Category Archives: Photography

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.

Limekiln

Photographs, Photography

A very special place.

I have been visiting Limekiln State Park for some time now. It is seventy miles or so from home, up Highway One, so no excuse is needed for the drive. Roughly midway between Cambria and Carmel on the central California coast, it offers magnificent ancient redwoods and waterfalls galore. Best of all, it’s generally deserted and though I have paid more than my fair share of California taxes, I do not feel too badly about the $6 entrance fee. It is a special place and sheer hell to photograph.

One reason is that you are simply overwhelmed by the beauty of the venue, meaning your first few trips result in lousy pictures. Then as you get to learn it you begin to appreciate the huge contrast range and begin to tackle it as best as you can. Unlike most landscape photography where the best lighting is early and late, Limekiln is best photographed between noon and 2 p.m., by which time the coastal fog has burned off and the sun is high enough in the sky to penetrate the dark forests of one hundred foot high redwoods. Then you get that magic light effect of sun dappled spots surrounded by this herd of ancient giants.

Up to now my best work there has been on 4”x5” film, which means 1-8 second exposures on my favorite Kodak Portra VC160 film with the 90mm Angulon wide angle stopped down to f/22 or smaller in the perennial quest for depth of field. That means the massive Linhof tripod has to come along with the Crown Graphic and all those film holders. Well, by the time you get there, what with lugging all that gear, it feels like the cocktail hour. Anything to stop the shakes.

So today I tried something different. No excuse was needed to try the new toy, the Canon EOS 5D, but the gear was minimalist at best. The camera, the 24-105mm lens (OK, so it’s the only one I have. I’m making virtue out of necessity here), my little alloy monopod and that wonderful Leitz ball and socket head which I seem to have been born with. Add an inexpensive quick release plate on the camera and the monopod and you have the kit I used today.

Now I’m still sticking with 6mp JPGs. Not that RAW scares me but because I’m a dumb ass. In all my excitement when I was placing the order with B&H, all those eBay medium format sale proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I forgot to order a couple of 1gB CF cards on which to store the large 13mB RAW files. The only CF card I have at home is a 256 mB used in the Olympus C-5050Z, the one with the one hour shutter lag, so I stuck that in the 5D while waiting for the big capacity cards from B&H to arrive. Boy, UPS must just love me. In fact the gate to the estate finally gave up the ghost today from all those deliveries…. JPG gets me 47 images, RAW 13. Now 24 is about right for me, so JPG it is for now.

I’m rapidly learning that to extract maximum dynamic range from digital your exposure has to be pretty much spot on. It feels like using slide film again. Maybe 1/2 stop tolerance either way. That means sharpening my skills as I’m used to the two stop latitude of color negative film. It also means that, in Limekiln’s dark interior, I finally used the built in LCD screen on the back of the 5D to optimize exposure. At least it was dark enough to see it. Several pictures were a stop out, so I erased them on the spot (that wretched 256 mB card!) and re-exposed. Two clicks on the Info button and you get a little picture on the camera’s LCD screen with the overexposed bits flashing at you. Now is that cool or what? The working dynamic was fascinating to compare with 4”x5”. Where the latter dictates f/16 or smaller apertures, meaning seconds of exposure. I cranked up the 5D to 400 ASA (oops! ISO. That dates me!) having learned that the big sensor in the camera shows no noise at this speed. 1 1/2 stops gained. Then I shot at f/4, the maximum aperture on the 24-105mm, as the lens is simply very, very sharp at all openings. 4-5 stops gained. Then I used the IS in the lens to cut vibrations for another three stops gained. That’s some 9 stops gained over 4”x5”, meaning I was shooting at 1/30th @ f/4, aided by the monopod. And the results are critically sharp. My back does not hurt and I don’t feel a day over 50 on arriving home.

Next time you visit here I shall be messing about with RAW. Is this a steep learning curve or what?

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?