Photographs, Photographers and Photography

Small, yes, but is it fast?

The Olympus Digital Pen is an exciting prospect for those of us interested in an affordable alternative to the ridiculously priced digital Leica M8, whose cost of entry with a lens is well north of $7,000.

The Olympus Digital Pen wit the 17mm (=34mm) non-zoom lens

At $900 for the body with the 34mm wide angle and optical viewfinder it is affordable as a street snapper but as yet there’s no indication what the shutter lag is like; auto focus with a lens this short is not important as pretty much everything will be sharp all the time, but what the world really needs is a pocketable high quality camera with a decent sized sensor without the interminable shutter lag which makes just about very point-and-shoot out here useless for street photography.

Thank goodness Olympus has had the good taste to release the body in chrome. The more amateur it looks the less visible the photographer becomes.

One other thought – the Pen is smaller than the M8 in every dimension without a lens, and much smaller with the 17mm fitted compared to, say, a 28mm lens.

Check the Comment for some preliminary feedback on shutter and focus lag.

No contest.

It’s not so much ‘Lens of the Year’ as it is ‘Outfit of the Year’ and the choice will surprise none who have been visiting here recently.

Canon 5D, Canon 100mm EF Macro and Bower ring flash

While none of this gear is ‘new’ – the 100mm macro has been around for ages, the 5D is no spring chicken and ring flashes are as old as politicians’ lies – what is so very special about this outfit is how simple the technical side becomes. Back when, in the bad old film days, you used a lens head on a bellows, constantly messed with focus and depth of field, tried to remember the right exposure compensation when the bellows were racked out and then suffered agonies trying to light your subject. Then, when you snapped the picture, you realized that you had forgotten to stop the lens down and were five stops over-exposed.

But Canon obsoleted all of that with a few strokes of genius, doubtless available from other makers also. First, they made the lens fixed length. It does not change in size as you focus. Second, the focus range is continuous from infinity to life size on a full frame sensor body. Third, focus is automatic and blisteringly fast. And, finally, E-TTL makes sure that all those arcane calculations are a thing of the past, computing the optimal blend of natural and flash light on the fly. A nice 100mm length also allows the photographer to step back from the subject, leaving more working room, and throw in the Software of the Year and you have the most perfect macro kit yet.

Thanks to all this magic 100% of your attention can be devoted to the subject and the technology takes care of the back end. This compares well with the automatic gearbox in cars which leaves more brain cycles available for the job of driving rather than shifting gears. Sure, there are people who like to use a clutch. (None of them drive in Formula One, by the way). There are also people who will tell you that film beats digital and good sound ended with the LP era. Have pity on them, while they do their calculations and make incantations to the analog gods of yore. The world will always have its technophobes, most so over-invested in yesterday that they have to defend antiquity.

And it’s not like this wonder lens is wildly expensive, compared to the mess of adapters, bellows, racks etc. in olden days. The lens retails for under $500 and works every bit as well on Canon’s cropped sensor bodies as it does on full frame. The optical and mechanical quality is right up there with Canon’s exalted ‘L’ offerings – I know as I own some. In fact, there’s not a sharper lens in my kit. So add an inexpensive digital Rebel body, splash out another $100 on the ring flash (no need to get Canon’s costly version), and you have the best macro kit out there for under $1,000. What’s that, you say? You want the ability to switch off one side of the ring flash tube for better modeling effects like the Canon one does? Well, dear reader, I have two words for you. Black tape. You stick it over one half of the flash tube in the same way you stick it on your camera to obliterate all those gauche manufacturer’s markings. Now that’s what I call a bargain.

The good old days were …. really bad.

The Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro autofocus lens is the Lens of the Year.

Simply unacceptable color fringing.

5D, 50mm f/1.4 at f/8 – after and before correcting for green and red chromatic aberration

When processing the picture included in yesterday’s journal entry, I was reminded again of the truly frightful extent of uncorrected chromatic aberration (color fringing) in Canon’s 50mm f/1.4 standard lens. For many this is a portrait lens on cropped sensor bodies, with an equivalent focal length of 80mm.

The picture on the right is unprocessed, straight from the camera at the lens’s sweet spot of f/8. The one on the left is after removing the chromatic aberration using the sliders in Lightroom. Even in these small pictures the amount of chromatic aberration is shocking – these enlarged snaps would make for a 30″ x 20″ print. (The small scale difference results from correcting converging verticals in Photoshop CS2).

Given the superb quality of the sensors in Canon’s DSLRs, isn’t it about time that some more attention was paid to fixing dated lens designs like the fixed focal length 50mm one? This sort of thing has been properly designed by any number of manufacturers decades ago and there really is no excuse for such poor optical engineering in a medium priced fixed focal length lens who many, suspicious of the bulk and poor optics in most zooms, still regard as their ’standard’ lens. Especially old duffers like me who toured the world with a 50mm or 35mm on our cameras, because that’s all we could afford.

Now a glance at any news source will confirm that there are more complaining historians in the world than people with fix-it ideas. The fix here could not be simpler, or more lucrative for all concerned. Do a Panasonic. License Leica’s fabulous designs, Canon, forget about corporate pride, and make sure the final product is emblazoned with the Leica name. Use your mass manufacturing genius to drive the price down and I will be the first to have a fully automated 50mm f/2 Summicron-R Leica lens (made by Canon) on my wonderful 5D – the best 50mm lens ever made. Heck, if I’m feeling spendy I’ll even consider springing for the 50mm Summilux-R with its f/1.4 maximum speed – the second greatest 50mm lens ever made. And while Leica, 40 years on, still cannot manage to add autofocus to its SLR lenses, for Canon that would, of course, be de rigeur.

And while you are at it, Canon, feel free to replace your underwhelming 20mm f/2.8 (which I know and dislike) with Leica’s superb 19mm f/2.8 Elmarit-R, or even with the older 21mm f/4 Super Angulon-R which I knew and loved for many years. Leica and Schneider conspired on that design – can life get any better than that?

A big enlargement to make things yet clearer – color fringes before correction

No half measures here!

My preliminary ramblings about the Canon 100mm macro focused largely on ergonomics with a quick peek at image quality.

