Yearly Archives: 2012

Once upon a time ….

Photographs

…. we snapped in monochrome.

Oakland Bay Bridge, D700, 24mm.

Gold Street, Jackson Square. Click the picture for the map. Same hardware as above.

Hotaling Street, Jackson Square. Same gear.

The 24mm Nikkor is special. It was special when I sold them, as a clerk at Dixons in London in 1969, to rich American tourists, and it remains special today, at a fraction of the cost. At that time I was quite convinced that Americans were so affluent that they never had a shirt laundered. They merely threw it away and donned a new one. And that 24mm seemed every bit as remote from that world as I was back then.

Back then the only people who could afford color prints were those self same Americans. Of course, despite all their costly gear, they opted for 3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″ machine made Kodak prints, just like their successors today who think nothing of using a $10,000 camera to publish their work exclusively in 600 pixel sizes on the web. Many of these are the same people lining up to upgrade to a 36mp D800 ….

In 1974, when mine was made, the 24mm f/2.8 Nikkor-N.C ran $316.51, which is $1,472.72 in today’s money. I think I got a bargain at $165 for a mint one.

Nikkor-N.C 24mm lens

Nikon lenses, Photographs

A fine street snapper.

The 24mm Nikkor was the first Nikkor lens with floating elements. Disparate glasses – there are nine elements – move in a non-linear manner as the lens is focused, enhancing aberration correction. I have added a CPU to mine and the related ACR lens correction profile which is automatically recognized in LR and PS with any lens equipped with a CPU can be downloaded here. The profile is also manually selectable for non-CPU lenses.

Contrast is very high at all apertures, with central definition identical to my 16-35mm f/4 AF-S optic, but the old lens is simply in a different class when it comes to quality of manufacture. Edge definition in the modern optic is better through f/5.6 with the old 24mm N.C catching up at f/8.

The lens vignettes noticeably (but see the note at the end of this piece), and there is very slight barrel distortion, with the sweet spot at f/8, but that does not stop me from publishing a few snaps from its first outing in San Francisco yesterday. The extreme corners are degraded through f/5.6 but that’s only noticeable if your subject is right at the edge of the frame. Small, exquisitely made like all early all metal Nikkors, my model is the later multi-coated version denoted by the ‘C’ in the description. Mine is Ai factory converted, allowing use on the D700 or other Nikon bodies with the aperture follower on the lens escutcheon without modification.

24mm Nikkor-N.C.

Here are a few snaps. all but the last from the vicinity of the magnificent Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Constructed at the height of the Great Depression by Real Men, it took a scant 39 months to build, opening in November 1936. Today it would take a decade.

The power and majesty of riveted steel.

It’s almost impossible to convey the power of the construction.

With bird. Flare is commendably low, using the HN-1 lens hood.

Steve Jobs is alive!

Lunch by the Oakland Bay Bridge. Click the picture to see the map location.

Gold Street, Jackson Square.

A note on filter use:

I rather suspected the corner vignetting at f/8 as being a mechanical not an optical problem, for example in the third picture above, and so it proved. I was using an inexpensive aftermarket filter which protrudes 0.21″ from the front of the lens. The stock Nikon HN-1 screw-in lens hood then mounts on the filter. Replacing the filter with a slimmer Nikon branded one, which protrudes only 0.15″, took away almost all of the vignetting compared to the un-filtered lens though, surprisingly, the merest trace of corner shading remains, which my lens correction profile will remove. So use a slimline filter not a stock one with this lens. A filter is recommended owing to the rather exposed nature of the front glass.

Lens correction profile:

Click here for the lens correction profile. This file includes two profiles, at f/2.8 and at f/5.6. LR and PS will use the closest match. The 24mm f/2.8 shows moderate vignetting at f/2.8 with minimal distortion at all apertures. By f/5.6 vignetting is negligible. An extraordinary piece of optical design.

AsmaGate

Hall of Shame

Vogue is stupid. Doubly so.

It’s dumb enough profiling the sartorial tastes of a butcher’s wife, one Asma Assad, an English girl on the make who decided a clothing budget and a palace beat any sense of moral compass. And profile her Vogue did, in its February 2011 issue of the famous fashion magazine, the repository of all that is best in fashion photography. The piece, captioned “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert” profiles the wife of the Syrian dictator who, like his father before him, has been torturing and butchering his people for many years now, albeit with renewed zeal recently as the threat of democracy has raised its ugly head.

The piece is made worse by the fact that somehow Vogue suckered in ace war photographer James Nachtwey to take the snaps. Hopefully Nachtwey stayed on to capture some of the carnage wrought by Assad, as that is the photographer’s specialty. As a minimum he would have saved his employer a round trip air fare.

It’s impossible to excuse Vogue’s judgment and even harder to understand how a seasoned war photographer, who surely has a decent grasp of international situations, could be suckered into this train wreck. Excuse me, Mr. Nachtwey, but do you even read the papers in which your work is published?

But it gets worse. Denying the realities of the Internet, Vogue has now compounded interest in its poor judgment by deleting the article from its database. And while no one except its editorial staff would think that Vogue is a current affairs publication, the act of censorship can only be said have its foul goals exceeded by its stunning stupidity. Tens of thousands of Chinese censors will tell you it can’t be done, Vogue. Just admit your error, take the high road, and leave it out there with an editorial message saying ‘Sorry. We screwed up badly and as contrition our Editor is donating her salary this year to help the oppressed people of Syria’.

Search the Internet for the piece and this is what you get at Vogue:

Click the picture to download the article.

Click the picture above and the article will download and you can open it in Safari.

In ordinary circumstances, even as great a stranger to ethics as Rupert Murdoch would have fired Vogue’s Editor, Anna Wintour, on grounds of shockingly bad judgment, not to mention a total absence of taste, the magazine’s raison d’être. But Ms. Wintour is sacred, the Dirty Digger does not own the magazine, and Condé Nast – which does own Vogue – took the coward’s way out and tried to censor the piece.

Thus, Condé Nast, Anna Wintour, Vogue and James Nachtwey are dishonorable inductees to this journal’s Hall of Shame.

Meanwhile, you can look forward to these future thrilling profiles in Vogue; grab them before they get erased:

  • “Svetlana Stalin: What my father taught me about humanity and dressing well”
  • “My life and sartorial times with Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević – a wife’s tale”
  • Discovered: Previously unpublished pictures of Eva Braun’s wardrobe, with love notes from her future spouse.