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On the subject of modest telephoto zooms, Nikon also made a 50-135mm f3.5, which is a very nice range and max aperture, IMHO. It was a very good lens for its time; only drawback is that it's a little large-ish.
It's the subject of "Tale 61" in Nikon's "Thousand and One Nights" series of history articles, many of which are quirkily charming. In Tale 61, we learn the story of the "yamaji type" zoom lens design:
https://imaging.nikon.com/history/story/0061/index.htm
Nikon's New Z5
Working with the Z5. Illustration courtesy of B&H Photo. When Nikon's new Z5 was announced the other day, not quite two years after the rollout of the Z mount, I had to confront a disagreeable facet of my psychology: I think I'm reflexively more interested in products that aren't at the top en...
Funny that Ken mentioned toxic landfills. When I was selling for Nikon, I had a dealer who had that exact experience. He bought a nice new lot on which he constructed a made-to-order, long dreamed-of building for his camera store, which had hitherto existed in a cramped old generic storefront. The new building really was nice, as camera stores go (or went, in the 90s).
Then the county discovered severe toxic contamination on the site. It had been a small-scale electronics factory two decades earlier and several owners back, and its operators had a free-spirited attitude towards dumping chemicals any ol' place that seemed convenient.
So my dealer was on the hook for the cleanup and, of course, the land was worthless until decontaminated. He had been tied up in lawsuits against layers of previous owners for several years by the time I met him, but the original polluters had long since dissolved their corporation (no personal liability, remember) and scattered to the four winds. I don't know how the saga ended, but I doubt it was good.
Wisconsin Mystery
Dave Schwarz asks: Do you know anything about the history of Colony Camera in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin? The Colony Camera at North Ave and 88th St. has been out of business seemingly forever...maybe 20 years now? But up until just a couple of years ago the Colony sign (with the Minolta logo) remaine...
@John Camp:
"One thing that's always puzzled me about business is the question of who would buy a company like Olympus Imaging..."
My strong suspicion is that JIP is not buying Olympus Imaging. Olympus will likely pay JIP to take it off their hands. This fact will not be explicit in the details of the transaction, but will be clear to anyone with experience disposing of distressed assets. Some money may go to Olympus from JIP but Olympus will include assets in the transaction that are worth far more than whatever money they receive.
The Memorandum of Understanding is very careful not to use the word "buy" or "sell". It says that the Imaging Business will be "transferred" to JIP.
Olympus R.I.P.?
Well, I'm sad about Olympus. Companies aren't living beings, but they do have "careers," and they certainly have histories. I haven't been able to find any inside scoop yet. But that might be because nobody really knows for sure what will happen, and the people who do know have to be careful wha...
Konstantin's shot with the backlit trees is very characteristic of every classic (read: ca. 70s, 80s, 90s) "nifty-fifty" SLR lens I've tried, all of which have been pretty similar double-gauss designs.
They give moderately yucky (that's the optical engineering term) bokeh when used wide open with lots of small, backlit detail in the background (foliage especially). Stopping down by even one stop improves the situation quite a bit, in my experience (which, of course, is not exhaustive, given that there are probably 50+ different varieties of that particular beast). In fairness, small, backlit detail in the background is hard for most lenses, I think.
Bokeh Is Not a Stable Characteristic of a Lens
I ran across a nice example yesterday of the same lens exhibiting both "good" and "bad" bokeh. I was looking through pictures taken with the old Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8, a fine little lens (identical in design to an earlier generation of Leica Summicron, by the way) which is widely available...
I don't mean to get all heavy here, but wonderful things like this really and truly give me hope for us as a species.
We use our minds in so many bad ways (which, don't worry, I won't list), but sometimes they come up with something truly wondrous like this. Just a simple, yet somehow startling, twist of genius, with no purpose other than to spread pleasure.
If There Was Ever a Cartoon for TOP Readers...