One of the advantages of the 100mm focal length is the doubled – compared with a 50mm – subject to camera distance, making lighting issues easier. But I decided I wasn’t about to do things half way, so I checked into ring light flashes for the 5D. Well, Canon wants over $400 for theirs to which all I could politely say was “No thank you”.

So a quick visit to that repository of thieves, cutthroats and crooks known as ePrey was called for and, lo and behold, simply dozens of ring flashes were on sale. After weeding through the offerings I finally found one which used a real flash tube (rather than poncy, underpowered, LEDs) and, best of all, mated with the ETTL circuitry in the 5D to make just about everything automatic.

$120 and a few days later UPS dropped it off. It comes with three adapter rings, the 58mm one of which fits the 100mm Macro. Look closely and you can see there’s a real flash tube in there:

The body takes four AA cells and looks suspiciously like the body of a Vivitar 283 flash gun. Recycling time is 3 seconds with fresh alkaline batteries. The foot has a nice screw retainer and you can see the contacts for ETTL in the base:

Here’s how the whole thing looks on the 5D – the power supply and tube are incredibly light, weighing less than the lens itself.

Once the base ring, which rotates freely on the flash tube body, is threaded onto the lens, the tube assembly is free to rotate and, if you think about it, that’s no problem. The base ring has nice, coarse serrations for a proper grip and protrudes just above the body of the flash tube – nice.

Use is simplicity itself. ETTL balances exposure between flash and camera automatically, the lighting is shadowless, and all you have to do is frame and press the button. If the flash is in range the green LED on the rear illuminates after the picture is taken to show all is well. It would have been nice if it did this with the first pressure on the shutter release, but, heck, ‘film’ is cheap in the digital age, no?

Suffice it to say that the whole thing works perfectly out of the box, at one quarter of the price of the Canon branded device. OK, so the finish is more GM than Toyota, but at that price, who cares?

And because even our six year old could take sharp snaps with this little combo, here’s one which mixes sharp and blurred, courtesy of ETTL, which has mixed flash and regular light by using a slow shutter speed, adding blur to a subject swaying in the wind. Choice of a low ISO setting compounds the blur.

5D, 100mm Macro, ring flash, 1/100, f/6.7, ISO 100

More later.

Not your father’s macro lens.

For a preamble on macro lenses, please click here.

Over the past five years anytime I wanted to get really close to something meant using my Olympus C5050Z five megapixel digital. Quality is decent, it focuses postage stamp close and framing using the built-in LCD screen is dead accurate. Rack the lens out to maximum zoom and you also get reasonable subject-to-lens clearance for illumination purposes.

If nothing else, it has been used to list any number of film cameras and lenses on various auction sites, so it has paid for itself many times. Most digital cameras, especially the point-and-shoots, focus easily into what we think of as the macro range, so the Olympus is nothing special in this regard. Handy, though, and easy to use, with auto everything – focus, flash, exposure.

By contrast, here’s my latest Canon lens addition – macro with a vengeance.

Canon 5D and 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens, with funding source

With modern multi-coated glasses, charging extra for a lens hood must be as big a scam as global warming and ethanol, and I never use one on any of my Canon lenses except on the fish-eye and the 400mm, where they are non-removable. Why? Because they add bulk and make no earthly difference to the picture. And if you have seen the hood for this Canon, you will not want to buy it either. But I do use an UV filter on everything and have recently convinced myself that the German B+W ones are better made than their Japanese counterparts, so I paid up a few dollars more for the real thing. Seems I’m still a sucker for that ‘Made in Germany’ thing. The main reason I use a filter is that I think any decent photographer should throw out all his lens caps.

Not a Japanese filter…. As you can see, that Olympus has no issues with getting in close.

Now no one could accuse the Canon Macro of being pretty to look at – not like in Leica Summicron or Contarex Planar pretty – but its inverted cone design speaks of the Bauhaus, function and funky form. Construction is typical Canon prime – meaning good if not ‘L’ quality and a whole lot better than their crappy kit zooms. Best of all, at under $500, if you drop it you are upset but not destroyed. Try saying that about your Leica lenses….

Everything about the ergonomics of this lens is right. The 100mm focal length means you get a nice long subject distance to simplify lighting. You are twice as far away as with a 50mm macro, at the cost of depth of field. The short (about 135 degree) focus throw from infinity to 1:1 (the lens goes down to life size on a full frame camera) is very smooth and full time manual focusing is included if you use autofocus – very handy for a macro lens where small focus adjustments are the order of the day. The bulk and weight of the lens make for perfect balance on the 5D, meaning hand holding is easy.

Best of all, unlike all those macro lenses I illustrated yesterday, the length of this one does not change as it is racked out – meaning that no new obstacle to proper lighting presents itself. And auto exposure means no more figuring of light loss as 1:1 reproduction is approached – a loss of two stops in brightness owing to the extension of the lens from the sensor. That holds whether the lens is made by Canon or Ballspond Roadski optics.

How accurately does the lens focus on the 5D? I am using the center rectangle here which is the most sensitive focus point in the camera’s design. Placing the camera and lens on a tripod on the high tech Pindelski test bench with the camera at 45 degrees to the tape measure, here is the result with the lens autofocused on the line just above the numeral 3 with the lens at full aperture of f/2.8, set at its closest focus distance:

That looks pretty spot on to me.

Not convinced? Here it is much larger:

Far better than I could do with manual focus. Anyway, the next time someone tells you autofocus will never beat manual, smile quietly to yourself and walk away. The boob probably swears that film beats digital, too. There is little point in arguing with fools.

Now I am an empiricist by nature, not a test bench nerd, but with a lens whose primary use is for the very close-up subject, a few seconds doing this determines whether the lens is a keeper or not. Clearly, this one is a keeper. Thank you, B&H and thank you, Canon!

The Dr. Pindelski optical test bench? High tech at its best:

Because of the internal space needed to allow those elements to be racked out when focusing close, the 100mm Macro is necessarily quite a bit longer than that greatest portrait lens I have ever used, the 85mm:

Comparable in weight, the 100mm Macro is much longer than the 85mm. Lens hoods NOT included!

So ergonomics, autofocus accuracy and sharpness are not going to be an issue with the Canon 100mm USM Macro lens.

