Lenses Galore!!

As you might realise, I'm a fan of the old things. I drive a Land Rover Defender 90. I use a wood burner for my main source of heating and I have an Alpha Industries Parka to keep me warm when I'm outside (you know the one - the same as the US army use for their extreme weather manoeuvres).

As some of you will also know I recently acquired a Canon 550D Digital camera. As mentioned - a great piece of kit. From the last blogcast, you'll discover that I have been purchasing bargain lenses that have an M42 mount that I'm using with my EOS adaptor and 550D. All is well and good in the household of yester-year. That is until I found some reviews discussing one of the lenses I have recently bought: the Sunagor 28/2.8 (Nope, I hadn't heard of that brand either).

It's not easy to recognise a quality lens from a virtual distance, but what I do know is that if it hasn't cost me too much (and in this case we're talking about less than £20), then I consider this a risk worth taking - especially as the average Maccy D meal for two is in this region (and the lens is going to last much longer - and likely give much, much more pleasure).

I digress.

So a couple of weeks ago I won a bid on the bay for said lens (the Sunagor) and waddaya know - it's a beauty. Ok so the brand is one of those 'bargain bucket' sneered at brands that other more professional types berate in their for-blog-casts, but for me it's a beauty.

Here's why.

It has a maximum aperture of f/2.8. It has really good contrast and saturation. I can get to within 15 cm of the subject and still focus. It has great bokeh for a wide angle lens. It takes great pictures. And - best of all - I only paid sixteen quid plus postage.

I've only done some initial tests, but I like the results (here they are).

So I hope you'll agree with me that the results are pretty impressive for a bargain bucket lens I got for less than a night out with the missus. I like this lens so much that it's likely to be my main lens (with a magnification factor of 1.6 the 'proper' focal length calculates to about 45mm). It doesn't end there though as I just laid out a slightly bigger wedge for a Chinnon 55/1.4. Again another bargain bucket sneered at brand, but I'm telling you - the bokeh with that is incredible (don't worry, I will post some snaps from this lens soon - WTS).

At work we have a set of Canon lenses that meet some of the specs of my recently 'liberated' lenses, so when I get chance, I'll do some proper comparisons. But already I know that I'm not going to beat the Sonagor for value. Call me biased, but I seem to remember that in the Good Book we are encouraged to love the lost and the lonely. Sonagor 28/2.8 we love you. Much more than 'wise' people do.

Check out the Bokeh

So I got the lenses (and the body): Revuenon. Solid. Had to wait for the adaptor to come through.

Friday night, one week later.

Finally the adaptor arrives and I go through the steps to set up the information for the camera to read the adaptor and to set the camera so that I can use the manual settings. It took a while, but I eventually deciphered the Chinglish and got the lenses to 'communicate' with my 550D. A word of caution here. If you do get lenses from the internet, make sure everything fits properly BEFORE firing the camera. I understand that on some of the older screw fit lenses and some of the latest digital bodies the mirror can catch on the lens if an inappropriate adaptor is used. I checked mine (I focussed to infinity to see if the inner barrel would extend past the adaptor into the body of the camera - it didn't). Everything working, fitted and ready to go. All I need now is an opportunity to snap away.

The next day.

As serendipity would have it the wife goes: 'Want to go to the market love?' (This is the outdoor market in Birmingham's Bullring). 'Sure.' Now's my chance to test the lenses.

It was a good shoot with some interesting material to aim at. I was very pleased with these lenses (after-all at £5 a pop, who wouldn't be?) There's a little fringing, and the contrast is a bit flat for my tastes, but hey, I've got Aperture (Apple's digital darkroom) so I can correct if required (as I have in the pics below). For my money, I reckon I got a bargain.

I bet by now you're wanting to see. Well I'll let the pictures tell their own story (check out the bokeh).

The Good Old Days

I've been away for a while...but I'M BACK!!!

A bit excited tonight. As you'll know I have recently acquired (through the generosity of my family) a Canon 550D. Great camera. In order to compliment this I purchased the 10-22mm UWA lens. Again a great piece of kit. Expensive, but great pictures. Well there's not a lot of change left, but there's enough for a small purchase.

So I'm down on the 'bay and doing a bit of trawling when I come across a really inexpensive way of getting good quality lenses (some of you will already be aware of this approach.) Remember in the old days before digital (yes there was such a time)? When we had manual camera controls, light meters and women... (ahem, no need to go there). They were good times (or maybe my recollection has been distorted by fungus, scratches, dust etc.)

I think you know where I'm going with this.