This is very slightly school/work inappropriate, I guess, so a mild NSFW warning. However, if there was ever a cartoon that TOP readers are more likely to "get" than the average population, this is it. Let me know if you don't get it! I'd be interested. Mike (Thanks to JG) Original contents copy...
@Steve Rosenblum re: shutterspeed tester for iPhone
I use an app called Shutter-Speed. The app is free, and when used alone it works by using the iPhone's microphone to time the sound of the shutter mechanism. I found it to be reasonably usable and accurate for leaf shutters at speeds of about 1/60 or slower. You read the audio waveform and mark the peaks to determine the opening and closing of the shutter.
The developer also sells an accessory 'probe' (about $30) that plugs into the iPhone's headphone/microphone jack (you'll need a lightning adapter on later iPhones). This probe converts light to sound, so now the app works by timing the light coming through the shutter opening. It still shows you a waveform, but the waveform is significantly better defined than the audio version, and gives me a usable result at least up to 1/500 with leaf shutters. I've never tested a focal plane shutter.
I can't say exactly how accurate it is, since I don't have a commercial shutter speed tester to compare it to. But based on my exposures of film, it seems like it's reasonably accurate. I get what I expect from the shutters I've tested with it (5 of them as of now). Here's the app:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shutter-speed/id560154244
Nostalgic Nikons
A quick snap to show you the reason why I asked about Nikon repair shops. It's an FE, for those of you who don't know that on sight. It works fine; I just want to get it CLA'd. I found the body (I already had the lens) for very few bucks, and it's basically flawless, to my non-collector, not-t...
Any man who works in the darkroom wearing a bow tie and links in his French cuffs is a far better man than I. Wonderful!
Here's Your Illustration!
Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, B655-23B A. Aubrey Bodine working under his enlarger This was supposed to be the illustration for the enlarger article. This happens more often than you'd think. I don't write articles in advance, and I generally search for illustration images whi...
Canon's FF mirrorless rollout is clearly a little uncoordinated, with poor synchronization between its body and lens introductions, as you noted, Mike. They mis-timed their "okay, now we get serious" moment (as did Nikon, but not as badly), and now they're scrambling a bit.
But this will be temporary. We can't see what Canon's elves are doing, but certainly they are tinkering away on cameras that will be a great match for the mondo high-end lenses Canon has announced, and modest lenses that will be a great match for the RP and its successors.
This is a long game, with a ton o' stuff coming down the pike that Canon knows about and we don't. They don't have to get everything right in the first 5 minutes. In 24 months the RF system will undoubtedly look a lot more logical and well-rounded with jillions of happy users.
New News From the World of Stuff
Of course, the "stuff" doesn't have very much to do with photography—as they say in courtrooms, that's stipulated (in law the word means "to accept a proposition without requiring that it be established by proof"). That aside, a number of delightful new baubles of interest have passed by in the ...
Strange coincidence: I just watched a vlog where the vlogger/photographer visits the same location depicted in Sexton's shot (although in winter) and decides to take no pictures. The location is at about the 4:30 mark in this video for anyone curious, but the beginning of the video is worth watching for context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN1tAMZozes
Although I'm not a huge fan of landscape photography, I've recently developed the weird habit of watching a lot of landscape photography vlogs. The vlogger in the above video is my current favorite. His name is Adam Gibbs, and he photographs mostly in British Columbia and other parts of western Canada. A lot of vloggers affect an I'm-young-and-hip-and-my-life-is-a-nonstop-fabulous-adventure kid of vibe, but Gibbs is not so young, blessedly calm, and a little wry, a vibe I much prefer.
His vlogs, especially the more recent ones, are usually gorgeous. He's helped immensely, of course, by the place where he lives, but it's pretty amazing what a one-man-band can do these days in terms of visual production. He packs a small video/audio setup, a drone, a couple of tripods, and a Nikon D850 into a backpack and makes beautiful 10-15 minute travelogs/photo lessons, all on his own.
