Posts tagged ‘C/Y Zeiss 50mm f/1.4’
NYC Walk About
Plus-X, N-1, HC-110
A few more from that roll shot in NYC with the RTS II and the C/Y 50mm f/1.4. It’s hard to see in this JPEG but the street sign says “42nd Street”
After I took the last one, I turned around and saw this . . .
That old C/Y 50mm 1.4
Plus-X, N-1, HC-110
Developed on older roll shot with the Contax RTS mounting the C/Y 50mm 1.4. Like the look of this lens; just wish the camera hadn’t given me the fits. Liked the camera a lot, too.
Glowing Bag
This look of pulled Plus-X I will miss a lot once I’m through with all the rolls I have stashed.
Love the reflection in the window
This roll, for some reason, had a number of abstract images on it. They surprised me quite a bit when I looked at them.
Still working on the transfer . . .
Plus-X, N-1, HC-110 (H)
I’m still working on the transfer of the blog to this theme. I’m moving the folders on the web site around so the whole thing will work, and in the process broke the RSS feed a bit. So please let me know if you see this post in your feed.
This image was from a roll of pulled Plus-X, shot with the short-lived Contax RTS II. Loved that camera, but it couldn’t be fixed after it broke.
Tri-X and Zeiss Glass
Zeiss Biogon, Pittsburgh, July
The images in this post are just a handful from the rolls I’ve scanned over the last couple days. The unifying theme is Zeiss glass (the C/Y 50 and also the Biogon on my Bessa) and the film is Tri-X, souped in DD-X.
Biogon, Chicago, July
Regarding the C/Y Contax experiment, I’ve given up. I returned the Contax RTS for a refund from KEH, I’m going to sell the C/Y 50mm on line, and I’m going to try and pry a refund from the adapter manufacturer.
C/Y 50mm, EOS 3, Vancouver, October
As Mike Peters, mentioned, there’s a limit to my patience trying to get this stuff to work.
C/Y 50, Vancouver
While the 50 and the adapter obviously don’t have the same troubles on the EOS and film. the 5D has difficulties.
C/Y 50, Vancouver
And while my love for Zeiss glass is undiminished, I’m just going to save up for the ZE series and get lenses that work on both bodies. And, of course, eventually get my Sonnar for the Bessa.
RIP, Plus-X
As some of you may have heard, Kodak stopped producing Plus-X. I bought two bricks earlier this week, and will try to stock up on it as long as I can.
Bessa, Chicago, Biogon
I guess I should start stocking up on Tri-X as well. Sigh.
Ben Lifson
5D, Nik Silver Efex, C/Y Zeiss 50mm f/1.4
Photography is an art form. I’m gonna make a stand there, not really expecting my readership to muster much of an argument. I don’t talk much about the art, mind you, because, as Kirk Tuck has discussed, blog posts talking about art or vison don’t generate much traffic. However, if I posted a review of the Canon 5D Mk III, I bet you I might set records for page views on my site. And, since I just described myself on my business cards as a “fine art photographer” I guess I’d better start talking about it. Eh?
Normally, I tend to keep to my standard topics, which specialize in film-related issues. If I’m known for anything on the web, it’s that I post more b&w than color, and more film than digital. I love those images and topics, and it would be unlike me to veer to far from those topics and those issues.
But I’ve had in the back of my mind two posts which are related to each other. The first is a post about Ben Lifeson, the second a post about Sean Reid. The reason they are related is that I found out about Mr. Lifson by reading columns written by Mr. Reid.
5D, C/Y Zeiss 50mm f/1.4
So, I’ll get to Mr. Reid another time. Today I talk about Mr. Lifson.
Mr. Lifson is a long-time teacher of photography and editor of photography books. In 2005, he published a series of articles about the nature of visual art and the traditions of painting as they applied to photography at a web site called rawworkflow.com. I felt, as you might reading this now, that rawworkflow.com was an odd location for such a series of articles. But there they were anyway. There were 12 articles in all, and the main theme of the articles was centered on the relationship between fine art (drawing and painting) and photography.
It would be difficult to summarize all the topics Mr. Lifson discussed in detail, but among them were the structure of a face and how best to portray that face; the importance of the hands in portraiture, the importance of the bottom of the frame in terms of grounding the image, etc.
There were 12 articles in all, and I printed each one out. The insights and wisdom was always astounding, and reading them and re-reading them always brought insight and new ways of looking at my work.
When I thought of discussing these insights recently, I went to find the articles (each of which I had printed out, very important as they had ceased to be found on rawworkflow.com — I assume Mr. Lifson had asked that they be taken down, or perhaps their license for use had expired). To my dismay, I only found articles 5 through 12. Numbers 1 through 4 were not in the hanging file where I thought I had left them.
I don’t know where they went, or how I lost them. But lost they seem to be. I will, over the next few weeks, try to summarize the insights in various columns on the blog.
All the images in this post were captured in Vancouver and LA on my trip, which concludes this evening.
Color Efex 4
5D, C/Y Zeiss 50mm f/1.4, Color Efex 4
I occasionally test software for Nik. I got a chance to used the new Color Efex 4 and just received my copy. This is one of the images from the walk-about I did with the C/Y 50mm mounted on the 5D. There are lots of things to like about Color Efex 4, and I’m in the midst of preparing a blog post about the software.
More to come.
Focusing Screens arrive at Patterns of Light n’ Dark!
C/Y Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 mounted on Canon 5D @ f/1.4
Using an adapter, this C/Y is a kind of poor-man’s Zeiss lens on my 5D. Now that I have the focusing screen, I can get accurately focused frames at f/1.4 (within human error, of course). I am a happy man, as this same lens works on my RTS II, my EOS 3, and my 5D. And, well, it would also work on my wife’s 40D and my old trusty 10D (albeit as an 80 mm equivalent).
This opens up new possibilities to me. It gives me a very nicely functional old-school film SLR, a larger, bulkier Canon film SLR, and a digital camera for less $$$ than the Zeiss new 50. Significantly less. Now, of course, there is a cost.
The door on my Saab with the 5D-C/Y combo
I don’t really think for a second the image quality is as good as the new Zeiss lenses made for the EOS mount. But it’s better than any 50mm I have for an EOS mount now, for sure.
Metering is a little tricky, in that when I mount the lens, the EOS cameras won’t read the actual f-stop, but they will read whether I’m over or under given the chosen shutter speed. But it is in old-style stopped down metering (the view frame gets darker as I stop down). But I incident meter a lot of the time anyway, so that’s no biggie if I’m shooting the EOS 3, and I can chimp with the 5D if I need to.
Switching the adapter if I switch lenses causes a little juggling.
Above image witrh the DXO Rollei preset
So, this is an overall good thing for me. Next post I will discuss my thoughts on my digital-raw-file-to-b&w-file using DXO or Nik Silver Effects workflow. While there are many ways to do this, I have some observations about this effort.
And, as always, there are more film scans coming.
