The Rolls Royce Of Adapters

Or the Fujifilm of motor cars...

In the spirit of the elk*, I knocked a Fujifilm M-adapter and a Zeiss 50mm f:2 M-mount lens off the shop shelves with a stick and clapped them onto my Fujifilm X-E2 with the turbo-boost vitamin -enriched firmware update. I was going to see how much different it made the adapter experience compared to the Ray-Qual and Tokina combination that I am most familiar with.

The first impression was quality improvement in both the lens and the adapter - hardly surprising as both of them are quality Japanese products. Not to knock the efforts of other sections of the Asian world, but there is no denying the superb machining on the Fujifilm or Zeiss mount. They clip together with no hint of distress.

No hint of a hitch, either, in the operation of the focusing ring and the aperture ring of the Zeiss lens. I am not surprised with this - when I operated Zeiss lenses on their own cameras or on Hasselblad 6 x 6 in the past there was never an operability issue - the operator might foul it all up, but the lens came through.

I have written before about the slowing down of the photo process when you use adapters and other-maker's lenses on your camera - how you are forced to give up auto-focus and are always opening and closing an aperture to view or expose an image. In some cases, like that of the Ray Qual/Tokina combination - it is really only suited to studio closeups and careful work. Even then the mind wanders, you forget to stop down or to open up and the image suffers...

Well, it ain't the same with the Zeiss on the M-adapter. Sure, there is no more AF. I accept that. I can turn the focus selector on the Fujifilm X-E2 to M and leave it there. In dong so I have opened access to the focus-peaking mechanism that Fujifilm provide. It is turned on with a push of the thumb control wheel and instantly zooms up the portion of the image that is covered by the AF box. Disregard the fact that there is no AF in this configuration - you still get to see exactly what is in focus in that box. I've set it so I get a bright red rime around the exact plane of focus.

It is a matter of a moment to thumb up this image, turn the focal ring until it pops, and then thumb back to the main view. Almost as fast as the Leica M2 camera...

Do I need to focus at full aperture and then stop down? Probably do if it is a close-up shot. I can whack it open and then count clicks down to the selected shooting aperture.

Do I need to do this in the field with a subject at is further away than about 2 metres? Nope. the Fujifilm X-E2 can boost the viewfinder image bright enough to let me focus and frame right down to about f:11 anyway so if I am going to get enough depth of field anyway I can just leave it at this stop and do nothing but focus and fire. Now that's about as close to the old Leica M2 experience I used to have as I can get.

Mind you, I do miss twisting my fingers into a knot at the end of 36 shots and then having to juggle the base plate as I load the next 36...

The results? Zeissuperb. Plus it has a silver ring at the front that makes it look cool.

* That was meant to read "week" but the autocorrect mechanism took over. I quite like the elk, eh?

See the Zeiss webstore here: http://www.cameraelectronic.com.au/zeiss 

Well There I Was and There It Was And...

I was in Bic Camera in Tokyo, in Japan. In spring, in a quandary.

I had been sent there by Camera Electronic to represent us at a Panasonic Lumix G7 tour and I was sent off with strict instructions not to run naked through the streets and not to deal with any other manufacturer's camera equipment. I was able to comply with one of those strictures...

Bic are a cross between Camera Electronic, Hardly Normal, and the shearing pavilion at the Royal Show. They seem to sell everything and are quite happy for the bewildered tourist to wander wherever - as we do not know what we are doing, we can be ignored. The awkward part comes when we know what we are doing.

In my case I wanted an adapter. I had Nikon lenses and a Fujifilm X-E2 camera body and wanted to mount the former on the latter. Adapters are not news - we've had them since the 1960's and digital ones are commonly offered by a number of makers. Some are put out by the camera people themselves to try to grab business from other makers - Fujifilm makes Leica M-series adapters to fit on Fujifilm X series cameras - and some are made by independent factories to try to mate everything to everything else. Occasionally they succeed.

Well, in Bic Cameras I found a Chinese sales assistant who spoke Japanese and English and we brokered a deal for a Nikon to Fujifilm X adapter with an aperture control ring. It mounts either a G or an F lens and while the aperture stops are not conventional, you can do the deed very easily. Camera Electronic has these as well, and there is a vast variety of A-fits-on-B types. Some of them are such an arcane combination as to cause me to who would ever want one, but then one day someone comes in and wants one.

The business of adapting someone else's lens to a digital camera is foolish, but we all do it. We ignore the magnificent performance of the proprietary lenses for what we think will be the magic of the adapted one. Websites, rumours, and wishful thinking form a great part of this. We lose the automatic focusing that sold us the camera in the first place. We lose a great deal of the automatic exposure capability. We sometimes lose the image stabilisation. But we know secretly that we have discovered the optical Holy Grail...