As I said, I watch a possibly alarming number of these vlogs, not just his. There's a sub-genre of guys who traipse around taking pictures with their dogs, and I can't resist those either, for obvious reasons. What it says about my life that I'm spending so many hours in my cramped Manhattan apartment dreaming about far away and empty places is a question I should probably examine.
Other People Have Print Sales Too
John Sexton, Geologic Conundrum, Banff National Park, Canada Old friend John Sexton is one of only a very few photographers in the United States capable of making a living off print sales. Seriously, you could probably count such guys on your fingers and toes. ...In case anyone out there is dr...
@ David Dyer-Bennet
Not sure if I'm reading your comment right, but if you're concerned about whether the Z7 and Z6 have two dials, they do. Thumb and forefinger — very much like all other mid and upper end Nikon bodies. They were easy and comfortable to operate for me.
The Z cameras also have an extremely good and well-placed AF-ON button for so-called back-button autofocus, which is critical for me. So many manufacturers, including companies that get tons of praise in these parts (cough, Fuji), can't get this right. It baffles me.
A Few More Thoughts on Ze Z
• False alarums: I was gratified to learn yesterday that Nikon has put a lot of pride in the new 35mm ƒ/1.8Z, and that it's not a rehash of the SLR lens. Additionally, Ross Harvey has written a review of the Z7 with the 35mm ƒ/1.8Z and concludes that "I've never seen images of this quality anywh...
Ask and ye shall receive.
Here is the Z-mount S-Line 35mm f/1.8
Here is the Z-mount S-Line 50mm f/1.8
I'll let everyone evaluate for themselves the complexity of these designs, and their similarity or lack thereof to F-mount Nikkor designs.
(I emailed higher res versions to Mike directly.)
I'm Suspicious of Nikon, and it's Sony's Fault
[Note: Be sure to see the later "update" at the end of the main post, which changes the tenor of this post; the fears expressed in the post were wrong. —Ed.] - Sir Thom "First off" as they say—a locution I hate—"first" does just exactly as much work as "first off," making the "off" in "first off...
I bought a medium format film camera recently, and it's a: rangefinder. This was driven mainly by my desire for a 6x7 format camera; none of the SLRs available in that format really appealed to me. If I wanted 6x6, I'd probably get a TLR.
On the Fuji, I prefer the rangefinder style, but I'd actually get an X-T20 for its feature mix. If the X-Pro2 were a little smaller and had a tilting LCD, I'd choose it instead. If the X-100F had a base 28mm lens and an add-on converter to make it a 50, plus a tilting LCD, it would be my dream camera.
I need to start my own camera company.
Two Questions
1. If you were going to get one camera to shoot film, small or medium format—removing cost from the calculations—would it be a.) a rangefinder or b.) an SLR? 2. If you were going to get one Fuji, would it be a.) a rangefinder-style (X-Pro2, X-100F) or a DSLR-style (X-T2, X-T20)? Just curious.......
@ Severian
I took to digital like the proverbial duck to water back in the late 1990s, and I was sure I would never shoot film again, too. And I would have bet a year's salary I would never, ever endure the tedium of developing the junk at home again.
And then this past summer I was seized by a sudden, utterly inexplicable obsession to buy a 40-year-old 6x9 Mamiya rangefinder. And, inevitably, a month after that I was tapping a Paterson developing tank on my bathroom countertop, for the first time in 25 years.
I'll never say never again is what I'm sayin', again.
Open Mike: New Old Film!
Kodak Alaris, the imaging division of the old Kodak that was spun off to satisfy the demands of the UK pension fund, has continued to produce both black-and-white and color films. Recently it re-introduced the famous T-Max P3200 in 135 size. Which makes me feel old—I remember when the film was...
Mark me down as another 28mm/55mm kind of guy.
