German Glass Trumpets

It is hard to pass a lens cabinet in a camera shop without taking a look inside.

Our readers and customers may have all the lenses they will ever need...and all the lenses they can afford...and all the lenses that will fit into the linen press at home...but they still look into that cabinet...

This cabinet is at our new Murray Street store. Clean blue and white minimalist style, and the Zeiss lenses you see here are perfectly in tune with that concept.

I judge them from the rear covers to be Canon-mount. They are, of course, available in Nikon-mount as well. Sticklers for complete detail will also point out there are other Zeiss lenses for Leica M, Sony A, Sony E, and Fujifilm X with different designs, but let's concentrate on the ones we see in the cabinet.

These are DSLR lenses that Zeiss list in their advertising as the world's best. Their competitors may point to other products and claim the same. Fans of various brands can get into optical pub brawls on this basis - it livens up many a camera club meeting. The one undeniable is the fact that the lenses will be better at what they do than the people using them...there is not likely to be any restriction upon art or achievement made by this equipment.

Manual focus? Yes. If you have never done it, these are a good lens to practice on. Your camera system probably has some form of optical assistant feature inside it to help you get the best out of the focus. The old days of the microprism or the split-image rangefinder are largely gone, but some cameras feature electronic versions of this that can help. I have always favoured a finely-divided plain screen myself, but then I distract easily looking into a viewfinder.

The inclusion of a real focus scale and a real depth of field scale on the barrel of the lens is a blessing. These are crude, accurate, and available for presetting a lens just before the big shot. I wish all lenses had them, but they have been left off any new AF jobs.

Weight? Yes. That's metal in those mounts and glass in those barrels. A lotta glass. 12 elements in the 55mm f:1.4 and 16 in the 28mm f:1.4. You are not going to be carrying these lenses as a casual afterthought wrapped up in an old footy sock just in case. They are far too big and far too good to be incidentals. When you attach them to your camera and do a shoot you are deliberately selecting one of the most precise optical instruments available to the general public.

Note that the trumpet shape of the lens barrels seen here is continued further with the flowing shapes of the lens hoods. They are quite elegant...and designed to be so.

Have I ever shot images with any of these lenses? No. My camera systems use the native lenses of the maker and I am happy with them. But had I a different body...a DSLR... I would seriously consider at least one of these optics. I remember the glorious results with the Zeiss glass in my old medium-format film days - it can only be better now.

Heckuva Lens Hood On A Heckuva Lens

If this month's selection of items to review seems a little biased toward Fujifilm equipment you must understand that the selection process for the weblog column is a precise one. I run through the storeroom with a hessian bag and a big stick one step ahead of the warehouse staff. As I go I bang the shelves with the stick and scoop up whatever falls off in the bag - then run for it. This is what gets investigated. Occasionally a box topples slowly and hits the storeroom staff chasing me instead of falling into the bag. Kinetic science is still a new thing...

Well as I rounded the far turn today the Fujifilm XF23mm f:1.4 R lens came down and I got it in one. This is a timely catch as there is going to be a new Fujifilm 23mm lens along later in the month and I would like to have some images from this one to compare.

Note that the new one is going to be more compact but is one stop slower than this lens. It also misses out on an important focusing feature...more on that as we go.

The 23mm lens approximates the same field of view for the Fujifilm X series of cameras that a 35mm lens would have done for a full-frame film camera of the twentieth century. It is a comfortable focal length and gives a relaxed view of the world - not too tight and not too wide. You can still accept it as a normal sort of view in the viewfinder or computer.

It is echoed at present by the 23mm f:2 lens fitted to the X-100 series of cameras. I have always found this to be excellent for tourism and general shooting and is the preferred focal length for shooting party events. It accords brilliantly with the flash power of the Fujifilm EF 42 speed light. It can be a little tight at hot rod shows if they park the vehicles too close together, but if you wish to settle for a front or back 3/4 shot it is very good. there does not seem to be distortion in the shots at this focal length.

Okay, we've got the angle of view - what about the aperture. A true f:1.4 to f:16 in very precise clicks. A setting as well for who you need to go programmed.

The focus is the stunner - it will go down to 28 cm either by AF or by hand...and we do mean hand. You pop the focus ring back from the AF position and you have full mechanical manual focus. Not a computer command. This is precisely the same sort of focus that the Fujinon XF 14mm f:2.8 lens has and it is magnificently reassuring to use. You do not hunt back and forth with it.

