Going back to basics. How I set up my camera for minimum surprises today. Brand and model neutral ideas.

 

Many years ago I had an epiphany about auto exposure and the quality of the resulting images. I'd been using what were state of the art cameras at the time (film era) such as the Nikon F5 and the Nikon F100 and using them in my favorite auto mode: aperture priority. I knew enough to tweak the exposure compensation if the tones in the frame were really light or dark. But back then, as now, I find that cameras are easily fooled by things like deep shadow or bright light sources. One of my more experienced (and wise) friends suggested an exercise for me. He told me to use a fully manual camera and to follow the Kodak instructions for setting exposures on that camera which were printed either on an inserted instruction sheet in each film box or as printed on the interior of the film boxes themselves. 

I found an old printed sheet for Kodachrome 64 (ISO 64) transparency film and I taped it with clear tape to the bottom plate of my old Leica M4. When I went out into bright sun the paper "meter" told me to always use 1/250th of a second f8.0 (or an exposure combination that equalled that EV). The idea being that if the light didn't change it wouldn't matter what tones were in the subject matter because the exposure was determined by the actual light falling on the subject. In bright sun it would always be that value! 

There are always caveats. The exposures were most accurate, depending on the time of the year, from about two hours after sunrise to two hours before sunset. There were other settings recommended for cloudy days, heavily overcast days and also open shade. All of them delivered fairly accurate exposures but the one for bright, direct sun with hard shadows? Always....right....on... the money.

I worked this way on one trip I made by myself to shoot in Paris back in 1988. I used the Leica M4 and a 50mm Summicron. I did not bring a light meter, instead I used the Kodak method. In the evening, when I switched to Tri-X film I used the exposure suggestions I found in the Kodak Photo Data Guide (which I still have --- in case I need to calculate reciprocity failure of 4x5 sheet film with long bellows extensions) which informed me that a good base for ambient fluorescent light was 1/60th of a second, f4.0. 

You realize of course that you can change the aperture and shutter speed to whatever settings you like as long as when combined they equal the same exposure value = EV. For example, if you'd rather shoot at 1/500th of a second you'd set your f-stop to 1/3rd stop less than f5.6. And Bob's your cousin. Or 1/1000th of a second with an f-stop of f3.5. Etc. etc.

When I realized that I didn't have to spend today waiting for the refrigerator repair person all day (that was yesterday) I happily went to swim practice and then, after a nice breakfast with B. I grabbed a camera that is fast becoming my favorite and headed downtown to burn off some of the stress of my ongoing "appliance trauma." Walking around with a nice camera and an empty mind was a good start toward calming me down and beginning the process of recovery from rampant customer (non) service abuse. Is the refrigerator finally repaired? Who knows? It's cooling now but will it maintain this level of performance after four or five days? History is bleak on this one...

But back to the photography. My biggest beef with modern cameras is their legacy of being confused by what I want exposed correctly. The cameras all want, in their own way, to analyze the scene through the lens, divide it into many squares, apply algorithms to the variance in the squares and then delivery a verdict. It can be a little off, a lot off or just wildly incorrect but it can be fixed by taking time to assess the image in review and then applying an informed amount of compensation, and then shooting again. That seems time consuming and burdensome to me when there are simpler and more elegant methods. 

With the Leica Q2 in hand I hurried to my reserved parking space near downtown, parked and then took a moment to set up my camera in a very old school fashion. I guess I should call it the Kodak Paper Meter Method to give some credit to the (once) Giant Yellow Father. This entails doing something you can do with any camera; modern or ancient. As long as you can control the shutter speed and aperture settings separately and manually. 

I set the ISO to the base of that camera. It's 50. It's not an interpolated 50 or a mythical 50. It's just 50 ISO. Same as on the Leica SL2. A third of a stop slower than the "real" ISO 64 found on the Nikon D850. The idea is to get the richest and most noise free file I can. Also to be able to  use middle and wider apertures without having to resort to an electronic shutter. 

