Still feeling my way around the Sony Nex 7 but getting more comfortable with it by the day.

One of the reasons why so many experienced photographers are drawn to mirrorless cameras is the short distance between the lens mount and the sensor. This smaller distance allows for users to mount many different lenses from a large universe of camera systems to their mirrorless cameras. One of the reasons I bought the Olympus EP2 was the ability to mount my large collections of very good Pen F manual focus lenses to the camera and to be able to continue to use them and benefit from their unique capabilities.

The Sony shares this short flange to sensor attribute and has become a very popular camera/vehicle of using Leica M series lenses, various Zeiss lenses and a raft of Cosina/Voitlander lenses.  I recently discovered that several companies make Pen F lens to Sony Nex adapters so I bought one and I've been testing various lenses from the 1970's on the camera.

So far, the 60mm 1.5 and the 40mm 1.4 have come through with flying colors.  Or really good colors. Once each of these lenses is stopped down at least one f-stop from their wide open aperture they become competitive with current lenses.  Once they are stopped down two or more stops they become premium quality lenses for most applications.  I liked working with the lenses on the Pen digital cameras but it was always a process of framing, enlarging the frame for focusing, reducing the frame to shoot.  With the Nex 7 I have the  focus peaking feature engaged for manual focus lenses so it's really just a matter of focusing and checking to see where the color outline occurs to confirm focus. Bravo. That make things a lot easier.

I decided today to test a lens that I've had mixed results with on the Pen digital cameras. It's the Pen F manual focus, 25mm 2.8 lens. Hitting sharp focus with it on the Pens was always problematic and, at a certain point, I began to suspect that the optic itself was just sub-par. I thought today would give me a make it or break it finality with the easier discretion of the focus peaking.

I've re-evaluated the lens in light of the three photos you see here and from many other samples I took during the course of a hot and sweaty walk this afternoon.  When accurately focused the lens can be very sharp.  The colors in the lens are more muted than modern lenses and I don't know whether that is a difference in coating or a design philosophy in lens making that's evolved over the years.  I do know that I can take a "quieter image" and do quite a bit of manipulation to it before the manipulation becomes obvious.  In some ways a flatter and more neutral image rendition gives you more latitude to make changes in post without suffering much.  The files don't seem "fragile."

The adapter I got came from Fotodiox and it's much more accurate at infinity that some other adapters I'd gotten for the Olympus digital Pens.  That means I can use the depth of field scale on the lens to calculate a hyperfocal distance. In bright light, at f8, I can get a field of focus that's relatively sharp from about 5 feet to infinity when set to the correct hyperfocal distance.  That's a real plus for street shooting.  With the electronic front shutter curtain of the Nex 7 and using manual exposure control, I can bang out an image with absolutely no lag time whatsoever.  And if I've metered correctly (and who couldn't with a camera that "pre-chimps" for you???) and set the correct distance I can shoot without making any adjustments and be sure of a sharp and well exposed frame every single time. Old school meets new tech.

The Pen 25mm does have a few issues when shooting a wide shot with uneven daylight across the frame.  I shot a bridge and noticed some color shift to magenta from edge to edge.  Other than that the lens is a good, straightforward performer.  If you can find one cheap you'll have a nice 35-37mm equivalent focal length for a really high performance camera.  That being said, I'm happy with the performance of the kit lens in that range of focal lengths.

Nice day in Austin. Everyone was at Barton Springs pool.  Ahhhhh. 68 degree water on a 102 degree day. Perfect.

Projection, reflection.

I was all packed up to spend my afternoon walking around Austin, making photographs with a Sony Nex 7 and a small bag full of interesting lenses and adapters.  I stopped by my favorite sandwich shop for a tuna sandwich on whole wheat with jalapeños and cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes.  In the early afternoon the over head sunlight bounced off the windshields of the vehicles parked out front and projected all the lettering from the windows onto the ceiling of the shop. I liked this very much.  So I took a photo with the Sony and a 40mm 1.4 Olympus Pen F lens.  I set the camera to black and white.  Being the nerd that I am I will admit that I looked at the file at 100% just to make sure I could see all the crisp detail in the acoustic tiles. Then I headed out for a long, hot stroll...

An insightful look at what may be happening to the world of art. A video. Not by me.