With today's high-resolution cameras, cropping is a viable option in many more situations than it was with 35mm film, IMHO. So now when I think of a prime lens, I consider it to have "secondary" focal lengths up to, say, 50% longer than its true focal length, for practical purposes.
So a 28mm is also a 35mm or a 40mm. And a 55mm is also a 75mm, within limits.
Then, too, shooting and stitching multi-shot panoramas is so easy now, in many (not all) circumstances you can use a lens as if it's wider than it really is.
More on a Two-Lens Kit: The Classic Variant
Of course there are many ways to construct one's own arsenal of lenses. (No one—or very few people anyway—ever has all of them, so choices must be made.) Two methods that are the farthest from the present topic might be: 1. To own many different cameras of many different brands, plus a few lense...
Loved looking at all these pictures and processes — thank you to all who submitted.
And Moose, thank you for posting that wonderful wedding shot — just fantastic. I was on that block of Flatbush Ave. about a year ago — a friend lives in a house around the corner, on the same block as the studio of the photographer who took your picture back in 1947. So your shot gave me that sense of wonder I always feel when photography reveals the layers of time that attach to a place, or a building, or even a person, and the change that time brings with it.
I also love learning new things about how professional photographers worked in the good ol' days. The banquet camera concept was new to me, but, of course, it makes perfect sense.
A Baker's Dozen: Large-Format Contact Prints
Up first is an image that isn't even a contact print, but might go one better. It's a unique image made directly in-camera on Ilford Harman Direct Positive Paper. Reader Johan Verhulst, 58, who lives in Lebbeke, a small village in the Flanders region of Belgium, uses a brass Suter Petzval lens...
I have the opposite feeling about the 8008s. In 1991, I was working in a camera store in Northern California that was a decidedly Nikon-leaning shop. My faithful steed, at the time, was a Minolta SRT-101, bought used for me by my mother and uncle in 1978.
In the early 1990s, Nikon USA had a program whereby if you worked in a camera store, you could earn points for selling Nikon stuff and then cash those points in for Nikon gear of your own. I was a good salesman, and I saved up enough points for, ta da!, an 8008s. (It was comparatively a lot of points.)
I still remember when that box came from Nikon USA, addressed not to the store but to me, my first brand new camera, a high-end Nikon to boot! A thrill from a more innocent time. That camera was a very satisfying object for me, much more for what it symbolized for a kid who grew up in a family of modest means than for any pictures I took with it (which were relatively few).
The Perfect Camera is Just Around the Corner!
Imperfected: the Nikon N8008s of 26 years ago Add one part Fountain of Youth, one part El Dorado, one part Shangri-La, one part Land of Milk and Honey, plus one sprinkling each of the inevitability of change and idle daydreams and a hardheaded and practical prognostication of the likely future,...
Photography may not be getting easier, but man are you right that certain aspects of operating a camera are a lot easier.
I was recently possessed by (another) bout of insanity and bought a Mamiya Universal press camera (a giant rangefinder, typically equipped with a 6x9 film back). It takes four — count 'em four — separate controls to make your next picture. You: activate the film advance release catch; wind the film advance lever twice; cock the shutter with the cocking lever; trip the shutter with the shutter release. Crazy. But fun! For now.
What may turn out to be the most pleasurable thing about buying this camera was that it led me to discover a Youtube phenomenon named Peter Elgar. He's just great fun to listen to; a living embodiment of an era now long past, yet 100X cooler than any of the young ranters trying to make a career on social media. Here's his rundown of the sister camera to mine, the Super 23:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_oqSiQGd1Q
Photography Isn't Getting Any Easier
Photography isn't getting any easier mainly because the hard parts are still hard. Seeing and recognizing photographs (both while shooting and while editing) and understanding their meaning and their appeal have never been common skills, and still aren't. Some things are much easier c. 2017—for ...
I actually love the picture, and I'm glad you ponied up for the right to publish it.