I would risk saying that people who might be used to using the manual rangefinder focus of L---- cameras with their lenses would very much warm to this Fujinon lens. I know during my test shots I kept it in the MF mode all the time and made use of the focus-peaking feature of the Fujifilm X-pro1 to nail it every time.

But we have neglected the lens hood...When I first saw it I thought it was a fantasy prop from Lord Of The Rings...it had that gothic-castle look about it. The deep cutbacks are to see sideways, but the extended top and bottom are really quite bizarre. Still, lens hoods are the unsung heroes of the optical chain so we should not laugh - just bayonet it on and ignore the raised eyebrows.

So...which 23 are you going to get - the new lightweight 23mm f:2 WR, the tiny 23mm f:2 on the X -series camera, or this low light 23mm f:1.4? Any way you go, you'll get a good standard wide.

See the Camera Electronic Fujifilm online store here: http://www.cameraelectronic.com.au/fujifilm

The Deliberate Decision - When To Go Manual With A New Lens

More to the point - when to go outside the normal boundaries of the manufacturer's lens line. When to break away and decide to explore new territory. When to take command yourself.

Well the manufacturers of digital camera bodies all give you lenses from their stables that are perfectly suited...each to its own mount. They have generally worked long and hard to have a wide variety of optics in all sizes and focal lengths  - and they will generally have a range of prices for them as well. You pays more, you gets more, but since the lenses are good to start with, the extra costs can sometimes be a diminishing return.

Enter the independent lens makers - companies who may have a license to use the mount of a certain camera but are not restricted as to what the other specifications need to be. They can search for the niche market that wants a particular focal length or maximum aperture. They sometimes elect to leave out auto-focus and auto meter connections to make the lens universal - they figure that if you are advanced enough to want a specifically special lens, you are capable of focusing and stopping down yourself.

The stop-down question is not even addressed in many cases - you get a good old click-stop aperture ring and are in command of it every time you shoot. If you are a maximum-aperture freak you just cello-tape the aperture ring open and let it go at that...put the camera on aperture priority and let it sort out he exposure. In most cases it will guess better than you can anyway.

So here's what I found in the special shelf - a Zhong Yi Creator 85mm f:2 lens. Totally manual, but with the sort of feel and finish that make it as good as the big boys. I think it would be the lens for someone who wanted to do street portraiture quietly and from a distance. So, of course I used it for lots of other things...

Out on the street it does react quickly - no AF or metering to get in the way, and you can stand and stop cars as they go past at 50 kph. Choose a high enough ISO and you can stand at a race course and stop the action good. f:2 lets a lot of light in.

Likewise if you use it as a stand-off standard lens. It would be a an excellent optic for separating the background from a face - hence the street portraiture.

And lastly, it is actually quite nice in a studio set, though here it is stopped down to f:11.

The action of the lens is extremely smooth and the aperture ring has clean click stops. Oddly enough they have an f:16 stop between f:11 and f:22 but do not mark it as such.

Note that there is a good bayonet fitting for a lens hood but none is packed in the box - presumably it is an extra.

Bending Over Sideways To Please The Client - Tilt/Shift Part One

This is not a column about business relationships. It is about optics. If you want the other sort you'll have to go to Dale Carnegie or The Better Business Bureau.

Three manufacturers that I know of currently make tilt/shift lenses that can be used on digital cameras; Nikon, Canon and Samyang/Rokinon. There have been others in the past but my researches don't turn them up readily now. The one in use in the studio today is the Samyang 24mm f:3.5 version with the Nikon mount. Of course you can get it with a Canon mont as well...

Cynics may be forgiven for looking at the design and screwing up their faces, but I'm not here to judge whether or not Samyang unbolted another maker's design and reverse engineered it. Nor any I going to make the obvious comment about the use of high-grade plastics to replicate someone else's metal part. Take it from someone who used it that it is well-built and works as it should.

You don't get AF with these lenses, nor do you want it. You get MF and ADJF...Adjustable Focus.

 And you get to adjust it in ways that are at once artistic and practical.

The subjects that people cover in the studio can sometimes be challenging in that they are longer than the depth of field of a lens will cover. Stop down as much as you like, you still can't get everything in focus -and clients demand everything in focus. If you need to use a wider aperture for artistic effect, you are in even a worse fix.