I then set the WB to the "sun" symbol. Which, on most cameras, should give you a fixed color temperature of 5500 or 5400 Kelvin. According to all my tests and all my readings, as long as the sun is your primary source of direct light (not filtered through clouds) it will always be accurate. As in CRI 100. The sun is, after all, the gold standard. 

Then I set the shutter speed to 1/250th of second and the aperture to f7.1. I would have set it to f8.0 if I had been shooting at ISO 64....

The final touch was to move the camera lens from AF to fully manual focusing. On the Q2 you get hard stops at both ends of the scale. You get a very, very nice distance scale and a depth of field scale on the lens as well. When you focus manually you can set the camera up so that a touch on the focusing ring magnifies the center image for super fine focusing and, if you want it, you can also add focus peaking indications to the magnified image. Voila. Now you have a fully manual camera in every respect.

If you are shooting with the f-stop just shy of f8.0 and you are using a 28mm lens on a full frame camera you have a fairly deep depth of field and most of the time you can just "guesstimate" the distance and set it on the lens's focusing ring (unless you are cursed with a fly-by-wire focusing lens....and no manual clutch).  If you are diligent and you practice you can shoot with barely a thought lost to focusing. Or to spending the many hours of reading and trial and error you might have to spend to master some of the more "mystical" auto-focus modes in a modern "nanny" cam. 

If you've set everything manually you can essentially just point and shoot and be almost entirely certain that the shot will be technically perfect. This method does nothing to ensure that you've pointed your camera in the right direction. If you want a photo of the Beatles you have to be sure and aim the camera at the Beatles!

But there needs be no other thought process to slow you down. It's relatively fool proof. Even an Austin photographer can be remarkably (technically) successful with this methodology. Trying this doesn't require much diligence.....as most of these "straight out of camera Jpegs" can attest. The only alteration is a reduction of size so that I'm not uploading 50 megapixels files to the web. But I find this method heads and shoulders above automation in any brand camera if it's consistency and accuracy of exposures that you really want. Oh, and turn off dynamic range expanding options. If you feel that you really need them it's better for you to just shoot the files in raw and do that sort of expansion in post. At least there you'll have some modicum of control over the results. 

I walked. I photographed. I looked at distant objects. I cursed GE under my breath like a madman. And I tried to let the afternoon wash me clean like a fresh shower of sunshine and the detergent of a good walk. 

I think that falls under: "mental health" initiative. 

some captions below.  where I thought they were useful.

Spring time clouds in Austin are puffy, detail filled and have depth. Lovely.

I have shot the alley mural at Esther's Follies many, many times but the 

color out of the Q2 today was exemplary. This image is exactly as I saw the 

color with my eyes.....after taking off my Polarized sunglasses...

Not a particularly good image but a chance to use the Kodak suggestion for open shade.

I love the sign to the left of the door that commands a strict dress code. 

Especially in light of the place looking like a rat trap and also 

having a big ad on the wall for cans of White Claw. Pure class. 

the vertical sign used to be for a downtown department store called "Yarings."

the last downtown department store in Austin was "Scarborough's" but it 

shut down many, many years ago. In the early 1980s. 

I've been to Paris about a dozen different times, in all seasons, and I've 

never seen Parisian Women wait in line for anything but the rides 

at Euro-Disney. 

A "Made in Germany" ping pong table. Serious gear for a serious game.

I wouldn't go bowling unless I could get a German bowling ball. 

Precision engineering is important for games. 

the pyramidal steps of the Federal Courthouse. Surrounded at the bottom

by tent camping homeless all the time but I get run off when I climb the steps and

try to photograph the building. Often by men with firearms, poor educations and bad manners. 

If I set up a tent out front I believe I would be free to spend all the time I ever wanted to tunnel into the building. But why? And what Netflix show will use this as a plot line?

Russian agents or Republicans bent on disrupting justice by living as homeless people in tents, 

spending night and day to tunnel inside.  My bet is on the Russians as the republicans would most likely get lost or sidetracked by the soft drink and candy machines in the basement.