I'm not particularly relevant to photography anymore but I take consolation in knowing that no one else is either.  Have a look at this very powerful, very thoughtful video about the changing nature of popular art and tell me what you think.  http://vimeo.com/34608191  

It's called PressPausePlay and it was produced by House of Radon, a creative agency in Sweden. I happen to agree with nearly everything in the video but I am especially interested in the idea that we are in a "crisis of democratized culture" that could lead to a new, creative "dark ages."

While it's true that more people than ever before have access to the tools to automatically create art what it's given rise to is a tsunami of mediocre work the sheer volume and noise of which hides the very few truly talented artists. It's not enough to "up one's game" unless the intended audiences for your work are savvy at the rigors of data mining and are hell bent on finding shining needles in vast, oceanic haystacks.  One of the interviewees in the piece states, in a matter of fact way that, "most people don't have talent."  But because of the outpouring of work in every genre "People start to become comfortable with mediocrity."  At some point we lose our ability to discriminate between genius and hollow imitation.  

These seem to be almost universal beliefs among both artists and critics. Don't argue with me until you've watched the video.  It's very well made and I think it's worth your time....

Sony Nex 7 meets Olympus Pen Glass for a brand new synergy of Power and Glory !!!

FrankenSony.  OlympenStein. Fun via the U.S. Mail.

Even I have to admit that the headline for this particular blog is way over the top. Hyperbole taken to a new level. But it's a quiet Friday and I'm temporarily stuck inside due to violent yet welcome thunderstorm. Something's got to give.

I've had good luck with the mail this week. On Monday I got my Nikon Lens to Sony Alpha camera, lens adapter. I'm using it to connect brilliant old Nikon F macro lenses to my a77's.  They work on the camera and the lenses are quite good despite their age. I plan to use them for a food shoot next Friday. Testing all next week.  On Thurs. I got a nice check from my publisher.  Delayed gratification for projects finished long ago...  Then today, just before the thunderstorm struck and scared the crap out of my dog (not literally) I checked the mail box and found another adapter I'd been anxious to put my hands on:  The Olympus Pen F to Sony Nex body adapter. Woo Hoo. 

I ordered the Fotodiox adapter from Amazon and I'm happy with it.  For about $40 I can mount all the cool Olympus Pen F lenses on the front of my Sony Nex camera, manually focus with righteously good focus peaking and then slam away with 24 megapixel, state of the art files. 

The first lens I put on the rig was my favorite, the 60mm f1.5. I can hardly wait to get out and shoot with it. With the APS-C sensor the lens becomes a 90mm (e) portrait lens with a wicked fast maximum aperture.  And in my experience it's plenty sharp.  I'm heading out to pick up Ben from a video project he's shooting today and I think I'll put one of the 38mm's on the camera. You know how much I love a fast 50mm (e) on my street shooting cameras...

So, now my poor, optically limited Nex system has, in addition to the Sony lenses, a 20mm f3.5 (nice 30mm e), an f4 and an f2.8 25mm set (37mm e), a 38mm (57mm e), a fast 40mm 1.4 (60mm e),the 60mm 1.5 (90mm e), 70mm f2 (105mm e), the 50-90mm zoom (75-135 e) and a 150mm f4 (225mm e).  If I add something wide, like the 16mm I guess I'll be set.

Test images and walking about images coming soon to a blog near you...

Summertime in Austin. Hot and lazy. It's all good.

Here we are in the middle of August and everything is going according to history and precedent. The jobs have fallen off to zero, the temperatures have gone through the roof and everyone left in Austin is burrowing down somewhere cool like the frog that lives under the faucet drip in the garden outside my front door.

This image of Noellia was taken at a popular spot in the middle of Austin. It's the stream that comes from the Barton Springs spillway and flows on to Lady Bird Lake, which runs through the center of downtown Austin.  The water is from an underground spring and is a constant 69 or 70 degrees.  People come with dogs, picnic baskets, little kids and whatever else to spend hours frolicking in the stream and staying cool.

We headed to the Springs because Noellia wanted some new images for her portfolio and she wanted "outside."  Okay by me.

This was taken with the Sony Nex 7 and either the kit lens or the 50mm 1.8.  I just don't remember which. Too hot to remember.  I knew I needed a little bit of fill flash but I'd never cracked the flash menu on the camera before and I've only used the Sony HVL-58 AM flash on a few occasions and then on complete automatic with a Sony a77.  What the hell.  I gave it a try.