Focus speed? Simply startling, with little noise. The only time I could trip it up is by focusing at the closest distance then recomposing on a subject at infinity with poorly defined details. The lens would hunt back and forth before locking in. For non-macro use Canon thoughtfully provides a focus limiter switch to prevent this kind of silliness. In practice, I have found that setting the 5D to servo-focus is ideal when this lens is used in the close-up range. This setting makes the lens focus continuously even after the first pressure is taken up on the shutter release button and you can hear the stepper motor working away to maintain the subject in focus. As I said at the beginning of this article, this is not your father’s macro lens.

As I already own the fast 85mm non-macro, I have little interest in using the 100mm Macro lens for any but macro subjects. To do otherwise would be like using an f/1 lens at f/4 – a waste of money. If, on the other hand, this is your only portrait-length lens, then use in the studio should be just fine.

The challenge now is to see whether I can take any snaps remotely up to the technical standards of this optic. Subsequent articles will determine that.

Click here for Part II.

Watch how they are made.

A reader posted an interesting comment (scroll down) with a link to Canon’s videos showing how lenses are made. (That same reader was very helpful in resolving a problem that prevented Internet Explorer users from commenting – thank you, Ben!).

Click on Lens Assembly Process (click through to get there – I cannot find a specific URL) and you will see how the monster 500mm f/4L IS lens is assembled – I still don’t feel good about the price tag, but this helps.

There’s lots of great historical information regarding Canon’s products – click Camera Hall for a history of cameras or here for great historical details on Canon.

Simply the best 400mm lens I have used.

Refer back to Part I for the design and handling aspects of this lens.

Now for some pictures. These were snapped with the camera/lens mounted at the lens ring on a Bogen 2016 monopod, one of the greatest bargains for any photographer. The monopod is fitted with a Manfrotto QR head, another tremendous bargain. Absent use with the very fastest shutter speeds, a monopod, as a minimum, makes great sense as it eliminates vertical movement of the camera. The long tube of the lens, with its attendant high turning moment of inertia, reduces rotational movement. That leaves fore-and-aft movement, something that can be greatly reduced with a solidly planted, wide legged, stance and support of the long end of the lens’s barrel with the other hand. Remember the lens has no IS – a shame, but that would add $500 and 8 ozs to the price and weight. I can live without it.

These snaps were easy. I drove 21 miles west to California’s wonderful Highway One with the sun having a couple of hours of gambolling about left, before its date with the far east. Early and late light always conveys the best drama. Add a lens that is inherently dramatic, and the rest is easy.

ISO was set to 400 for shorter shutter speeds. All snaps were underexposed by 1.5 stops, as these late lighting conditions are simply an opportunity for highlights to burn out with the 5D’s sensor. Underexposure and a little use of the ‘Shadows’ slider in Aperture makes for a far better dynamic range. The aperture makes no difference to resolution with this lens – the aperture controls only light and depth of field. Definition remains unchanged. Meaning superb.

All pictures were processed in Aperture, meaning RAW conversion and default 5D sharpening settings. The lens does not need additional sharpening, unlike its two Leica predecessors. Focus was automatic, with a first pressure on the button locking the central rectangle focus point, pending recomposition. Forget matrix focus and all that marketing gobbledegook – there is so little depth of field at short distances that critical focus must be on the key part of the image – meaning the eyes, where animals are concerned.

First, driving north on One, a quick stop at Moonstone Beach to catch the pelican doing his thing. This one is actually one half of the image, cropped for drama. So it’s as if I used an 800mm lens here! You can’t tell – there is no grain with the 5D’s sensor at ISO 400.

Pelican at take-off. 1/1500th, f/8

10 miles further north, just past Hearst Castle, is Elephant Seal Beach and a stop to enjoy sunset with these big boys was just what the doctor ordered. Just stay upwind of these fellows if at all possible. The lens is completely flare free, even directly into the sun. And who said fish don’t make you fat?

Elephant seal pup. 1/180th, f/8

Elephant seal. 1/250th, f/8

Finally, with the sun three-quarters of the way down the horizon, driving back home, Hearst Castle glows in all its splendor. This one had the camera resting on the car for support.

Hearst Castle at sunset. 1/180th, f/11

The striking thing about this optic is that, for the first time in my experience with a 400mm focal length, absolutely no excuses need be made for micro-contrast. Meaning the resolution of fine detail with high contrast is equivalent to a fixed focal length prime (OK, excluding the lousy Canon 20mm!). That statement alone should have you rushing to your favorite vendor to buy yourself one for the holidays. Sure, you may only use it a few times a year, but when you do …. Wow! Canon’s megabuck f/4 and f/2.8 optics of like length may be better, but at that price I neither care nor propose to find out. This lens is a stunning bargain.

First, the ergonomics

Ergonomics are vital to all effective machine design and nowhere is this more true in photography than with really long lenses. The user is already confronting slow apertures and a high risk of camera shake. A poorly handling lens does nothing to help.

So in this first of two parts (the second will deal with performance) I take a look at my latest Canon lens addition, the 400mm f/5.6 ‘L’ telephoto which I have been using for a while now. And let me start by saying that I have not used a lens of this length with better ergonomics.

First, a few notes on my long lens history. I started with a 280mm f/4.8 Telyt on a Visoflex II mirror housing mounted on my Leica M3. An ergonomic nightmare. The big glass front elements of the lens were so heavy that the brass focusing collar would bind if the front of the lens was not supported. The collar was also very small, the lens had neither auto focus (this is 1975!) or an automatic diaphragm, overall contrast was low dictating the use of contrastier grades of printing paper and, well, it’s a miracle I managed to make any good photos with it.

Hyde Park, 1975. Leica M3, Visoflex II, 280mm f/4.8 Leitz Telyt, Tri X

Later, when the Leicaflex SL came along, it was joined by an 180mm f/3.4 Apo-Telyt R. Great if not superb ergonomics, more than made up for by fabulous optics. This is the lens Leitz designed for NASA for use on space flights. It shows.