Not political just observed behavior reporting. 

 In my experience Austin is one of the few downtowns in which food can be delivered from multiple restaurants for in-office lunches and can be reliably left outside the front doors of a bank building awaiting each customer's pick up of same. Well, here and in Tokyo...

That's all I've got today. I'm setting up an SL2 and a 58mm f1.4 for evening photos.

Still using the Kodak Photo Data Guide for a starting point. 

I'm beginning to realize why it is I like older, manual focus lenses. Even if I have to use adapters to get them onto my current cameras.

 

Modern, fly-by-wire lenses have a uniform fault. From my Leica 24-90mm zoom lens to my 35mm f2.0 Sigma, and just about all of the other AF lenses put on the market since AF became de rigueur all share the same fault, regardless of brand. They have no hard infinity stops, no depth of field scales and (most grievous of all) they lack distance scales. You literally can't "zone" focus them without having to pay a lot more attention to the process than you should have to. There are a few modern lenses such as the Pro S series from Panasonic and the Pro series from Olympus that have auto focus to manual focus clutches. Pull back on the focusing ring and voila, you are bequeathed both hard stops and also a distance scale. A big and accurate one. But modern lenses with this capability are rare. And not always in the focal length range you might desire.

One of the things that draws me to want the Voigtlander lenses I have been buying is just this thing. A repeatable and knowable distance setting feature for all of the manual focusing lenses. It's a godsend. 

I made the photograph above on a shooting trip to Rome. I was using a Mamiya 6 camera which makes photographs on 6x6 cm film. As with any larger format camera the depth of field is less than what we are used to when using lenses with the same angles of view on smaller format cameras. But even with a slight telephoto lens on the camera I was able to select a focus distance and understand what kind of depth of field I would have before even lifting the camera to my eye. In the days of zone focusing we were generally pretty good as estimating distances. 

I can't remember whether or not I just took one frame of this scene on the Spanish Steps or if I had time to tweak focus with a second frame but I was able to work quickly, nonchalantly and without the intercession of AF. And once you've focused well the lens maintains your setting whether you keep your finger on the shutter button or not. Once focused you are ever-ready...until the distance changes.

When I take one of the 40 or 50 or 58mm lenses out with me on a digital camera I always feel more in control over the entire frame when the lens I've selected is an "old school" prime with a great depth of field scale on it. If you haven't tried this way of shooting you might want to put an older, manual focusing lenses on the camera of your preference and give it a go. It could be a perfect way of working for you. 

Disregard if you are shooting football with long lenses... 

It's funny that in the old days, the days of ASA 400 Tri-X film I didn't really pay much attention to depth of field. When we were photographing in old book stores I defaulted to f1.7 on my Canonet camera because.....I kept running out of light.

 

And now it's a look I find wonderful and fascinating. Along with that 40mm focal length. 

Funny how, until recently, need was the mother of style. We needed more light. I opened up the aperture knowing I was hitting the limits of my ability to handhold the camera. But to my eye the out of focus areas in the background, as authentic as they come, make this portrait of a young child clutching a print magazine one of my favorite early photographs. I think I've been trying to get back to that basic level of making pictures ever since. 

What Now?

It's gloomy out there on the web. At least it seems to be for people who are interested in photography. I just read that Thom Hogan of Bythom.com is taking a month off. Maarten Heilbron, whose camera reviews on YouTube were always fact-filled, fact-checked and fun to watch has thrown in the towel on making camera reviews; mostly because the major camera makers have stopped spending enough on marketing to even be able to send out review cameras to reviewers. Not as give-aways but as temporary loaners. Maarten's post from a couple of days ago is entitled: "It's Over."  Of course there's the big story about DP Review shutting down as well. 

Many of our favorite bloggers who wrote about photography and cameras seem to have aged out, or run out of steam and inspiration. Topics skew far afield and little nuggets of good, insightful information abut photography have become harder to pan for than gold. 

