Yearly Archives: 2018

Ektar! Watch out.

Photographs

A color brute.

I made mention of Kodak’s Ektar 100 film here when I first started messing about with film after a decades long hiatus spent genuflecting to the digital god.

This is not an easy film to use. The contrast is brutally high and even a smidgeon of over-exposure means highlights will blow out and there is no way the limitations of the film medium will permit their recovery in post-processing.

So I have learned to set the Nikon F100 to -0.3 stops exposure correction using the +/- control and expect that for the next roll I will migrate to -0.7 stops, meaning I am rating Extar at 160 ASA and recovering detail thus in Lightroom:

Here’s an image snapped in Prescott AZ the other day – any hint of over-exposure would have blown that roof out:

Sure, the sky came out darker than it really was, but Extar is about drama, not realism. I get enough of the latter from the NYT daily, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Nikon F100, 24-120mm AFD Nikkor, Kodak Ektar 100.

AF and AFD Nikkors

Nikon lenses

A curious bunch.

Before Nikon migrated to AF lenses with built in linear focus motors – the AFS series – they marketed the AF and AFD ranges which used a screwdriver linkage in the lens for focusing, the actual focus motor being in the body of better film and digital Nikon SLRs.


The Nikon screw drive motor coupling on the body and in the lens mount.
The film era F100 works well with these and just as well with the latest AFS optics.

While a seemingly Rube Goldberg solution it has proved to be solid and reliable with millions of lenses made. The line started around 1986 and one or two are made to this day.

What is odd about the AF and AFD lenses (the later AFD versions added an enhanced metering chip for better results with flash; otherwise all else was identical) is just how much construction quality varied across the line. I have a half-dozen:


My small AF/AFD collection – 20/2.8, 50/1.8, 85/1.8 and 80-200/2.8 ED IF rear row;
35-70/2.8 and 24-120 f/3.5-5.6 front row.

The mechanical stand-outs here are the 80-200 and 35-70. The former is a two ring zoom, the latter a push-pull design which wears less well, the action becoming sloppy with age. Both are fabulously made and optically as good as it gets. The 80-200 is still sold new at over $1,000, my mint sample running me just $476. The limited range 35-70 is long discontinued (1987-2005) and is often found for under $200. Both are wonderful bargains.

The mechanical quality story with the others is quite a bit different. All these optics have proper aperture rings, a feature sadly deleted from the latest AFS line where apertures are set using one of the command dials on the body of the camera. The 50/1.8 is a piece of garbage. Cheap materials, rattling internals, awful controls. And dirt cheap at $70 used, mint. The 20mm ($230) and 85mm ($270) are mechanically so-so, but focus fast with the 85mm especially pleasant to use in the portrait studio where acquiring focus on the subject’s eyes is a piece of cake with AF especially fast.

And the 24-120mm is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. It comes with fairly pronounced barrel distortion, rather wobbly construction, an unspectacular f/5.6 at the long end yet it’s invariably found on my D700 or F100 when I want to lug only one optic along. The 24mm comes in especially handy for architectural images and the barrel distortion is easily removed in LR. At well under $100 for a mint one, it’s hard to pass by.

Where Nikon did not compromise is in the optical quality of these lenses. All are at least as good as their MF predecessors with the 80-200 considerably better (and bulkier) than what came before. It’s a weapon, not a lens. The 85mm, with its chintzy external plastic, can almost match the classic 85/1.8 MF at full aperture, equalling it at f/4 and below. And even that piece of garbage, the 50/1.8 is almost as good as the classic 50/2 MF – it’s 1.5 stops less sharp at f/2 compared to the old MF optic, but usable wide open even in the extreme corners. Finally the 20/2.8, which scarcely needs AF owing to large depth of field, is almost as good as the classic 20/3.5 UD MF …. made 21 years earlier.

If MF is not for you, or you are just feeling lazy, none of these economically priced AF/AFD Nikkors will let you down. Just make sure your body comes with the screwdriver coupling or AF will be lost. Sadly, none of these will AF on the new FF Z6/Z7 mirrorless bodies, which lack the screwdrive motor in either the body or the related adapter.

For an index of my Nikkor pieces click here.

Eggleston lives

Photographers

Bizarre.

Drive a few miles north from Dewey-Humboldt to Prescott on Highway 69 through central Arizona and you will see this seemingly abandoned Technicolor building perched amongst the desert magnificence:

William Eggleston (1939 – ), a one time Harvard professor, was the first photographer to have an exhibition of color snaps shown at MOMA in NYC. ‘Snaps’ is especially appropriate here because Eggleston’s choice of subject matter was supremely banal, all focus being on color. A poor photographer with a new vision which has been fooling the art crowd ever since. His prints were made using the long-discontinued Kodak Dye Transfer technology (think Technicolor for stills) and early originals command well into six figures

You can see a collage of his work by clicking this image:

Click the image.

When I tell you that his most famous image is that of the red ceiling in the top row, at $250,000 a pop, you will be able to draw your own conclusions. Eggleston waxes lyrical about the ‘blood red color’ in the original print, and so would you at that price.

Anyway, I was reminded of Eggleston’s banality and artlessness when passing this awfully painted building in the desert and could not resist pulling over for a couple of snaps.

Nikon F100, 24-120mm Nikkor AFD, Kodak Ektar 100. Processing and scanning by Sharpphoto.net.

Dewey-Humboldt

Photographs

Small and fine.

The town of Dewey-Humboldt is home to under 4,000 in Yavapai County, AZ, slap bang in the middle of the state and easily missed on the drive from Scottsdale to Prescott.

