Great street snapper.
First snaps through the 40 year old 35mm Nikkor, profiled yesterday.
Yesterday and tomorrow. D700, 35mm. Click the picture for the location.
Oyster vendor. Same gear.
Cheese shop. Same gear, at full aperture.
Flower. Same gear.
Looks like a keeper. The lens has a CPU installed, which took a few minutes, and I used my custom lens correction profile on import to Lightroom 4. The CPU allows the correct profile to be automatically selected and applied in LR or PS.
A superb 35mm optic for pennies.
35mm Nikkor-O f/2, with period hood. The CPU is visible on the rear baffle.
The manual focus 35mm f/2 Nikkor-O, from the ‘all metal’ era whose construction quality has never been surpassed, shows moderate vignetting at f/2 and f/2.8 with a small amount of barrel distortion at all apertures. Full resolution is reached at f/4. Contrast is very high. The 8 elements in 6 groups design appears to have remained unchanged in the pre-Ai, Ai and Ai-S versions, spanning December 1965 through August 1981, and testifying to the excellence of the design. Later models, named ‘O.C’, were multicoated; mine is single coated. This lens is fully the equal of any Leitz or Leica 35mm Summicron on a Leica M, regarded by many as the standard at this focal length. Having owned and used 8 element and 6 element spherical Summicrons and the Aspherical model, I can testify to this.
Mine is 1971 vintage and there is one huge difference compared to the Leica optic. The latter will run you $3,200 new and not much less used. My Nikkor was $175 with hood for a near mint version. Another $25 was spent on an Ai conversion and the CPU ran $30 more. The CPU is easily installed with epoxy, directly on the rear baffle. More on CPU installation here. I see very minor diffraction loss at f/16, and slight red fringing at all apertures (you really have to pixel peep to divine that) easily corrected in LR4 by checking the ‘Remove Chromatic Aberration’ box, which I have done in creating my import setup. This means the lens is perfectly useable – and will render huge prints – at any aperture.
I have made a tailored lens profile to correct the minor aberrations in this lens and you can download it here. It works with PS or LR.
Pictures will follow when I have had a chance to wring the lens out. Look here.
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.
The invention of an American genius.
This wonderful advertisement for Edwin Land’s Polaroid SX-70 instant camera is thrilling to watch.
Almost eleven minutes long, and reveling for a considerable part in the fabulous technology of the machine, there is no better way, other than using one, of appreciating what Dr. Land had accomplished with his magic machine. The sheer simplicity of the SX-70’s user interface would not be rivaled until the iPad came along forty years later, and having used both, I can assure you only one is magic, and it’s not the product designed in Cupertino.
The film was made by Charles and Ray Eames, whose other accomplishments include architectural and furniture design. Talent is seldom evenly distributed.
Film for the SX-70:
A bunch of criminally insane people in Holland got together, bought out the old Polaroid film making hardware and got down to making film for the SX-70, and you can still buy it here. Bless them!
How a picture book should be done.
Our son was doing a homework project on the Spanish Missions in California and the one assigned, which he had to profile, was Mission San Gabriel. In contrast to the others whose roofs rest on adobe walls, San Gabriel has the roof resting within the walls, the latter reinforced by over a dozen vertical buttresses – large stone columns to bear the side load of the roof on the walls. It was an interesting project and we both learned a lot doing it, but at the conclusion I had to put the boy to right.
“Winston, old man”, said I, taking the lad aside, “when it comes to roof supports, there are buttresses and there is Notre Dame.”
And this is the picture I showed him.
Notre Dame, ÃŽle de France, Paris. Flying buttresses.
Seldom has there been a more perfect marriage of form and function than in these flying buttresses, light and airy, as befits the City of Light. Gazing at this of course made me long for Paris, and there is no better way of seeing that gorgeous city through photographs than by downloading the free Fotopedia – Paris app to your iPad. The app is custom designed for the iPad, and will not run on laptops, desktops or Zunes.
The design is a masterpiece, as you might expect from the former chief technology officer of applications at Apple, Jean-Marie Hullot. There’s an interesting piece on the man in the NY Times Blog. The app is not about hotels, or sightseeing or boat trips or restaurants. It’s about showing the most beautiful city in the world on the best display device in existence. I have run it on both the iPad1 and iPad3 and it works well on both.
The photo below is from Fotopedia – Paris by Magnum photographer Jacques Bravo and is of the roofs of Rue Mouffetard in Montparnasse, a particularly pleasant reminiscence for me as it was a snap of that very street which saw me first published in Leica Fotografie in 1974. On an iPad, touch the picture for the Fotopedia app. On a laptop or desktop, you can save by clicking on the picture and then syncing your iPad using iTunes.
Touch the picture on your iPad to download Fotopedia – Paris.
There are several other Fotopedias, but after this one, who cares? Oh yes, there’s one about the US National Parks for all those who believe landscapes start and end in Yosemite. Good for the Saint Ansel set, I suppose. And there’s one on North Korea (what?) for manic depressives. But Paris is the one to get for this street snapper.