I find blogging is widely devolving into a cult of personalities in which the writers' life and life stories are given much more emphasis than the topics we originally sought them out for. Yes, it's nice to have well written articles but even better when they are on subjects we're interested in. 

Both Thom and Maarten provided numbers or anecdotal information about the overall decline of the camera markets and, by extension, the world of the profitable practice of photography. From them as well as other sources I think we can agree that at least in the short term the outlook is bleak. Especially when measured by camera sales...

The ever-growing and deeper piercing nail in the coffin for most photographers with a certain tenure in the market is generative A.I. If you think it's kludgy or not ready for prime time you need to step up your research a bit and I think you'll see that, in capable hands, the technology is going to be is devastating for professional photographers. The taking of headshots, product shots, and most lifestyle advertising will vanish as jobs. Or projects. Or sources of income. All that will remain are folks content to sit in front of computer monitors carefully describing what they want the robots to make for them. And, when it comes to commercial work, why not? Clients always seem to know what they want. Their accounting departments are loathe to pay humans for silly stuff like.....art. And making up whole worlds on the fly is a heck of a lot quicker and infinitely cheaper than sending out a human to do their best with reality. Fantasy is much more addictive and hence much more lucrative for advertisers. No cameras or shoe leather required.

I remember watching a movie in the 1960's called, "Jason and the Argonauts." It featured lots of stop frame animation and claymation. Those were primitive visuals and yet the audiences went right along with the action. Now we can drop a computer generated stand-in for Carrie Fisher into a Star Wars movie ("The Last Jedi") and not even be able to tell that the moving image of her character is totally CGI. No suspension of disbelief required. Seamless --- and at thirty frames per second.

We don't have to dislike or renounce photography to grapple with where we are at this point in time. When the gear talk goes away so will community. There is no future in writing about the philosophies of picture taking. Why? Because as much as people profess to want access to such material only a tiny handful will really read it or search for it at all. How do we know? Because the internet has tested that for decades. We love to talk about gear. We are bored talking about aesthetics, or any non-mechanical process. 

I know you're tired of hearing about my fucked up refrigerator and the ongoing saga of corporate incompetence. I know most of you couldn't give a rat's ass about my ability to swim or the happiness I derive from it. And seeing yet another tranche of images from Austin's downtown is just depressing. It's the same for me on other blogs. Snooker? Breathing machines? Vegan-ism as religion? About as interesting to me as the nuances of the competitive flip turn are to you. 

So. What now? Without a ready market camera makers will slow down new product introductions. Eventually Fuji will make sure everyone who takes photographs with a dedicated camera has access to a Fuji X100V and will then probably shut down. Why bother after full saturation?

Some kids will mine the used market for rangefinder, film Leicas for the next few years and walk around in the street shooting with 28mm lenses until the last sources of 35mm film dry up and the labs close down. A few people who lack other talents will doggedly soldier on over at YouTube to make walk-and-talk videos about whatever new cameras or old news comes their way. But everyone is seems to be moving on, ditching photography as we've known it and replacing it with automatic content from their phones. 

Seems like the perfect time to retire. 

Here's my current plan: I'm 90,000+/_  page views away from my content here having generated 30,000,000 page views. That's measured by Blogger and not including stuff you read on an RSS feed. Add in those numbers and it's several times more. But I can only measure what I can measure. When I hit thirty million page views I'll take a big long look at the trend lines and if they are, as I predict, falling off a cliff I'll take note, sign off and leave the web to the last few, standing and producing photography experts.

I figure we're about a month away from the target date. I won't see it as a defeat if I decide that we're done. I'll see it as the turning of a page and my adaptation to human evolution ( or de-evolution). But I will say one thing. Now I understand how newspaper editors, writers and photographers felt as the ground slipped out from under their feet. 

One thing I'm going to do over the next 30 days is to write only about photography, cameras, lights and lenses. I'll try to give the blog a fighting chance at relevance. Wish me luck. 

 

Easter is a time when we just photograph everything at f2.0. Okay...we can also use f1.4.

