Category Archives: Hardware

Stuff

Taking Rube Goldberg for a spin

Canon 5D

That’s Heath Robinson to British readers

Having written about the complexities of getting my old Leitz 200mm f/4 Telyt to work on the Canon EOS 5D, I took the Rube Goldberg collection of lens, adapters and digital body combination for a spin yesterday, in that wonderful afternoon light you get right before a storm. Ergonomically the outfit handles unbelievably well and, mercifully, there is no wobble despite all those adapter rings.

I had the 5D set on ‘Av’, meaning I set the aperture (the lens is manual so you have no choice in the matter) and the camera sets the shutter speed. Anyway, at ISO 200 and f/5.6 the camera said 1/750 so I pressed the button. Here is the result:

I checked the screen preview on the 5D’s LCD and it looked two stops overexposed, so I took another at f/11. Now this did not smell right. Years with manual cameras have done a decent job of calibrating the exposure meter in my brain, and f/5.6 looked about right to me.

Getting home I dropped the snaps in iPhoto and, sure enough, the original at f/5.6 was right, the other two stops underexposed. What gives? Well, I had cranked up the brightness of the Canon’s screen to maximum in a vain attempt to make the thing visible in daylight. As a result, everything looks over exposed. So I have now reset the screen to the factory default.

The picture above is about half the original, yet is wonderfully well defined on a 13x enlargement. So those magicians at Leitz Wetzlar had it all right some forty years ago when this lens was first sold. A 40 year old lens on a 4 week old camera…. OK, so it’s not auto-anything, but I mostly use long lenses on landscapes, which tend to be fairly stationary beasts. I’ll leave sports photography to those far more expert than I will ever be. Or want to be, in that genre.

As for that LCD screen, I have adopted a one hundred year old technology to solve the problem. Diving into my 4″x5″Crown Graphic kit, I borrow the well worn black T shirt which I use to see the focusing screen on that behemoth and stick it over my head and the camera. This actually makes the LCD screen visible. Some things never change.

On the way home I spotted this gaggle of $1mm homes perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Anywhere else these would be slum dwellings but here in California these are considered luxury weekend getaways. Right dead on the San Andreas fault.

Whatever you think of the architecture, you may agree that this old lens still does the job.

Here’s the center section at a 30x magnification ratio:

Wetzlar goes to Tokyo

Canon 5D, Leica

Leica or Leicaflex lenses on the EOS 5D

About the time I was ordering the Canon EOS 5D it dawned on me that it would be nice to be able to use my Leica Telyt long focus lenses on the digital body. I have a 200mm f/4 which is quite decent and a 400mm f/6.8, the one with the trombone focus action, which is very good. Both were made for use on the horrid Leitz Visoflex mirror housing for the Leica M body, but I had been using them on my metered Leicaflex SL SLR (now sold) with a Leitz M to R adapter, code 14127. I finaly got around to selling the Visoflex, but it wouldn’t go without kicking and screaming, as the first eBay buyer was a certified retard who decided he didn’t want to pay. How do these losers get through life? Mercifully, eBay recognized this nut for what he is and deleted his slanderous, retaliatory feedback. A small nod in the direction of decency and honesty!

Sniffing around the internet, it became obvious that there was quite a number of adapter manufacturers who promised that Leicaflex lenses could be mounted on an EOS body. Prices ranged up to some $200. I bought one from Kiev Camera in the USA for $50, but promptly had to return it as it had a faulty lens locking pin. The folks at Kiev Camera sent me another one and that one works really well.

As you can see, the order of events is Telyt lens, M to R adapter and then R to EOS adapter. The 200mm Telyt shown here, being a truly ancient design, also has a Leica screw to Leica M adapter, # 14166. Despite all these adapters, the whole thing feels rock solid once assembled.

While the Telyt lenses are manual, indeed the 400mm does not even have preset stops, use is easy with the 5D on aperture priority. Indeed, that’s the only way you can use it as the camera has no idea what is fitted, as there are no electronics to feed it the information. So you set the shutter and the camera choses the shutter speed. Focusing is also manual, as once again the lack of electronics defeats the focus confirmation light ordinarily seen in the viewfinder. No matter. The standard screen in the 5D works just fine with these long, slow lenses. For this very occasional long lens user the setup suffices, even though Rube Goldberg might be proud of the design! Both lenses preserve full focus to infinity with this arrangement.