After a number of searches and discovering the Carl Zeiss lenses are still expensive and profuse. I finally found what I thought was a good bargain to bid on: a Revueflex camera that comes bundled with three Revuenon lenses. I know, I know, I hadn't heard of that brand either but it was supposed to be in perfect working order so what's not to like?.

The lenses are a 35mm f/2 (calculates to 56mm on the Canon); a 55mm f/2 (88mm); and a 135mm f/2.8 (216mm). F/2.8!!! That's pretty fast for a 135mm. How much should I bid then? I asked myself (mainly because everyone else had gone to bed). I decided my maximum bid for three lenses should be forty quid, set up my auto bid, sat back and waited.

Now you must remember at the time of setting up the bid the price was at £2.10 (or something around that) with 2 days to go. So I checked before going to sleep (what red-blooded male doesn't take his iPod Touch to sleep with him?) and it hadn't changed. "Ok." I thought. "check tomorrow." and I did. Again no change. Still there was another 10 hours to go and after all I wasn't too fussed if I was to lose the bid.

The day went (a good day at work I might add - maybe more of that another time) and I got home. Checked the 'bay and there it was: 10 minutes to go and still no different. The upshot was that I got myself a kit of lenses for £22 including postage. They're M42 mount so I bought a lens adaptor for £12 and there you have it: three lenses for under thirty-five smackers.

So tonight more research (and God's graciousness continues). Turns out these little babies are actually pretty good lenses (will post test shots as soon as I can). Made in Japan by a company called Tomoika (?) who also made the infamous, and above mentioned, Carl Ziess lenses on the same production line. More research still, and I found a great site that shows how to take lenses apart, clean them and successfully put them back together again (so even if they're not 'in perfect working order' I can try and do something about it).

One drawback is that not all the functions of the camera will work using these lenses with the adaptor and I'll have to use manual settings quite a bit. But I do that anyway, so no real loss there (and it'll be good to blow the dust off my spot meter and get it going again). Ahhh yes, bring back those good old days when it took more than a microsecond to set up the camera and shoot.

What a day.

Digital SLRs

So I get home from work tonight, watch Dr Who (iPlayer catch-up), have my dinner and go shopping. The weekly shop - you know the sort of thing meat, veg, sandwich stuff. Anyway, there's this 'lightening' tree near where I live and I've been wanting to capture it's image for a loooong time. And I get home with the shopping and think - now is the time. The light is right, the weather is right, what's to stop me? After putting the shopping away, I'm picking up my camera and I'm off.

"Where're you going?" was the response from the better half.

"To get a picture of the lightening tree."

"Oh."

Quick as a (dedicated) flash, I'm out the door and walking up the road towards this tree.

Now in the old days of celluloid, one of the things that would bite my biscuit was night-time photography. I would experiment with the bulb setting, set a small aperture, aim the camera and about two or three days later there it would be the best (or worst) picture I'd ever taken. But that was the old days. I had some moderate successes, but on the whole this was experimentation.

Back to this evening: I've been preparing in my mind for a few months now about how I'm going to plan this and get the best image I can of this tree and I'm nearly at the tree now and this is the plan:

Set up in the field (with tripod, camera etc.), use a long exposure time and try some flash bursts (from my off-camera dedicated flash). I don't have a shutter release cable or remote so I'll have to use the self timer on two seconds so that I don't get camera shake. (Note to self: get shutter release cable)...

And I get there and the fence is covered in barbed wire all around and there's no way in (or at least not visible in the dark). As a consequence the first part of the plan fails. So I set up the tripod, camera and get it in position; switch on the live view mode and this is what I saw... Wow!

Let's go back a few years when digital photography was in it's infancy (ok quite a few years) and I could only afford a standard 35mm film camera. I would have had to chance it (based on a few calculations and guess work) take the picture and wait until the next morning before I could check the results.

These days, I can see the results instantly (well after setting up and having a 30" exposure time). I can then take these pictures home (I took about a dozen in all), upload them into my computer and manipulate them like this:

And this is my point: digital cameras have a real advantage in that they allow us to set up and view images instantly. However, I have a draw full of 'imperfect' images that once-in-a-while I get out and inspect. Often, I see things in the background that I hadn't noticed before: buildings that have gone, people I haven't seen for a while and I'm wondering what they're doing now. With digital photography we either instantly view (and delete) the images that we take or we simply load them onto the computer and forget about them. Perhaps with the advent of digital photography we've lost some of the memories that make us who we are. Perhaps it's an indication of the culture now - 'If we don't like it we can dispose of it'. I'm convinced that this is not the way.