B. is in S.A. taking care of her mom. The refrigerator is still broken. No swim practice on Easter. The pool is closed. It's overcast. It's the perfect day to roam around downtown and play with a new lens.

I rounded up a spare battery, plugged the Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 lens onto the front of a Leica SL2, ditched my cellphone into a desk drawer, double-knotted my walking shoes and headed downtown. My intention today was to photograph everything I wanted to photograph while doing it in black and white, at ISO 50 and with the lens spot-welded at f2.0. I gave myself permission to try some shots at f1.4; just to see how it might work out. 

If you are of a certain age you probably remember the Easters of your youth in the same way I do. All the stores were closed. All the churches were open. Some families dressed up with the little girls in pink dresses and matching shoes and the boys looking uncomfortable in hand-me-down jackets, choking-collared white shirts and clip-on bowties. Other families looked out the window at the earnest church-goers going by, with shaky dads holding the curtains open a bit with one hand while nursing a hangover with a can of beer in the other. 

I had to go to church back then because my father played the organ there. He didn't really believe in any of the religious dogma but he loved wailing away on the big organ just behind and to the right of the pulpit of the church. We sat bored and uncomfortable, feet unable to reach the floor and looking vaguely forward to a nice brunch at a restaurant with white tablecloths, extra forks and spoons,  tuxedoed waiters and an older African American man in a black suit playing "Alley Cat", "Mack the Knife" and other favorites on a much smaller organ. A restaurant sized organ. We got to order hamburgers and french fries. The grown-ups got shrimp cocktails with cocktail sauce, and then steaks. 

At some point in the day either my brother or I got in trouble for drawing pictures of the Pillsbury Dough Boy with captions that read: "He Has Risen." 

It all seemed so innocuous back before the far right started weaponizing religion again... Funny that "Happy Holidays!" is now a call to arms... so sad. So misguided. So....off message.

Sunday morning in Austin was quite different today. In fact, it seemed like just another day in a (cloudy) paradise. Torchy's Tacos was open so I was thrilled to get a bacon, egg and cheese breakfast taco and a coffee there. The restaurants were open up and down Congress Ave. and also Second St. The homeless on the streets were a deep contrast to the well dressed crowds hustling by on their way to hotel restaurants for Eggs Benedict and Mimosas. And the weather over all was comfortable but gloomy. 

I walked through downtown with the camera over my left shoulder and my sunglasses hanging off the collar of my black shirt. The one with the demure Nike logo on the front.  I was interested to see how the lens performed when I used it close in and wide open. Seems pretty nice to me. The contrast there is a bit low but that's why Adobe invented the contrast slider and the clarity slider in Lightroom. If you can correct for geometric distortion and vignetting in the camera's firmware  is it any more "cheating" if you correct the contrast in your software?

I didn't stay long. I made a loop through the parts I thought might be interesting today and then headed back to the house. I was on a mission. I'd volunteered to bring along two nice bottles of white wine to have with fish at a friend's house later this afternoon and it dawned on me that I needed to chill the bottles and.....no refrigerator. In 2023, in an age of endless affluence, I actually had to go to a convenience store and buy some ice with which to chill the wine. Savagery. Despair. 

To sum up: The re-delivered lens is great. That and the 40mm are a fun pair. Not having a functioning refrigerator has moved from being annoying and frustrating to being an interesting experiment in adaptation. With luck and lawyers the fridge should be fully restored by Tuesday. The lens doesn't need any repairs which is enough to currently endear any device to me. Car, camera, lens, water faucet.... If it works I'm a fan. 

It's a weird holiday for me this year. Usually spent with family. Not this time. But it's good to have friends. The more the better. And I'm avoiding Peeps this year and embracing Cadbury Eggs instead. It's part of my theologically inclusive Easter diet plan. 

It's not as much fun searching for Easter eggs if you have to hide them from yourself, for yourself.... Just a thought.

A quick note. I'll leave it just as a headline. I want to thank everyone who commented this past week. It made writing blog posts fun, happy, rewarding and comfortable. We don't always agree but if we did there would be no sense reading it. Right? Thanks!!!