I put the flash on a short, off camera cord, put it in ttl-auto, dialed it down a couple of stops and shot.  I had the camera set to manual exposure, 1/250th of second and in the territory of f 5.6.  I chimped a couple of times to fine tune the flash ratio and then we moved on.

My big mistake of the day was not tossing the cameras to one side and throwing everyone into the water.  That would have been even more fun.

According to all the test reports my (fill in the blank) lens is not sharp in the corners.

Hmm. I'm a portrait photographer.  Do I really need ultra-sharp corners?

I love manufactured conundrums.  How could I not? I was in the ad business for years before becoming a full time photographer.  We thrived on finding the "pain" for consumers and then giving them a "solution".  "The Malls are too crowded?  We've got acres of free parking!!!"

I was thinking about this after I caught myself mindlessly reading a lens review of the Sony Nex 18-55mm lens on SLRgear.com. They have a nifty-charty thing that shows the performance of the lens you might be considering. It uses colors to show you how sharp a lens is at different apertures and different focal lengths and in different areas of the frame. But here's the issue for me:  I think that the only lenses that test really well on flat charts are macro lenses meant to do well when photographing flat charts because they are made to photograph flat charts.  The rest of the lenses that I'm interested in don't really need to do that, do they?

But the test sites need us to be fearful about picking lenses so they can get eyeballs.  The information can be useful but only if you apply it to your ways of working...

When I looked at the performance of the kit lens for the Nex system I at first was excited to see that, even wide open, it was very sharp and performed very well in the center of the lens.  The air was let out of my balloon when I read on and did all the interactive stuff with the cool graphic sliders. Seems the lens is not as sharp on the corners.  In fact, you've got to stop it down to f8 to get really good corner performance.  Most reviewers tell me that the kit lens won't come close to providing enough performance (across the full frame of the sensor) to work well with the 24 megapixel sensor in the Nex7.  And then there's all the fringing I might find when I do high contrast photographs of little, naked tree branches against the stark sky.  Oh my.

I let my sometimes rational brain take all the information and put it into my mental processing blender and it came out giving the lens a big C+. A snob like me would never consider shooting with it.  Never mind that I actually love lenses that have a high core of sharpness wide open and then gracefully devolve on the edges and corners.  And that includes most of the portrait lenses I have used to best effect, as well as nearly every 50mm lens on the market.

Oh the damage we do to ourselves when we have too much information and not enough theoretical depth to process the information optimally for our own individual needs.

All lenses have curvature of field.  Some are corrected for this and they make really good optics for people who need to photograph stuff that has straight lines.  These might be architectural photographers, still life photographers or technical photographers.  The overwhelming majority of the lenses we buy are used to document life around us.  And the majority of the lenses I buy are pressed into the service of photographing people.  We generally don't need stringent edge to edge sharpness and total lack of optical faults when we use lenses wide open.  We need optics that are crispy enough to do the job.

Many years ago Leica made lenses that the best photographers in the world absolutely swore by.  They still do. But strangely enough, when the lenses from Leica were tested in conventional, flat target ways, they never seemed to put up numbers that matched what we saw on film (or now on our monitors).  Then I read a white paper on optimum design for lenses based on their intended use and I got it. To make a fast, high aperture lens you need to make some compromises.  To make a zoom that's consistent across the zoom range you've got to make some different  compromises and if you want a flat field lens that does good single planes of focus and even illumination you've got to make still other compromises.  The trick is to test the different kinds of lenses and find the ones that work for your style of shooting.  There a few perfect lenses that I can actually afford.  The designers can correct for a lot but would you be willing to pay $10,000 for a 10 pound f4 prime lens to hang on the front of your tiny camera?

And you have to know what compromises are involved.  For example, the 85mm Zeiss 1.4 lens is a super duper optic but in order to make it fast and sharp Zeiss sacrificed corner sharpness wide open and also the design of the lens means that you'll get appreciable focus shift as you stop down from f1.4 to f4.0.  Especially at closer (portrait) distances.  The work arounds are to only focus and shoot at f4 and smaller or to do all of your fine focusing for close up work with a magnified live view image and with the lens stopped down to the actual shooting aperture.  And Zeiss and Lloyd Chambers will tell you that.  You can't have it every which way.