From Wikipedia:

When a new post office opened in 1898, the community was renamed Dewey, probably to honor Admiral Dewey’s great victory that year at the Battle of Manila — this was the height of the Spanish–American War. Another post office was established at Val Verde (Humboldt) in 1899.

It’s worth a stop as picture opportunities abound, and you can only admire the early settlers of the west for their toughness and resolve. First settled in 1863, it would be many years before Willis Carrier invented air conditioning in 1902 making the desert livable.


Dewey-Humboldt Main Street.

Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes.

Another view of Main Street.

The town has seen better days.

How the West was colonized before the steam train.


All images on the Nikon F100 on Kodak Ektar 100 film. Nikon absolutely knocked it out of the park with the F100, which can be found mint for well under $200. The ergonomics are identical to any number of Nikon DSLRs which followed – I especially like the D700 – so there is no learning curve.

Ektar 100 film has exceptionally high contrast and while I underexposed these -0.3 EVs, -0.7 EVs would probably have been better, as it’s very easy to lose the highlights with over-exposure and the dynamic range of film is simply awful compared to that of a half decent digital sensor.

The lens used was the Nikkor 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 AFD zoom, an excellent all-rounder. After sale of the filters this came with, my net cost was under $50. It comes with free barrel distortion thrown in, easily fixed in Lightroom when it matters.

The 2018 iPhones

iPhone

Victimhood.


The ‘cheap’ iPhone Xr starting at $750 + tax.

Despite a new battery my iPhone6 is becoming very sluggish. Apple makes sure this happens with its older devices by loading them up with ever slower code in its unending pursuit of planned obsolescence. My original iPad Air is suffering the same symptoms.

So announcement of a new series of iPhones sort of catches my attention. While I want a new iPhone like a hole in the head, the operating realities of my current one leave me no choice but to upgrade. And as 50 of my 64GB remain unused, it’s not like it’s a memory issue.

The sad truth is that the technological edge of two manufacturers – Apple and Samsung – has landed consumers with an inescapable oligopoly. Your choice is the Sammy with the insecure, rat infested Android OS or Apple’s ‘my way or the highway’ iOS. And as I would rather keep my credit card out of Ivan’s hands when he next goes on a free shopping spree, I am pretty much tied into iOS.

Now I am not obsessed with the need for an edge-to-edge screen and am most certainly averse to shelling out a minimum of $800 for a new iPhone, you know the one without a headphone socket and that ridiculous face recognition technology replacing the excellent thumbprint sensor on my iPhone6, which has yet to let me down. But, sadly, $750 + tax is the lowest point of entry to the new iPhone universe, with costlier models (one is appropriately named the ‘Xs’ which will be immediately read incorrectly by the 99.999% of the populace without an education in Latin) adding unnecessary OLED displays in lieu of LCD ones and adding more costly storage when none is needed in the age of the cloud. That’s monopoly pricing power for you, albeit you must respect Apple’s pun in the name.

But a friend points out that, given my modest needs, an iPhone7 will do just fine and he pointed me to the web site ‘Swappa’ (doubtless run by chaps in Sicily) as an alternative to the slime pit that is eBay (full disclosure: my last two iPhones were sold on the slime pit to Russkies!):


Clicka da image to goa to de Swappa.

Here you can sella your olda iPhona and buya a later, if discontinued, replacement for a whola lotta lessa dan de latest iPhone from da gender challenged boy in Cupertino.

So I’m thinking I mighta giva da Swappa a chanca befora shelling out $800 on the latest and greatest. My friend upgraded from an iPhone 6 to a 7 and noted a large speed increase, so that upgrade path seems rather appealing. After sale of his iPhone6 his net outlay was very low indeed. Sadly, however, the iPhone7 deletes the headphone socket, meaning yet another adapter is required.

CPU speed? Check this Geekbench chart. The iPhone7 offers the best bang for the buck over the iPhone6 on CPU speed with a speed gain of 147%. Thereafter, later models are pretty much hitting the law of diminishing returns.

The ‘new iPhones’ are nothing but a bait and switch from a disingenuous Apple. There are zero compelling new features for the outrageous 25% price increase. How long will it take consumers to realize that they are being conned? AAPL’s unit sales of iPhones were up just 1% last year with all of the large revenue gains resulting from the high price increases on the iPhone X. How much longer can Apple get away with this ‘no product upgrade’ strategy for a 25% increase in price?

Update:

I bought a mint, boxed 128GB iPhone7 from an established Swappa seller for $429, shipped. I get 81% of the speed of the iPhone X for 54% of the cost and will happily resell my iPhone6 on the Swappa site once all is said and done. It will be a cold day in hell before I lay out $1000 or more on a cell phone. (The iPhone7 is still being sold new by Apple. The price I paid is $180 less than they are asking and, if needed, I can have the battery replaced for just $29 through 12/31/18 – Apple’s ‘guilt price’ after they were caught cheating on battery lives. Replacement sky-rockets come 2019, with Apple hoping no one notices).

The iPhone7 is indeed much faster than the iPhone6. No more grinding waits while it processes ever more bloated code. And the haptic feedback is well implemented and a ‘nice to have’ feature as is ForceTouch which Apple just discontinued on its latest iPhones, ever in search of greater margins. (You push down on an icon for more options – for example accessing bookmarks in Safari). The iPhone7 is a recommended upgrade for owners of the iPhone6 and earlier models.


No comment.

I got 4 years’ hard use from the iPhone6. Not bad.