Lake Elizabeth, 1995. Leicaflex SL, 180mm f/3.4 Apo-Telyt R. Kodachrome 64

Later, I added a 400mm f/6.8 Telyt which was a fine, if failed, attempt at improving the ergonomics of long lenses. It was very long being a true long focus lens rather than of telephoto design, unscrewed into several pieces and came with a weird shoulder mount (redesigned many times, all awful) which would connect to the base of the lens with the stock for your shoulder, like with a rifle I suppose. So time consuming to set up and so impossible to carry around, I never used this add-on contraption. Focusing was original too, using a sliding trombone mount locked with a small button on the side of the lens. Remarkably effective as long as the slide had fresh grease. The maximum aperture was slow at f/6.8, resulting in a very light lens which was always used at full aperture – not least because the lens lacked even a pre-set diaphragm. Click stops only. It had but two elements and lost definition off axis quickly, but the center was dead sharp and the results satisfying.

Hearst Castle, 2006. Canon 5D, 400mm f/6.8 Telyt, monopod, ISO 400

But my latest long lens journey bears documenting, if for no other reason than that someone has finally got the ergonomics as right as they can be on something so ungainly. The Canon lens I am writing about has been around for ages and ages, but this is my first experience with a fuly automatic 400mm lens.

Who needs a 400mm lens? Well, the fellows at sports events for one. Intrepid wildlife snappers and paparazzi swear by them. I am none of these. However, for landscapes, there is nothing to beat them for drama and impact. And I photograph landscapes.

I sometimes think Canon must have two lens design teams. There are the geniuses who design the wonderful optics and mechanics of their big guns and their ‘L’ glass, and then there are the guys who couldn’t make it in the bean counting department and were relegated to the sub-basement, only to churn out truly awful cheap zooms and ultra wides.

Looking at the long focus lenses in Canon’s catalog, you gets lots of choice in the purportedly better ‘L’ glass – with a 100-400mm zoom, the 200mm f/2.8, two IS-equipped 300mm optics (f/2.8 and f/4), no fewer than three 400mm choices – f/2.8 IS, f/4 IS DO (non-’L') and the f/5.6 non-IS. At 500mm there’s an f/4 IS and a 600mm f/4 IS monster rounds out the range. Most of these run well into the thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately this lens adopts the garish cream coloring seemingly de rigeur for the polyster set to whom nothing matters so much as displaying their possessions. Don’t wildlife photographers just hate this? The lens has no IS but is small and light instead, in as much as any 400mm lens can be thought of in those terms. Add a monopod and a quick release tripod plate and you have a very effective combination which can avoid the worst of the shakes. It bears emphasizing just how long a 400mm lens is – any shake is magnified eight times compared to a standard 50mm optic. The grain free nature of the 5D’s full frame sensor goes a long way to beating the shakes by simply cranking up the ISO to 400 or 800. That makes for short shutter speeds.

Why is this the best 400mm I have used from an ergonomic standpoint? Simple. First the autofocus is deadly accurate (when used with the center focusing rectangle in the 5D), it is super fast and no focus collar (Did I get that right? Maybe a little more this way? No, maybe the other way?) twiddling is required. This is a good thing as the longer you have to hold any heavy lens at eye level, the more fatigued and unsteady does your hold become. Secondly the lens is auto aperture permitting full exposure automation. Finally, for its length it’s compact, coming in at 10.1″ long and only 2.8lbs in weight. (Compare with the 16″ or so inches of that f/6.8 Telyt). That weight is perfectly balanced on the 5D and the lens comes with a superbly designed tripod collar – more of this later – and a (not so superbly designed) built-in lens hood. The latter is a pain until you get the hang of it. It’s nicely flock lined and is pulled out and rotated counterclockwise (and counterintuitively) to lock. The front of the hood is cleverly surrounded with a rubber protective ring. Try to collapse it and you quickly learn there’s a right amount to rotate it clockwise before trying to slide it down the barrel. A click-stop or two would have been welcomed here, Canon. New price is some $1,100 but I bought mine mint, if used, for just under $900. Check the used listings – these come on the market periodically and most seem to have had light use. I would definitely avoid pros’ beaters. Mine came with the tripod collar and expertly designed pouch, both standard with the lens.

Perfect balance at the tripod mount on a Canon 5D

This flock-lined tripod collar is a true masterpiece. The knob operates a short-throw cam to lock the collar in place after clicking it onto the lens. The click-lock is bypassed on removal by turning the knob CCW then pulling gently. No force is needed to lock the ring and it remains very stable in use. I have fitted a Manfrotto QR plate to the foot for quick mounting on a tripod or monopod.

A design masterpiece – the locking tripod mount ring

As an added feature, if you want to use the tripod collar on the 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ it fits perfectly, so long as you reverse it to clear the camera’s front escutcheon when mounting the lens. This provides a far better mounting point for the front-heavy 200mm lens compared with the one on the 5D’s baseplate. Stress, of course, is greatly reduced also.

Tripod mount ring mounted on 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’, reversed to clear body

Snugging up the collar is easy with the generously sized cammed knob provided. This is a magnificent piece of engineering design clearly thought through by a real photographer-designer.

Top view. The ring is snugged up when the line is aligned with the focus indicator

The focus range switch purportedly makes for faster autofocus when set to the narrow range. I cannot tell the difference and simply keep it on the broad range setting. In either case, the focus is blisteringly fast. This is not your grandfather’s Leica Telyt! Given that focus can be locked with a first pressure on the shutter button, I have yet to use manual focus, though it has to be said the focus collar is very smooth and devoid of any of the raspiness afflicting Canon’s garbage non-’L’ zooms – you know, the ones from the boys in the basement.

Focus range amd auto/manual switches, just like on the 200mm

Canon did not stop there. They did the case right. Instead of some dumb drawing room display tube of shiny leather (thank you, Leitz Wetzlar – ‘Echte leder’ as they used to proudly claim) they give us something in pure vinyl (the better to ward off rain and much harder wearing) with an ingenious velcro plus 2 linked zipper flap design which really works. The case needs a shoulder strap to make sense (buying an oversize camera bag to accommodate this monster does not) but, boy!, does it work!

Canon’s bag easily accommodates the quick release plate from Manfrotto

Ingenious double zipper opens velcroed flap for quick lens removal from the LZ1132 case

In Part II I will take a look at performance in the field with some snaps to illustrate. Suffice it to say that if my specimen is typical, you should be rushing out to get this lens if the need dictates.

Not perfect – you get what you pay for, I suppose.

I wrote in somewhat lukewarm terms of the underwhelming definition of the Canon 20mm lens here.