Here is where the tilt mechanism of these lenses comes in. They are the way to produce the Scheimpflug effect - the phenomenon that occurs when you rotate the lens and the sensor to intersect the plane of the subject. Sounds complex, turns out to be surprisingly visible in the viewfinder, and nails the focus along the length of the subject - in this case a 1:24 Chevrolet Fleetline. Even at a modest aperture, it's in focus.

All in focus from headlight to rear bumper.

Away from the plane that you select, it goes out of focus faster...so if you want to create a fuzzy effect that is where you do it. Again useful in the studio to diffuse the backdrop and smooth it out. The clients want to see the products, not the brick wall behind them.

Note that the focusing you do with this lens is with the broad front ring. It's well damped, and does not creep. The lens is a pleasure to use.

As always, available now in-store or on-line.

A Picnic In The Country

After sampling the delights of early morning tourism in Rossmoyne ( Land Of the Two-storey Mansions Trying To Be More Massive Than Each Other ) I headed over the historic Old Shelley Bridge toward the Artistic Quarter. As this is where the Little Studio is located, perhaps that should be amended to Artistic 1/64th. No matter - I was determined to try the Olympus Pen F as studio camera.

Don't screw up your noses - it might have been meant for a street camera or a tourist camera, but inside that chrome lurks a very special studio camera - one well-adapted to the Little Studio.

The sensor in a Micro 4/3 camera is smaller than the sensors of other mirror-less cameras - they might have the 24mm x 36mm of a full-frame camera or the 18mm x 24mm of the APS-C camera. The Olympus company has pioneered the micro 4/3 sensor which is which is 13.5mm x 18mm. The lenses that are made for micro 4/3 cameras have their focal lengths selected to match this smaller area.

As the lenses have shorter focal lengths while still maintaining the angular coverage of their larger cousins, they benefit from an increased depth of field. The photographers who always want shallow depth of field to throw backdrops out of focus might growl at this and have to take special care to use wide apertures - but those of us that shoot close-ups of various types think that more DOF is wonderful.

To give you a concrete example - if I want to have a digital view of the world that is the same as that was seen in an old 35mm film camera when it had a 35mm wide-angle lens mounted here are my choices:

1. A full frame camera with a 35mm focal-length lens. No mathematics involved. If I focus on a subject at 10 centimetres and use an aperture of f:22 I get a depth of field of 4.6 mm. That's very little when a subject might be 25cm long - It means the subject can only present a very shallow side to the camera.

2. an APS-C camera uses a 23mm lens for that same angle of view. It is better when the same criteria are applied - you'll get a depth of field of 12.6mm. Still shallow but the subject has more space to move and can start to be seen more in 3/4 view.

3. The micro 4/3 camera uses a 17mm focal length lens for that same view - and this time the DOF expands out to 25.1 mm.

Now, obviously if you can move away from the subject a little then the DOF gets wider too, but in the tabletop studio you are clawing for every millimetre of focus that you can get - it can literally be a no-debate question if you are faced with a 40mm macro lens or a 35mm macro - you choose the latter.

Now the good part about the Olympus firm is that they have incorporated massively good sensors and processing engines in their cameras to take advantage of those smaller sensors. Studio work on a tripod does not using their extensive anti-shake mechanisms as such but there is certainly provision in the camera to use the shifting sensor to capture more detail from an immobile subject.

Note that in the examples made today, this extra resolution mechanism was not put in place - I was working on the premise that the camera was being used as a tourist camera so I left it off. Another time might show far more detailed results.

As it is the results from the front bumper of the Chrysler 300 to the back are more than adequate. This is a good test model as it is one of the longer cars of the 60's and it tests DOF to the limit.

One fun thing - there are provisions in the 'art" section of the colour control dial for "retro", "pinhole" and other effects. They are surprisingly good, and if you did not want to add plug-ins or complex actions to Photoshop to achieve old-looking images, this would be a good choice. There is also a very adjustable monochrome control to explore.

For those who have never ridden in a Chrysler 300 from the late 50's and early 60's - they are interesting cars. The front seats swivelled to the side to allow easier entry and exit and in some cases they had adjustable steering wheel rake and the wheels themselves were shaped like television screens. The ones with the press-button automatic transmission did away with column or floor shifts.

They were big and fairly fast on a highway, but the suspension on them had a fore and aft roll to it that could set up a rocking motion that was a killer for people with travel sickness.
You can find the Pen-F available for order on our website.

