neg, and then later there's the post-processing.

Yes, it does look undeniably imperfect on the left side. Mine is a bit, also, and every mention I've seen of problems has been to the left. I wonder what that means.

I bought an FM as a backup, and it did need a full CLA, but the result is a really nice, tight and compact body, and I'm very pleased. I suspect any of the FM series are similarly tasty cameras. It's more compact than either the Nikkormat or normal F series cameras, and particularly nice to carry around.

I've been through all of this, hoping each new generation of flatbed will give me something approaching the quality of what I've gotten from my first simple film scanner. If you're looking for anything resembling high quality from 35mm, forget flatbeds--every flatbed--and buy a dedicated film scanner of some sort.

 

The usual size mentioned for the maximum from flatbeds is 4X or 5X. That's marginal for 120, but doesn't cut it for 35mm. Even the folks on the large format forums say, "wellllll, for 16x20 from 4x5, flatbeds are maybe OK, but that's it."

 

This is assuming you're concerned about quality, which from your question I assume you are. Lacking a functioning film scanner at the moment, I've set up a little copy rig with my Nikon D300 and 60mm Micro which is doing a great job--much better than any flatbed I've had, and I've had a few. I'm as happy as a clam with it, but I'm not talking about scanning 5000 pieces of film.

I have a Spyder 2 or something, and though it usually does a good job, sometimes it misses. I'd say this is clear evidence that it missed this time. Do it again.

For me, the issues that caused me to discard zooms nearly completely in favor of primes were first, size and weight, and second, that I take a different, better, type of photo when I'm forced to look for things that fit within the confines of a particular lens.

So, it you want the equivalent of a 50mm lens on your digital camera, you need to buy a 35mm lens: 1.5 X 35 = 52.5mm.

Yes, my 20/2.8 lives on my camera, also.

I forgot there was a wedding, until the bride called me 15 minutes before the ceremony wondering where I was (I lived 30 minutes away). To beat that someone's going to have to have done something like putting one of the wedding party in the hospital. :-)

Focus-and-compose works equally as well with digital as it ever did with film, but now that you can move the sensor around rather than the camera, the technical advantage of that is obvious, and I use it, and get better results that way, when it's appropriate.

 

On less critical and changing stuff, though, where the focus spot isn't in the same place in every picture, I still focus-and-compose. The one thing I don't like is letting the camera pick the focus point, since it never seems to be as discriminatory in that as I am, and can't even equal focus-and-compose results.

Over the years I've had four or five 35s for a couple of months each, and never got into the length, which always seems to me to be a lens with no particular point of view. My favorite pairing is 28/50.

Just from experience, I can tell you that a common Canon RF strategy is to either thread the lens head into the focus mount, on teles, or on the wides to use a locknut on the back to do the same thing, much the same as large format lenses are mounted on lens boards. Sometimes you can just grab the front of the lens and twist it loose, then unthread the locknut from the back without a tool, though I can't guarantee that this approach is safe for the lens, since you're twisting that which isn't intended to be twisted.

 

Anyway, after that you're left holding a lens and a focusing mount, so which one has the problem you're thinking of attacking? I've taken apart focusing mounts and relubed them; once you get the lens head off it's usually obvious what to do. I've never taken the optics apart, though, after the time I tried it on a 90mm Elmar and ended up with a bunch of loose diaphram leaves and no idea how to put them back together. :-)

I wouldn't go cranking on them to try to find out. I had a lug come loose on an Olympus OM-1 once, and after digging down inside, found that the mechanism was very clever, and more complex than you would imagine . . . and foolproof--the lug was never going to drop off, even though it was loose. So without actually seeing how it's done, I don't think you can assume anything about how it's held in place.

I don't know how many people there are here (this is a tradition, and each year's group photo is linked on this page) but it gives you the idea of what something similar might look like:

http://luth.org/convention/convform.htm