I took a more objective view of the vignetting issue by banging out four snaps on the old estate, camera and lens dutifully mounted on a tripod, at the four largest apertures:

To best assess vignetting, look at the bottom right corner. The sky is misleading as the changing azimuth angle will provide some natural vignetting with any lens this wide. You can see that at full aperture, f/2.8, the vigneting is pretty awful, but rapidly falls by f/4 with full coverage at f/5.6 and below.

So unless you want to use the Photoshop CS2 Filter->Distort->LensCorrection->Vignette->Amount, (does anyone at Adobe have the remotest iota of common sense when it comes to designing menus – who would guess it’s under ‘Distort’?) f/2.8 is simply not useable. Realistically, if it’s a low light situation, vignetting is no big deal and tends to enhance the drama of a picture. But if you want full coverage to the corners, forget it. Regard the maximum aperture as useful for focusing only.

How about definition? Well, I concluded that my first sample was just not good enough, especially after nothing but great experiences with the 15mm fisheye, the 85mm f/1.8, the 200mm f/2.8 and the 24-105mm zoom. If I can get way better definition from the fisheye after doing all that pixel stretching with ImageAlign (making the lens like a 12mm rectilinear hyper-wide) then all cannot be right with my 20mm sample which clearly has poorer definition than the fisheye. So I bit the bullet and returned the lens to B&H. Moses, of that estimable store, didn’t understand when I explained the lens sucked, but when I pulled Schlecht on him he cottoned on and was very good about it. I had a replacement (with an older serial number, strangely) in my hands in seven business days. Thank you, B&H. Was the result a quantum leap in definition? No. However, overall the ‘bite’ of the image is improved, if still not up to any of the other lenses which, frankly, easily surpass it in this regard. Vignetting in both samples at full aperture is just awful.

The right answer, I suppose, is to get a used Leica 21mm Super Angulon R and adapt it to the 5D. That lens may only be f/4 but it’s fabulous, like all Leica glass. I used one on my Leicaflex SL for years. Unfortunately, the sheer bulk of the lens, compounded by a heavy brass mount and a huge front element, not to mention a complete lack of focus or aperture and exposure automation on the 5D, rules it out. The M Elmarit will not, of course, achieve infinity focus owing to the need for a short flange-to-sensor distance mandated by the rangefinder design. Plus, it’s way overpriced.

So mediocre definition would seem to be the Achilles Heel of this optic – that or I have been an unlucky victim of poor quality control. Canon has little incentive for improving the lens, with everyone being sold on bulky, slow zooms. Shame. Still, at f/8 it’s decent and it’s dirt cheap, too, at $400. If it was much more I would return it.

You can get an idea of the relative size of the 20mm in this picture where it is side by side with the 50mm f/1.4 – it’s not too bulky.

Notice that the 72mm Canon UV filter on the 20mm lens says ‘Sharp Cut’, implying a sharp cut off prior to the infra red range of the spectrum. By contrast the 58mm filter on the 50mm lens bears no such designation. This is rather mystifying (the 77mm filter for the 24-105mm is also ‘Sharp Cut’) as the sensor in the 5D (and probably in their other DSLR offferings) has a built in IR filter – something Leica should have learned before mistakenly releasing the M8 with no IR sensor filter, only to have to issue free lens filters to all buyers as IR rays wreaked havoc with color accuracy. No biggie – Canon’s filters are inexpensive and do the job of protecting my lens’ front elements.

Update: I ended up selling the lens – too much bulk for too little performance. Read all about it here.

It’s nice to have a 20mm again

Chevy. 5d, 20mm, ISO 250, 1/500, f/11, 1 stop underexposed, processed in Aperture

No question about it, I miss my 21mm Leica Asph Elmarit, though who can afford one at $3k+ today beats me. The Canon 24-105mm L zoom is wonderful, if a tad bulky and heavy, and the 15mm Fisheye + ImageAlign works out to something like 12mm! So there’s a big hole between 12 and 24mm and the inexpensive 20mm Canon lens fills it nicely.

Anyway, that’s my excuse, and I’m an ultra-wide guy by nature. The Elmarit does that to you. Now this lens, at one tenth the price, is no Elmarit, but it’s more than serviceable. Plus you don’t have to deal with the crappy (sorry, no other word to describe it) plastic Leica viewfinder which, for all its cost, gives only a very rough approximation of what you will get on film. Sorry, film only for the Leica lens if you want all of its 21mm wide on the image. That disables it for me ay any price. If you want to get flare free snaps with biting corner definition at full aperture, and you are unaware that film is dead, the price of entry to the Elmarit world is justifiable. For me, this Canon 20mm f/2.8 does fine. By f/5.6 vignetting becomes very low and the corners sharpen up nicely; frankly, they’re not so great at f/2.8. At f/5.6 an 18x print will not embarass you, provided your original is sharp and well exposed.

Yes, it has some flare spots into the sun – see above – but the image retains high contrast across the frame. All I did was bring up the shadows in this snap, using Aperture. Exposure was for the highlight on the hood. Contrast is as recorded by the camera otherwise. Works for me.

A nice lens, not all that compact, and fully automatic – lightning quick auto focus (though hardly vital with a lens this wide) and easy manual override. I bought mine from B&H in New York along with an inexpensive Canon 72mm UV filter to protect that bulging front element.

Update: After some more experience I ended up exchanging the lens for another – read here.

An intriguing new feature in the latest pro Canon DSLR

It was a rite of passage when using my rangefinder Leica bodies – the M2 and M3. Should the rangefinder alignment go out for whatever reason, you would go outside, place the camera on a tripod, focus on infinity then remove the lens. Sighting the rangefinder, lateral out-of-alignment would be corrected by using a right angled flat bladed screwdriver on the roller cam, which is eccentrically mounted. Replace the lens, check, repeat if necessary.

Vertical alignment was even easier – with the lens in place, remove the small chrome screw next to the rangefinder window on the front and use a jeweler’s screwdriver on the slotted screw thus disclosed.

This was called ‘adjusting the rangefinder’.

Much the same your friendly Leica repair specialist would do, though for your $250 you would get a three month waiting list and the obligatory German accent should you actually be lucky enough to reach this exemplar of the mechanical arts on the phone. If lucky to get him, you could plead for the return of your body after the obligatory three month absence. Good luck.