In my case I wanted a way to use a macro lens of a focal length that will never be made by Fujifilm, for reasons that are all my own. The combo is slow and clumsy and unavoidable, and I am delighted that I had a chance to see Bic camera and get this adapter. I also saw the Rack Of Ghastly Camera Straps and restrained myself from buying the purple furry one. Even I did not think that the Japanese sales assistants could have clocked that one past the register without tears or laughter.

Come And Fiddle With The Sony Cameras - Make A Little Photographic Music!

Rental Man and Rental Girl - aka Thomas and Evelyn - have activated the Rent-Signal for the photographers of Perth. Flashing above the skyline, it has signalled the availability of some of the most sought-after Sony full frame gear.  Now you can try the new mirror-less system and see if it will be your future!

The stocks avaiable for rental include the following:

Sony A7s Mk II body

Sony A7r Mk II body

35mm Zeiss lens.

70-200mm lens

28-135mm lens

90mm macro lens

16-35mm lens

24-70mm lens

55mm Zeiss lens

Metabones adapter for Canon mount

Come on down to the RentCave ( the back counter at 230 Stirling Street ) and bring your credit card and identification - let Rental Man and Rental Girl put you out on the street with Sony's finest.

Nananananananana. Nananananananana. Rental Man!

Email - rentals@cameraelectronic.com.au 

Step-up Ring, Step-down Ring, Step-sideways Ring...

The humble adapter ring is seen in many camera bags - an enthusiast decides to put a filter that they already have onto a new lens. If the filter is larger than the lens size, the adapter ring is a step-up ring. If the filter is smaller, the adapter ring is a step-down ring. The idea would seem to be simple.

The Tower of Babel was also a simple idea; just build upwards. And didn't that work out well...

If you want to use the smaller filter on the larger lens, you risk getting vignetting at the edges of the image - not in every case, but it is always a danger. It maybe hard to see by just peering into the camera, so you might have to take a couple of test shots at small apertures.

It you clap a larger filter onto the smaller lens you won't get vignetting, but you might create a multi-thread monster that tends to unscrew itself whenever you touch the front end of the lens. Circular polarisers are the worst danger here.

The real trap for young players is the ring that screws into the filter thread of your lens and then presents another male filter thread on the outside...onto which you are presumed to screw another camera lens in a reversed position. It is one way to compel the lenses to do very close-up focusing and macro work but the exposure calculation means a certain amount of trial and error.

If this is too much, there is an adapter made that will slot into the mount on the camera body - chiefly on Nikon or Canon - and then take the original lens in that reversed position - again it is a close-up worker but not so unwieldy as the previous rig.

If you are currently using a mirror-less camera system you can also adapt lots of other manufacturer's lenses to your own body. that's the subject of a different post, though.

The Legacy Lens - Pat It At Your Peril

I have come to the conclusion that Legacy Lenses are the optical equivalent of the small vicious dog that my aunt used to have. Slightly scruffy, oddly shaped, unpredictable, and liable to leak or bite at any time*.

Legacy Lens is a great phrase - it makes you think that you have encountered something wonderful and precious. And all for free. This illusion rapidly vanishes as you try to adapt it to your modern digital camera - you discover that you'll need to spend more again to get an adapter  - and in some cases we're talking more than the price of the lens itself - and the result can be sad. If you have purchased the Legacy rather than found it in a box under a bed, that is so much further you have gone from free and wonderful.

Point the finger of hypocrisy at me if you like - I have a Tokina 35mm Macro that was intended to sit in front of a Nikon camera but now links via a Kipon adapter on a Fujifilm X-E2. And does very well - it was the shortest 1:1 macro lens I could find at the time for an APS-C camera and delivered/delivers exactly the point of view and focusing distance I need for tabletop shots. The adapter is well enough built to keep it in good alignment and I am always working at manual aperture and manual focusing anyway. I'd chuck the lash-up in a second if Fujifilm would put out a 34mm Macro in their native X mount, but until they do I am going to take toy car pictures with the Tokina.

Did I wish to retain auto-focus or auto-exposure I would be nursing a dog bite. Legacy lenses were made for the days when you were expected to make your own focusing errors - not entrust them to the AF program on the computer. You throw away all modernity when using them.

Are they better than new lenses? No. Stop squawking, it's true. In every case where modern manufacturers have replaced their 1957 Whateveromatic lens with the 2015 AF ASPH Whateveromatic lens they have multicoated it and recalculated the optical formula to present the ray paths at a better angle to the receptors in the sensor.

Let's face it - when you agonise for months about the latest and greatest camera body of whatever make, and then throw yourself around the town trying to cheapen it with every dealer, and then sit sweating in front of every internet forum to see if strangers agree that you made a wise choice...wouldn't it be nice to know that you have the optical design that was actually intended for that body? Whether it is made in Bangkok, Saigon, Yamagata, or Wetzlar ( or made in Yamagata and shipped to Wetzlar... ) it is a fair bet that the optical designers ate their rice noodles or bratwurst with their camera body colleagues in the staff canteen and that there is likely to be a close agreement on what the glass does to the silicon.