I was once out and about in the California countryside with a Nikon 800mm f/5.6 lens when I spied a bobcat. He was so far away that, even with the 800, there was no point in trying to get a shot. I just enjoyed watching him; he acted exactly like a regular house cat. That was the closest I ever got to one. From the looks of this picture, I guess I should have been checking the back alleys around my apartment building. Who knew.
Funny Photo Rant
[Ed. note: Our friend JG, he of the Frankencamera, sent me this little rant the other day. Does what happens to him happen to you?] Words and valuable photo by JG You know what is really annoying about being a hobbyist photographer these days? Having friends who sincerely believe that every h...
Well, your old nostalgia train provided me with a few hours of diverting entertainment. Despite being a manager in a pretty good camera store in the late 80s/early 90s, I knew basically nothing of the Exakta 66 or its East German progenitor, the Pentacon 6.
The site you linked to (for the picture of Herr Mandermann) has page after page of operational and historical information about the Pentacon 6 of the kind that can only be written by a passionate devotee. I mean that as a great compliment.
I had to fight the very strong urge to buy one, even though there's no chance I would shoot more than one roll of film before my attention wandered!
The Old Nostalgia Train
I've already written way too much about the old Exakta 66, a camera of direct interest to roughly .03% of you. (That number might be optimistic, but then, only optimistic people would shoot an Exakta 66.) However, Oren uncovered some numbers yesterday about what it cost: "The B&H ad in Popular P...
You've sparked a somewhat different take on finishing a great book for me; certain kinds of really great books can be kind of maddening to me, if there's nothing (or very little) else that is as good.
I'm haunted, for example, by John le Carré's two great Cold War masterpieces, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People. No other espionage novels have ever really come close, no matter how often book jacket blurbs, publisher ads, and book reviewers say so. I almost wish I hadn't read them (10 times each, by now, I think) because their greatness makes all other spy stories pale in comparison. I want that amazing feeling that Tinker, Tailor gives you when you first read it, and I've never found it anywhere else. So part of me is perversely resentful of the book, and of le Carré himself.
I have similar, if less intense, feelings about (some, not all) of the crime stories and novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
I don't feel the same way about great non-genre books (fiction or non-fiction), for some reason, and I don't feel it about great photographs or books of photographs, either.
Have Faith
The great American photographer Sally Mann once told me (paraphrasing madly here—it's been a long time) that she always worried about where the next great picture was going to come from. Or, sometimes, whether it would come along at all. And then she said something like, "and yet it always does....
On the other hand ... I recently came to wish I had a little bit more perfectionism in me. Two years ago I bought a moderate wide angle lens for about $300 — refurbished with a warranty. I intended to use it as a knockaround street/travel lens, and so, embracing un-perfectionism, I gave it only a cursory test. It seemed okay, and okay was all I aspired to. The first few times I used it, I did get a couple of weirdly unsharp results, but, reveling in my loosey-goosey air, I dismissed these shots as no big deal to a sensible guy like me.
I didn't use the lens all that often, so time passed without any cause for alarm, and the warranty expired. Recent bad results in pictures that mattered to me caused me to look more closely at the lens, and sure enough, it's significantly defective when used in a specific way that I use it about 30% of the time.
Now for the kicker: the manufacturer, who I won't name, does not provide any spare parts for the lens. It can't be repaired. (The first time I've encountered this in a new, still-on-the-market lens in 35 years of photography.) It's out of warranty, so I have no legal right to a replacement. I'm out $300, which I am hereby writing off to the bitter wages of un-perfectionism.
Hwo to Cure Perfectionism
Here are a few suggestions for curing photo-related perfectionism. First, a few words about the words. The other day in the "Level With Me" post, I wrote, "...a fair number of photographers are meticulous or fastidious (the more pejorative words might be fussy or picky)...." It's tough terminolo...
I may have posted this before; if so, please ignore!