Aaah, Leica ownership. Like owning a Jaguar. You need two. One for the garage while the other is in the shop. You also need two mechanics in case one breaks down.

So lo and behold, what does the new professional grade Canon 1D Mark III offer? Why, a modern electronic version of this same feature. I quote from the awesome (as in 720 page!) B&H Digital Photography catalog which the local fork lift operator just delivered:

“AF Micro-adjustment is another example of the flexibility of the Mark III’s AF system. If a critical photographer ever finds that his system seems to consistently focus slightly in front of or behind the intended subject, the AF Micro-adjustment (C.Fn III – 07) allows the user to adjust this in fine increments to put the sharpest plane of focus back where they’d (sic) like it to be. It even allows different adjustments for up to 20 different Canon EF lenses if necessary”

So it sounds like Canon has not only added an overall adjustment to correct for an incorrectly adjusted focus sensor, they have also made it possible to key this adjustment to your lens of choice, recognizing that manufacturing tolerances would, inevitably, result in mis-collimated lenses. So you adjust things in the camera rather than at the manufacturing stage, suggesting a very smart way of keeping the cost of lenses within reason.

Now this latest Canon camera holds no interest for me. It uses a cropped sensor, making my wide angles less wide. Even if it had a full frame sensor I would not be a buyer as I simply do not need battle toughness or 10 frames a second capability, nor the massive bulk of the fixed battery grip.

But it’s nice to know that this feature will be coming to more ordinary bodies down the road, as these things inevitably do.

For some stunning Canon publicity images from this new camera, which claims a sharper sensor than its predecessor (these are clickable BIG downloads), click here. Make sure you check out Sample Image 7 – taken on the 85mm f/1.8 – the cheapest optic used and quite superb, as I know from personal experience.

f/1.4 is fast!

I have never owned a lens faster than f/2.

That said, the f/2s I have owned have invariably said ‘Leica Summicron’ on them, whether 35mm, 50mm or 90mm. Which is sort of like saying that all your sports cars have been Porsches, meaning the best of breed. At 90mm, that was an apochromatic, aspherical element lens and suffice it to say that the aperture ring on this lens only did two things – it changed the amount of light striking the film and it changed the depth of field. Definition at any aperture was the same, which is to say superb.

So I got to thinking what something faster might be like. Now f/1 is available from Leica only, and that means a second mortgage, so forget it. The f/1.2 lenses out there from Japanese makers have generally poor reputations, being more exercises in marketing, or keeping up with the Joneses if you prefer, so they are of no interest to me. But guess what? Canon just happens to make an f/1.4 for very little money and it’s auto-everything and a nice match for the 5D body. Plus, having grown up with film Leicas, I simply like the 50mm focal length.

So a couple of clicks on the B&H web site and the 50mm Canon f/1.4 was on my doorstep.

The lens is well made, if not as solid as the ‘L’, meaning the extending focusing mount has a bit of play at the closest focus distance. Auto focus is every bit as fast as the ‘L’ and, strangely, the viewfinder image does not appear much brighter than with the f/4 L – certainly not three stops (8x) brighter. Naturally, as a fixed focus 50mm, it is much smaller and lighter than the L and the absence of Image Stabilization further reduces bulk and weight. The feel, with the lens on the 5D body, is just right – a smaller lens would not feel as good in the hand. The focus ring, if you elect auto-focus override, is a bit blah – it’s geared down approximately 2:1, making for slow manual focusing.

Surfing the web, comments about this lens vary from ecstatic to disappointed, the latter writers damning the optic for soft images at full aperture. How much of this is poor Canon quality control (how much can you expect for $300, after all?) and how much is poor technique I have no idea, but my first ever f/1.4 snap suggests this is a special piece of glass.

At any rational enlargement ratio, the above snap shows critical sharpness on the right front nails and the eye, which is how I wanted it. The nose, the crowning glory of the Border Terrier, is clearly unsharp, being a few inches closer to the lens.

I took three precautions to avoid definition robbing issues. First, I used a reasonably fast shutter speed of 1/60th second. Second, in the very low lighting in which this was taken, I cranked up the ISO on the 5D to 800, knowing that grain would simply not be an issue with the 5D’s sensor. The aperture was, of course, f/1.4. Finally, and I suspect most importantly, I used Canon’s spot focusing center rectangle to place focus where I wanted it, using a partially depressed shutter buttton to lock in the selected focus point. I wonder whether many users are using the default multi-point focusing feature of Canon’s DSLRs and ending up with the wrong focus point being selected? How on earth can the camera know what you want to focus on using this technology? Optimal auto-focusing depends on a focus point with contrast and detail, as those variables drive auto-focus accuracy. Point your auto-focus camera a a white wall and just watch the mechanism hopelessly try to establish optimal focus. Selecting the nails on Bert’s right front paw satisfied the dictates for accurate focus.

So this inexpensive optic seems like a nice addition to the 5D and some more extended work will disclose whether my first positive experience is borne out over the longer term. If not, I’ll just sell the lens for eighty cents on the dollar and put the loss down as the small cost of a worthwhile experiment.

Some empirical tests deliver surprising results.

Being the ’serious’ photographer in the family, the sad responsibility of selling off everyone’s film cameras naturally falls on my shoulders as we all move on to the world of digital picture taking.

I made mention of my mother-in-law’s magnificent Kodak Medalist II earlier, at which time I also sold her film Canon Rebel, together with its cheesy 28-80mm ‘kit’ lens.

Years earlier I had bought my wife the same Rebel but we got so tired of the execrable quality of the kit lens that we sold it and replaced it with a better 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 Canon with improved optical and mechanical quality. When she decided to upgrade to the digital Rebel, we did the same, buying the pricey EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS in lieu of the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 non-IS kit lens. A wise decision once you have handled the latter.

Anyway, my wife finally decided to sell the film Rebel and I dutifully listed it for sale. However, as the lens will cover a full 35mm frame I spent a few moments taking some pictures with it side by side with the costly 24-105mm f/4 L lens, both on my Canon 5D. You can get some sense of the relative sizes of the lenses here:

Both lenses at their shortest focal lengths

Both lenses fully extended

I took pictures at full aperture and f/8 with both, at 28mm, 50mm and the 105mm maximum.