So for me I'm keeping my images and most of the mistakes and now and again I'll look at them and smile at my own ineptitude. And as a bonus my chief critic likes the lightening tree image and wants a print out framed and on the wall - now that's a result.

Guns and the Law

So. I'm in John Lewis shopping - I like John Lewis, never knowingly undersold - and I notice the spud gun, I bought my son last week (for sale at twice the price of the one I bought from Poundland - do the math). Reading the package on the back I noticed that this also had the ability to fire caps. You know the ones we used to have as a kid - little black dots of gun powder on a roll of paper. So I'm getting excited now. My own boy can menace his big sister in much the same way I did at his age - 8 (the photo is of me a bit younger, but you get the idea).

So a kindly shop assistant walks past and it sort of goes like this:

"Er, excuse me. I noticed the packaging on the back of this spud gun says that it can fire caps. Is that right?"

"Yes sir."

"Great. Can I get some?"

"Sorry. We don't sell them to children. It's against the law because the potato gun is a replica."

(at this point I'm slightly taken aback as the spud gun itself is bright red - call me naive, but on my visit to the Royal Armoury in Leeds a short while back I didn't notice any bright red real guns).

"Sorry?" I say.

"We can't sell the caps to children - it's against the law. Besides, we don't stock them."

At this point I started to quietly rant a bit to the kindly shop assistant, but realised that this was neither helpful, nor going to get me those caps. Still, it got me thinking (something I'm not much good at).

What is happening to our UK society when we can't even sell cap-guns to kids? I had one and I didn't turn out to be a gun-toting whatever (now I'm starting to sound like fifty - or a raving Tory). It's not that I actively promote boys and guns either. It's more like they'll do it anyway (my own boy has this uncanny skill at being able to make a gun out of pretty much anything - even a stick!). My thinking is that: if we teach them from an early age that using guns is simply not a good idea, they should get it. Boys will play. Boys will play at [cowboys, soldiers, gangsters, use your own names]. That's often how they learn about right and wrong. Of course my wife doesn't approve of this approach, but I'd like to think that my lad and myself have a good enough relationship to be able to discuss these issues as they arise - and they might not arise IF WE CAN'T BUY CAPS FOR CAP-GUNS!!.

I'm not an advocate of war either. It would be a real heartbreak to have my own son join one of the armed forces.

What I'm really trying to say is that in our risk-averse, game-consol passive culture we have lost something - the ability to teach our children what's good for them and what isn't through real activity. I think if my 8 year old son can prepare and light (under supervision), the woodburner that keeps us warm in the winter months, he'll be able to cope with a few black dots on a roll of paper that go bang!. He knows that fire is dangerous. He also knows how to control that danger and make it safe. I'm trusting that he'll understand, as he gets older, that fire is not to be underestimated, but respected and used as a tool to heat and cook. I'm also trusting that he'll understand that guns (real guns, that is) is not such a good idea.

Nobody's reading this, right?

A bit late to get into the blogging thing, but hey here goes - I was always a late starter. Guessing you guys out there want the fun stuff, the meaty stuff - the personal details about my life. Why? Why would anyone be interested in what I have to say? Mr Ordinary that's me. But it's the ordinary people that get things done, isn't it? I mean look at Moses. Ok he's famous now, but when he encountered the burning bush, he was just a shepherd, and who wants to be one of those?

Any road up. I'm now Fifty - yep the big five-o (as of 25 days ago) and up to this point in my life I can't really say that I've achieved much, but as I was saying - it's the 'nobody's' of this world that get things done.

I've been a Christian much of my life. I say 'much' - something definite happened at the age of 10, so for the rest of my days God's been a part of it all. I know, I know, some of you don't believe in God and that's up to you. But for me, I like it that way - me an' God, mates.

Do photography too (leicamike.jalbum.net). Just getting back into it after a long break. Tried a Leica (V-LUX 1) and now I'm trying out the new Canon 550D. Nice camera. Very nice camera. Don't get me wrong the Leica was nice, but this is a different nice. That's the thing about going back to something after a few years - it's all different. It's much easier now. Easier to check the pics, easier to delete the pics. So I'm doing it different, making an effort, making it harder (life's too easy - more on that another time) - using infrared filters. It takes me up to 40 minutes to take one picture (maybe I'll explain in another blog). That in itself is a good thing - slowing down, removing oneself from the hurly burly of the 21st Century rush - it is a good thing. And then you get the reward... the pics. Keep them, delete them. Does it really matter? Who's going to be interested anyway?

So you got to my first blog and this could be my last, but if you're out there reading this, take heart: Mr Ordinary has just entered the world of the ordinary (something's gotta work). See ya next time.