Too Much Monkey Bidness...The Focus Issue

Did goe to a belly dance show on Monday and was greatley amused - as I always am. The dancers moved like women possessed...mind you at one stage they took 0ne of them away for non-payment of debt. She was a woman re-possessed.*

They move fast, belly dancers - mostly. The tribal ones who follow their leader are very stately in their movements and are easy to capture - the rest are like shooting down kamikazes. Using a camera that has an electronic viewfinder for this sort  of shot is problematical - there is a tiny time lag between what is happening and what the finder displays to the eye.

It is a very small time lag, and the makers of the cameras are doing their best to reduce that lag even further. There is also a small time lag in any auto-focus camera while it does the distance measurement by various means and then focuses the lens. Unfortunately these delays can add up and prevent the shutter from going off before the dancer crashes into the front line of seats and bursts into flame.

In an effort to reduce this with the Fujifilm X-system I have selected a camera with a direct optical finder - the X-Pro1 - to eliminate the perception lag. ( Note that the X-pro1 also has a switchable EVF that you can use for precise focusing when time is not critical.)
I experimented with the focus settings and found that the S setting introduced too long a delay as the camera settled into a perfect focus. The C setting sometimes did not get to a point of focus before the shutter went off - and sometimes seemed to pick up the backdrop as the point of focus rather than the dancer.

The M setting was most useful. A little pre-dance experimenting with the centre point of the stage meant that there was a starting point and every time a dancer passed it flailing I could fire instantly.

More experimentation is needed to see just how high the X-Pro1 will synch electronic flash. Conventional wisdom says 1/125 for sure but I suspect I can stretch it up to 1/250 before trouble ensues. The Fujifilm X-100 camera would synch at 1/1000 but I needed a different focal length for this stage.

The too much monkey bidness  ( thank you Chuck Berry...) refers to the OS setting on the 18-135 mm lens vs the camera on a monopod vs a shutter speed of 1/30 to gather some of the stage lighting vs a Metz flash firing off the ceiling. Eventually the interconnected calculations and estimations for all this overwhelm the brain and I long for an iPhone...

But it is all good in the end. One day I will get the exact rig working perfectly. Then all I have to fear is a costume malfunction.

Uncle Dick

* Here all week. Try the veal.

The Bigger Spoon - A Tale Of Autofocus with Fujifilm X-E2

One of the interesting things you can do with some modern mirror-less cameras is change the size of the AF area to suit the subject you are dealing with.

On my Fujifilm X-E2 I can press the AF button to display the little green AF rectangle and then steer it around with the multi-controller buttons  - much like Pentax, Nikon, and Canon users can do with their respective systems. Good to do if your subject is not dead-centre.

What you can also do is press and twirl the little control thumb wheel just above the multi-controller and watch the green AF rectangle get bigger and smaller - it is selecting more of the sensor to use as the AF measuring pad as you do this.

Why do this? Well, if you have a subject that has intense contrast and detail, you can use the smallest size of rectangle and get sharp focus...but if your subject is dimly lit or lacking in contrast you would be waiting a long time for this small rectangle to work.

Push, twirl, and make it bigger. The camera will have more information coming into the focusing circuit and will lock onto focus faster and better.

The bigger spoon in the title is just this - if you go to dinner with a bigger spoon, you get more stew. Grab the AF info with a bigger box and you get more stew...

Can you tell this post is being written close to lunchtime?

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.

Sweepstakes Book Now Open - Zeiss Standard Lens

We have opened the staff sweepstakes book in regard to the new Zeiss Otus 55mm lens. It is an f:1.4 design and is going to be available in a ZF ( Nikon) or ZE (Canon) mount. Currently the only sight of it has been through the internet - a number of websites including DP Review have mentioned it.

From the posting in the DP site, the lens is as perfect as a copywriter can make it. Ken Rockwell does not approve of it, but then he may not have been offered one...so far I have not received one either.

As a standard lens for either of these two cameras, it should be particularly useful for considered work - landscapes or still life subjects. Reasonably good low-light performance too - after all it is f:1.4.

Of course the price may restrict the possession of it to a select class - it looks to be about the $ 6000 mark. A little more than the standard 50mm f:1.4...

But as I say, the sweepstakes book is open - we have already had the enquiry about whether we have it in stock - but I am still accepting bets as to when the first call asking us to price-match it at $ 1238 will come in. I've got $ 5 on tomorrow morning at 8:31. I reckon the guy who got tomorrow at noon is just wasting his money...