So what am I getting at?  Only that the two lenses I bought for the Sony Nex 7, the 18-55 and the 50mm 1.8 are both more than sharp enough to make wonderful portraits in my style.  Even when used wide open.  The "nifty 50" that everyone loves for the Canon has pretty atrocious performance on the test charts as do most of the 50mm 1.4 lenses from the major makers.  The thing that makes them popular though is the sharp center core and the ability to use them at faster apertures than most zoom-only users ever dream of.  You can't have everything in a lens.  That's why I have separate Macro lenses for those special moments when I find myself longing to shoot test charts.

Measurements are great but interpreting correctly is the part that counts.

Yes, I've gone crazy with the Lightroom presets today.  I'm sure I'll recover.

I think I'm getting the hang of this Sony Nex-7 stuff. Need more practice.

My friend, Noellia the actor, just wrapped up a six month project for Disney and came home to Austin to visit friends and family. She called me up to see if we could get together and spend a little time shooting some photos.  I first met Noellia when I cast her for an ad campaign nearly nine years ago.  She had just turned eighteen and answered a casting call.  We've done many projects together since then and she was a consistent and wonderfully patient model for me during the production of four of my five books on photography.

I thought our "around the town" photo session would be the perfect chance to try out the the little Sony Nex7 and see of what it was capable.  My first intention was to shoot a bunch of images with the bigger a77 camera and to kind of toss the Nex7 into the mix from time to time. But I started out with the 50mm 1.8 lens on the front of the Nex7 and, after a few minutes going back and forth between the two cameras I tossed the a77 into my camera bag and leaned on the little camera for the rest of the day.  Nearly all of the images in this particular blog were shot wide open at f 1.8. I thought the lens performed very well when used wide open.  I also like the focal length and, when used at the right distance from my subject, it was good at throwing backgrounds out of focus. 

I'd read so many articles and reviews that mention two "faults" in this camera.  The first one being battery life that's limited to about 350 to 400 exposures.  I was careful to bring two fully charged batteries along with me but surprised to find that I shot nearly 1,000 frames and still had over 50% power remaining on my first battery at the end. (I don't post-chimp much and never use the built in flash...) The second fault was said to be the rather logically opaque and chaotic menu interface and dial set-up.  It didn't seem very daunting to me.  If you shoot in aperture priority your left control dial takes care of selecting apertures while the right side dial gives you immediate exposure compensation control.  Easy as pie.  Once you figure out that a couple touches on the navigation button gets you to the white balance menu you're pretty much done messing with stuff. I don't change ISO frequently and I tend to find modes I like and to stay with them.  

We started our photo spree at the Barton Springs spillway and then walked down to the bridge that brings Barton Springs road over the miniature train bridge and pedestrian bridge on the east side of Zilker Park.  (The image above was shot under the bridge).  The day was steamy and hot but we didn't pay much attention to the heat.  We were busy having fun photographing and catching up.  Noellia, being the consumate NYC professional actor brought her own make-up and hair pro along with her...

After playing around in the park we headed downtown to make some fun images in the open shade of the buildings on the south side of Second Street.  Of course we ended up at Caffe Medici where we shot with abandon.  (The owner, Michael, is very photo friendly).

I had heard from misguided reviews on the web that the Jpegs out of this camera were mediocre compared to other cameras so, of course, I chose to shoot everything as a large, fine Jpeg.  In fact, I thought the jpegs were highly detailed and well mannered.  At a certain point I tossed everything but the Nex 7 and the 50mm 1.8 back in the bag and stuck the bag in the car.  Intellectually I like the idea of having other lens options.  Aesthetically, I like the black finished 18-55mm lens because it matches the body so well, but the reality is that the 50mm, on that cropped sensor is a pretty compelling match for the way I like to see stuff so I don't see it coming off the front of the camera any time soon.

The only thing I had problems with out in the field was setting the DRO (dynamic range optimizer).  I could get to it in the menu I just couldn't figure out how to change it.  Every thing else seemed pretty straightforward to me.

Noellia and I had a fun afternoon.  She got to see Ben.  Ben got to see her.  She reminded me of why I like to shoot professional actors.... it's the talent.  Tomorrow I'll go out and shoot more stuff with the new camera.  Me liking the Sony Nex 7 camera right now doesn't mean I think all other cameras are bad.  I just think this one is really good.