Closer than anything you, your aunt, or that damn dog can think up.

Uncle Dick

* Poodle. Suzette. Like a dyspeptic rat, but meaner.

Three - Layer Sandwich From Voightländer

This device has three layers.

The front layer is Leica M-series mount.

The middle layer is Voigtländer.

The back layer is Sony E-series mount.

The side ring says it is a VM-E Close focus adapter but when I combined a Leica 50mm Elmar lens and a Sony A 6000 camera I got infinity focus looking east towards Bulwer Street. I initially thought that this was just the effect of Bulwer Street...

But then I noticed a small red tab on the side of the adapter - once triggered, it allows the ring to screw open to provide the effect of a small extension tube. VERY useful for the Leica lens user who dos not want to haul boxes of gear to capture flowers and insects.

Well-made in Japan.

KUPO - The Things You Can Do WIth A Turning Lathe...Plus a Manfrotto Steampunk Accessory

The small change of a studio budget is generally spent on  instant coffee and cheap biscuits - a deadly mistake as it ends up being the photographer who has to eat and drink the stuff. A wet week day, no bookings, a cup of Pablo and a dried out Nice biscuit...not a cheering prospect.

Better to invest in accessories. If the budget will not stretch to a new set of Profoto studio lights with full range of light shapers think of getting some of he little KUPO light sand adapters and attachments.

This one converts a 3/8" male thread to a 1/4" male thread so you can put a speed light shoe on the top of many standard light stands.

This one screws onto a tripod - either the 3/8" of the bare legs or the 1/4" of the ball head  -and lets you mount a studio mono block on it. 

Some stands have a large 1/2" hole in the top - and some Manfrotto adapters have the same thing - this drops in there to let you mount the studio mono block.

Here it is with the plastic covers fitted - not absolutely necessary, but nice.

Here we move into heftier support - the 1/2" shaft will support big flashes and the 1/2" threaded end will capture bigger lights or monitors.

Bigger is better, as a certain class of advertisement would lead us to believe...

1/2" socket and strong screw clamp eventually becomes 1/2" threaded.

And lastly, a Grordbort armoured trocanter for letting excess gas out of dragons and the heavier sort of mammals. Steel tipped for easier penetration. A Manfrotto part - imaginative company, Manfrotto...

The Three-Ring Circus, Or The Wrong Auto-Focus

It is embarrassing to be foolish in my old age. The business of being a sage elder seated upon a mountain is all very well, but I have come to suspect that I am not suited to it. Case in point was this weekend when I stuffed up a photo assignment.

This was not a paying job, thank goodness. It was an annual visit to the Super Model Car Sunday in Malaga to take pictures of the little cars. I love 'em and am always in awe of what the other enthusiasts can come up with in the year's interval. I use the pictures to report on my hrhoa.wordpress.com blog. The hall is brightly lit, but with a weird colour temperature so I tend to prefer off-camera flash to illustrate the paint jobs on the cars.

In past years I rigged up a Nikon D300s, 8-200 lens, SB700, and Stroboframe holder and got brilliant results. But I was hauling 3.8 kilograms of rig around all day and I ain't getting any younger*. I planned to lighten the load to 1.9 kilograms this year by combining my new Fuji X-E2, a Rayqual adapter, a Nikon 28-105 lens, and a Fuji Ef 42 flash.

The old nikon is an AF-D lens with an aperture ring. The Rayqual adapter also has an aperture ring as it can be used with G lenses. As it does not autofocus or auto aperture on the adapter, that was all to be done by hand. The problem with this was that there are 4 rings of doubt there and only a limited number of hands and fingers to actuate them. And the final criteria for the focussing was to be one old right eye.

That eye used to get me into trouble when I was looking through a Nikon F3 film camera -  some of the dance shows I covered with that film system showed bad focussing near the end. The shift to AF was a blessing. Note: My days of potting sepoys with a three-band Enfield are long behind me, but even then I noted that there was less accommodation to the eyesight as I got older. A formed body of mutineers in red was easy to hit but individuals sometimes escaped.

Well, to cut a long story long, about 3/4 of the images from yesterday show me that I was off with my focussing. The colours are gorgeous, and the flash exposure all i could want.
Setting the Fuji to the Astia film simulation mode with a dynamic range of 200% is perfect for bright toys  - but in this case unfortunately it turned out to be fuzzy toys...

I live and learn. I shall buy a 60mm f:2.4 Fujinon macro lens for the camera and be done with it. Shop tests prove to me that it really can do what I should have been doing yesterday.

* Better looking, yes - but not younger.