You can see some snaps taken with this combination here. For results with the magnificent 400mm Telyt, please click here.

But wait. The plot thickens. In going through all my gear trying to sell anything that was no longer used, I came across a near new El Nikkor 50mm enlarging lens which I had last used in those mercifully long past, dreary darkroom days. That would be 29 years ago. As any Leica user will tell you, sooner or later you end up in adapter hell, as Leitz made adapters for seemingly everything. They must love the art of machining in Wetzlar and, indeed, their adapters are things of mechanical beauty. The El Nikkor uses a Leica thread mount. A few seconds later and it’s converted to Leica M bayonet with an adapter from the dark recesses of the cupboard where all my remaining junk hides. A separate adapter, # 16596 if you must know, converts my old Leica Bellows II, another remnant of the Visoflex years, into Leica M mount. Attach the M to Leicaflex to EOS adapter on the back and you have a free macro lens:

This gives larger than life images and, of course, infinity focus is not possible. Still, have you tried to sell an enlarging lens recently?

A better use is with the superbly sharp 135mm Leica Apo Telyt lens which gives images 2/3rds life size and also affords a far greater lens to subject difference allowing for better illumination of the subject. Nice to give these old warhorses a new lease of life.

On speed

Canon 5D

Not enough light? Just crank up the ISO!

I was snapping pictures at my son’s fourth birthday party the other day and rather than use an intrusive flash, I though “Why not just crank up the ISO on the Canon EOS 5D and see what happens?”

So I set the speed to ISO 1600 and let the IS lens do it’s thing, taking pictures at the f/4 maximum aperture with the camera setting the shutter as low as 1/8th second. The only duds were where the subject moved. The picture quality is simply breathtaking. On 35mm film I would be using a Leica with an f/1.4 lens with ISO 400 film and the grain would be obvious on an 8x enlargement. With these digital snaps, 13x enlargements are grain free, pores clearly visible.

When all was said and done I reset the ISO back to 650 and snapped this image of my exhausted wife, Elenia, with Bertie the Border Terrier. There is something amazing going on here.

In this picture of my wife, in the 13″ x 19″ print the details in the window are clearly visible in the reflections on her rather gorgeous American Teeth. At ISO 650. Hand held by window light.

Advertising hoarding seen on the 101 freeway in Silicon Valley, California, with a picture of the Canon EOS 350 digital camera: “Film? History.” Yes indeed.

Fix that flap

Canon 5D

A simple workaround for the clumsy flash socket cover on the EOS 5D

When using non-hot shoe flash, like my studio Novatron flash kit, this is how the flash cord is attached to the Canon EOS 5D body:

Can you believe this design?

However, for less than $20, Nikon still makes a hot shoe flash adapter, the AS-15, which can be locked in the hot shoe on the camera and the flash cord is then attached to the front:

It makes hand holding a lot easier and you prolong the life of that very fragile flash socket cover. What were they thinking of?

Upstrap in action

Cameras

Goodbye to the garish, inept horror story that is the Canon strap.

Here you can see what I am going on about – fancy being a walking billboard for Canon? Heck, I just paid them nearly $5k for the gear – if they want me to wear that, they need to pay me. Plus free repairs for when it slips off my shoulder. The Upstrap has a broad rubber pad with nipples on both sides. It is far more comfortable and simply does not slip. This is the SLR model for cameras over 2.25 lbs. I used to use the lighter RF/DC variant on my Leica M2 and M3.

Here you can see how it is threaded so that the ‘tail’ can be folded in between the two sides and retained by the slider. Neat.

Recommended without reservation unless, that is, you prefer gold chains displayed on your chest.

Here are the detailed instructions – there are many incorrect ways to install one of these and one correct one. Follow these instructions and the strap cannot become detached from your eyelets:

When threading the strap through triangular keepers be sure that its surface contacts one of the two non-opening sides, as the sharp ends of the latter can gradually wear through the strap material. Triangular split D-rings are far better than circular ones as you cannot prevent the opening area rubbing on the strap’s material with those.


You do not want the strap in contact with the arrowed side of the D-ring.