Looking at the results, I must confess any differences are more imagined than real, and I know my 24-105mm L is good for enlargements to any size any rational user would want.

The L lens adds an Image Stabilizer, goes wider at a very handy 24mm, has lots of metal, very smooth controls no wobble anywhere plus …. lots of weight and bulk. By contrast, the 28-105mm lens is very light, although the mount is metal, has a horribly raspy, grabby zoom ring and the lens barrel wobbles about merrily when fully extended. Both have autofocus with the L marginally faster, but not enough to make any practical difference. Oh! and yes, before I forget, the L is $1,300 and the other is $230.

Now we may have been lucky and got a really good example of the cheaper lens, but based on this little exercise, I would recommend it without hesitation for anyone looking for light weight, fine resolution and a nice broad zoom range good for 95% of anything a regular photographer might need. You might not want to bash it about too much or expect it to last to the next millenium but, then again, you would also save a lot on chiropractor bills, not to mention over $1,000 on the lens.

The greatest photographic invention since digital imaging.

The current B&H paper catalog contains no fewer than ten pages listing some 132 digital cameras, from inexpensive point-and-shoots to full frame Canon DSLRs. So there’s no shortage of choice at any price point. What is intriguing is that some 25% of these now include words like “Image Stabilizer” or “Vibration Reduction” in their specification. Go back a couple of years and the only place you could find these technologies was in a select few exotic lenses for their DSLRs from Canon and Nikon. True, some makers cheat by simply upping the ISO where slow shutter speeds would otherwise be required, but you can see the general technological direction nonetheless.

My guess is that, a couple of years hence, every digital camera save the very cheapest will have this technology built-in. Makers have come to realize that it offers a competitive advantage and, until proper optical viewfinders make a comeback, holding a camera at arm’s length to squint at the little LCD screen on the back while composing the picture denies everything we were taught as children about holding a camera steady.

And steady means sharp.

The stabilizer switch on the superb Canon 24-105mm L lens

I have become so attuned to the grain-free sensor in the Canon 5D that an 18″ x 24″ print is, if not something that is made with impunity, at least pretty commonplace, and the definition in the details is nothing short of startling. There is simply no way that I would be turning out so many large, sharp prints, with 35mm film technology. The enlargement ratio would be the same, true, but the vibration reduction in that splendid 24-105mm Canon lens would be noticeable by its absence. So while Leica can justifiably lay claim to making the best 35mm interchangeable lenses on the planet, not a one of them boasts vibration reduction. Bottom line? The less refined Canon optic with VR beats the superb Leica one unless a very sturdy tripod is used.

And it’s not just at the slower speeds that this is noticeable. Like most photographers, the majority of my pictures is taken using shutter speeds in the 1/60th – 1/500th range. Now the old rule used to be that you had to use a shutter speed no longer than the reciprocal of the focal length for a sharp picture. So, 1/50th for a 50mm, 1/100th for a 100mm and so on. This rule, of course, is so much rot. Go to any photo show and viewers will not step back twice as far to view an 18″ x 24″ print as they would for an 8″ x 10″ one. So the effects of camera shake in big prints are effectively magnified from the viewer’s perspective. So that 1/50th at 8″ x 10″ suddenly becomes 1/100th at 18″ x 24″ for the same perceived absence of camera shake. Offset this with the three shutter speeds of added sharpness gained from VR and you can see why most of my 5D originals easily scale to 18″ x 24″ prints. I am, in effect, using far faster shutter speeds than ever before, thanks to VR. Take away the detail-robbing effects of film grain, courtesy of the 5D’s noiseless sensor, and you have another quantum leap in definition.

So VR will become as commonplace in digital cameras as anti-lock brakes have in cars.

No way I need VR in my Canon fisheye, which has an effective focal length of 12mm after applying ‘defishing’ software, but I would kill for it in the 200mm f/2.8 where it is sorely missed. So until Canon does that, I continue to drag my monopod around with me when using this otherwise excellent optic.

How about f/0.85 back in 1934?

‘Glamor’ lenses for 35mm cameras, the ones with bragging power, have either entailed large apertures or extreme length.

On the extreme length end, it was rather like the cubic capacity of motorcycles. Once you hit the magic thousand, you had bragging rights. So when Vincent motorcycles (then known as HRD) came out with its magnificent Series A twin in 1936, it was a ‘thousand’ (actually 998 ccs) that graced the frame and made it the talk of the town. On the lens front, thousand mm lenses have been around for ever, even if they were never priced at amounts the amateur could afford. No, you had to use someone else’s money to buy a Zeiss Mirotar 1000mm mirror lens for your Contarex back in the sixties. That or choose between a car and that lens. Nikon already had lenses of this length and greater. Canon had a 1200mm ages ago and it was a regular refractive rather than mirror optic, some 853mm long. That’s almost three feet! Get one of these and you could say yours was longer than anyone else’s with little fear of contradiction.

The Canon 1200mm f/8 telephoto lens

Quite how you were meant to keep this monster steady unless your tripod was built like the Maginot Line is unclear to me, but hey!, you were the big guy on the block so who cared? Sure, Nikon had the 2000mm mirror lens, weighing in at 40 lbs. but, let’s face it, it was barely two feet long so the only bragging rights it conferred was how long it took you to recover from the hernia induced by lifting it on your tripod. Or, for that matter, from lifting the tripod sans lens if it was one sturdy enough.

The Nikon 2000mm f/11 mirror lens

So long was long and nowadays these monsters are as passe as bell bottoms and wide flower ties. Reminders of silly one upmanship and passing fads. The longest Nikon and Canon lenses I can find in the B&H catalog are 1000mm (a mirror lens with a modest f/11 aperture) and 600mm (with a whopping f/4 maximum), respectively.

But for the average man in the street, fast was always more intriguing than long. If his ship came in, a nice 50mm f/1.4 was more likely to grace his camera than a 2000mm f/11. Heck, you could actually use the thing. Indeed, even before WW2, Leica and Zeiss offered f/1.5 50mm lenses. Back as far as 1925 Erich Salomon was taking his great candids with an Ermanox 4.5 x 6cm plate camera fitted with an f/1.8 lens. So speed goes back a few years. Once modern anti-reflective coatings started to be used about 1942 (wars and technological progress being synonymous) these lenses began to transmit something close to their stated apertures. Later Leica gave the world the Summilux, an f/1.4, originally a 50mm and later joined by 35mm and 75mm versions. All superb.