Once, while busily procrastinating, I did a little research on the word bokeh, as used in English. (Somebody was claiming it was in common use before the Photo Techniques articles were published, which I knew to be untrue.)
I have access to Lexis-Nexis, and its database did contain one (and only one) prior English-language citation of the word, and it's not referring to photography. Instead, it uses the word to denote mental blur, which I thought was really interesting. It's from the Nov. 8, 1990 edition of The Washington Post, in an article by T.R. Reid about the reluctance of the Japanese population to allow their Prime Minister to send any Japanese troops overseas. Here's the relevant paragraph:
" ... much of the country seems to be fearful of any foreign involvement. The attitude, dating back to Japan's disastrous defeat in World War II, is a broader and longer-lasting version of what in America came to be known as the "post-Vietnam syndrome." The term for it here is heiwa bokeh, which translates as "peace senility.""
What a lovely phrase and idea: peace senility.
So this doesn't in any way change the story of bokeh in its photographic sense in English. But in its "mental blur" sense it did escape Japan as early as 1990, and the Post editors decided to transliterate it with the 'h', just as Mike did a few years later. Great minds think alike!
20 Years Ago Next Month: What Is 'Bokeh'?
By John Kennerdell A still from "Legend" (2015), Dick Pope, director of photography. In 2014 Pope evidently went through just about every lens at a large London rental house before settling on some old Cooke Speed Panchros for his brilliantly photographed "Mr. Turner." In "Legend," the followi...
re: resale price maintenance
Jack's answer regarding the Leegin decision was exactly right. There's a complex -- and, to me, fascinating -- history of resale price maintenance law and economics in the U.S. (and elsewhere).
Won't go into the details here, but the Leegin decision was an extremely consequential event for everyday American life -- in more and more industries, companies are using it to control price competition between retailers and the extent and depth of discounting in U.S. stores. The mechanism they use, which Leegin made possible, is called "Unilateral pricing" -- a Google search will turn up plenty of stories on it. There's been a kerfuffle over it in the contact lens industry, and that story is an incredibly instructive example of how economics, competing (and typically unpretty) interest groups, and government policy interact with big consequences for us little folks.
Tasty Olympuses
I know you find no appeal here. Move along. I get it from many recent comments that we're not updating our cameras as often as we used to. But if you should happen to find yourself on the uptake side of a lengthened ownership cycle, and just in case you've been hankering for those tasty Olympus...
Wonderful! I love how they were scrambling for a roll of film. Been there!
Of course, it's a hoary old cliché to say that the sight of Earth like that should make us all acutely aware of the fragility of our unbelievably beautiful home in this cold universe. And clearly, it hasn't -- we're merrily despoiling it just as fast as we ever did. But it should have made us aware.
On the Scene of One of the Greatest Photo Shoots in History
I had never seen this before, although you might have—it was published in 2013. A wonderful short by the Goddard Space Flight Center about the shooting of "Earthrise," undoubtedly one of the greatest photographs ever made. The video recreates the making of the shot in wonderful detail. Gave me ...
One further note to keep in mind: with the lithography division writing off 29.7b yen in inventory (29.7b yen is 29,700 million yen), and the company forecasting "only" a 9b (9,000m) yen loss overall, it's essentially certain that the camera division will be posting an operating profit for the year. It's the lithography division that will drag the company into an overall net loss.
So if you're analyzing Nikon, the really urgent question is not about cameras at all. The question is what's wrong with the lithography division, and how can they fix it? (That question goes back a long ways; Nikon's first loss-making year ever in its history was in 1992 (talk about hand-wringing!). And the cause was -- yep, huge inventory write-downs in the lithography division. Everything old ...
Nikon Lets the Bleeding Show
Nikon has released three worrying notices in quick succession, most notably a "Notice of Recognition of Extraordinary Loss" that announces losses totaling more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the last three quarters of 2016. More than half of that comes from the "Result of Solicitatio...
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