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 fully 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 at 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.