In 1953 Zunow came out with an SLR, largely made of pure cheddar with an f/1.1 lens. Four were sold and have never been heard of since. I recall seeing one and that lens was certainly impressive to look at. In 1956 Nikon equalled them with an f/1.1 for its screw thread Leica clones.

So in 1961, not to be outdone, Canon came up with the 50mm f/0.95 for its Canon 7 rangefinder cameras which used a Leica thread mount. So large was the lens it had a separate external bayonet mount to fit around the standard mount on the camera body. User comment suggests this was truly one of the worst lenses of all time but, what the hell, it was under f/1.0! “Brighter than the human eye” the advertisements screamed. I’ll bet it sold a lot of Canon 7 bodies with f/1.8 lenses. You could always say you could get three faster lenses in case of need – f/1.4, f/1.2 and this worthless wonder.

The Canon 50mm f/0.95 lens. Like most marketing exercises, fast and worthless.

By the way, Canon tried again with a 50mm f/1 lens in their ‘L’ line early in the 21st century. Testifying to the poor performance of that lens, suggesting Canon had learned little from their prior experience, that lens was discontinued a couple of years ago and now has, you guessed it, collectible status. Must make for a nice paperweight, I suppose.

Leitz’s approach was different. The German character, not renowned for its sense of humor, reckoned that anything faster than f/1.4 actually had to be capable of taking sharp pictures, so they took it in baby steps, first coming up with the f/1.2 Noctilux with its exotic and costly aspherical element. Needless to say, the lens was superb and the limited production run of some 2,000 has ensured its collectible value. Meaning, sadly, hardly anyone uses one of these any more, most rotting in some collector’s cage.

It took Leica another 10 years to work out how to do it with spherical glasses and how to make it faster, and the f/1.0 Noctilux was born in 1976. It remains in production to this day and is probably the first useable f/1.0 lens for a 35mm camera ever made.

But Leitz always were horrible at marketing. Had they but searched their long and distinguished history, they would have found this and it was made in 1934 with an aperture of f/0.85! Or maybe they knew and were embarassed that 42 years later they could only manage f/1.0?

The Leitz 75mm f/0.85 Summar. From Theo Scheerer’s ‘The Leica and the Leica System’, Fountain Press, 1962

And you thought f/1.4 was fast?

By the way, want a $300 f/0.70 lens which will blow any of the above away for definition? Simple. Place that inexpensive Canon 50mm f/1.4 on your EOS 5D, set the speed to 1600 ISO and enjoy finer grain than TriX film at 400 ISO. Two stops gained from f/1.4 make it an f/0.70 with the depth of field and definition of an f/1.4. So Canon finally made a decent sub-f/1.0 lens, by virtue of that wonderful full frame sensor in the 5D!

Finally, a replacement for the magnificent Leica Apo-Telyt-R

Mention of the fabulous Leica Apo-Telyt-R lens in my column on the Leicaflex SL the other day prompts mention of its replacement which I have been using for a few weeks now on the Canon EOS 5D.

Available during the period 1975-98, the 180mm f/3.4 Apo-Telyt was one of the first Apochromatic lenses available for 35mm cameras, meaning there was no color fringing to be seen no matter how big the enlarged print. It was a surprisingly compact lens, weighing in at 1.65 lbs with its built in lens hood. Full aperture definition was as good as that at any other aperture, meaning superb, or as good as you ability to hold it steady.

The fabulous Leitz 180mm Apo-Telyt R

While cursed with yet another clunky lens hood (why on earth did Canon abandon the earlier sliding lens hood? Another Canon lens hood in the garbage can), the Apo’s replacement on the EOS 5D is Canon’s superb 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ lens. The ‘L’ lens adds the benefit of automatic focus, to boot. As I sold the Apo-Telyt in a moment of foolishness a few years back, I have been using the fully manual Leitz 200mm f/4 Telyt on the 5D where it works well, but you have to stop down and focus manually. A legacy of my Leica M/Visoflex housing days. Closest focus with the Canon is down to 4.9 feet (compared to a rather poor 8.2 feet for the Apo-Telyt) and can be limited to 8.2 feet in the interest of faster performance when the close-up range is not needed. Weights of the two lenses are 1.65 lbs for the Apo and 1.68 lbs for the Canon, meaning the latter uses plastics where possible as it has automatic diaphragm and focus motors to conceal in its somewhat bulkier body.

Automatic focus speed on the 5D is simply startling. So fast you don’t even think of it, though I have taken the precaution of limiting auto focus area selection to the center focus rectangle in the interests of accuracy. There’s not much depth of field at 200mm and f/2.8! The only thing missing is vibration reduction. Now that would be nice to have!

Consistent with my commitment not to get loaded down with gear, I purchased a small cylindrical soft case for the lens which attaches to my belt and, because its overall dimensions are similar to the 24-105mm f/4 ‘L’ , when one lens is on the camera the other makes its home in the belt case. Each is fitted with a clear UV filter, so only a rear cap need be used – I would dispense with that also, but the rear lens element on the zoom is too exposed to take that risk, given my proclivity to thumbprint everything.

The Canon 24-105mm f/4 and 200mm f/2.8 lenses. The zoom is at its longest setting.

Why a prime lens rather than another zoom? Two reasons – weight and maximum aperture. Performance is less of a concern given the high optical standards of Canon’s ‘L’ lenses. I really do not need focal lengths between 105mm and 200mm and the 5D’s sensor allows image enlargement in this intermediate range without compromising definition. Further, any lens with a half-decent maximum aperture that zooms beyond 200mm is impossibly bulky. On the very rare occasions I need something longer I have my 400mm f/6.8 Leitz Telyt to fall back on.

The 200mm is a fine landscape lens, compressing perspective and focusing on essentials.

Canon EOS 5D, 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’, probably at f/5.6.

Best of all, as ‘L’ glass goes it’s positively a bargain, and chump change compared to the Leitz lens which it so ably replaces.

Canon EOS 5D, 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’, at f/3.5. No problem with background clutter!