 

I guess this week's fascination is with products from Voigtlander. At least that's what I'm currently interested in....

 

The nicely recessed front element largely eliminates the need for a lens hood. Maybe. 

One standing by, just in case. 

Lenses seem to be this month's fascination. I can't imagine a better camera for me than a Leica SL2 so I've given up even reading camera reviews --- by anyone. This has allowed me to concentrate more completely on the most fun part of photography gear, the ever interesting subject of camera lenses! 

The current fascination mostly started on a lark. I was looking at L mount lenses at B&H's website with the idea of finding a small, light, cheap but good lens to take with me on a vacation to Vancouver last November. I didn't like the options I found for the L mount; or I already owned a number of them and was looking for a different set of compromises... whatever reason I stumbled across lenses over in the Leica M mount section. That was okay because I knew I could adapt any of the M lenses to the L mount with a simple adapter. 

I found a lens that was small, fast, reviewed as being sharp and interesting, and available, on sale, at a very affordable price. It was the 40mm f1.4 Nokton Classic, with multi-coating (apparently, if you like flare and some additional artifacts some Voigtlander lenses are available in a single coated version....) and it was priced at $399. It came in a classic M lens configuration with cams for rangefinder coupling and the cool little finger grip for fast focusing. I bought a lens hood and a B+W filter for the front (knowing I'd be out shooting in the rain a lot) and I took that lens with me as my only lens, paired with a Panasonic S5; the "early adopter" version, not the S5II. 

I shot a couple thousand frames with the lens and really liked the way the files looked. There is a bit of uncorrected barrel distortion and the usual vignetting one sees from most fast and wide-ish lenses but for the most part it was great --- easy to focus and tiny. There is one fault with my copy that would have been a catastrophe for an M rangefinder user who doesn't test gear before traveling with it. The focus calibration is pretty far off. What that means is that when the lens hits its hard stop at infinity it's focused far beyond infinity (if that's theoretically possible) and what you gain past infinity you loose in close focusing capabilities.  Oh, and the marked distance versus the focused distance are two wildly different settings. Used on a rangefinder you would always be focusing well behind your subjects. No big deal on a mirrorless camera. One of the charms of the mirrorless tech. 

The one aspect of the 40mm lens I really liked was, in fact, the focal length. Nearly 45 years ago, when I was just a photographer child I scrimped and saved and bought a Leica CL. Not the digital one, obviously, but the original. It came with a 40mm f2.0 Summicron C lens. The lens was superbly sharp. Far sharper than any lens I had ever put on any of the Canon cameras I had been shooting for a number of years. I loved the lens and the focal length and could kick myself, hard, for ever selling it. But I had yet to gather my "extensive fortune" by that time (still trying). And so the lens went on the chopping block to pay for something else. But I never got over that focal length. It seemed, in some ways, so "right." 

This Spring I realized that I had hit a milestone and, in the Leica cameras I'd acquired, I'd found a system that I haven't felt the least bit of motivation to move on from. Or to add to; camera-wise.  I felt a stability creeping into my viewpoint on cameras that I hadn't felt for a long time. But as the desire for new cameras faded my brain compensated by increasing my desire to track down the "perfect" lenses for me. Not for you, or the sports photographer you know, or the photo-journalist you read about. Just the perfect lenses for me.

Unlike Leica, Sigma, Panasonic and others Voigtlander is not concentrating on making ultra-of-the-moment, best-in-class lenses. They don't make autofocus lenses, nor are any of their Voigtlander branded lenses featuring stuff like image stabilization. You have to focus by hand. And learn how to hold your camera and lens nice and steady. But what they are making is a collection of lenses that I would label: Romantic. 

By romantic I mean that they provide a visual profile that's more similar to film era lenses than to the highly corrected lenses being made for digital. The centers are quite sharp at the first few apertures on the lens but the corners are much less sharp. The lenses's optical designs are simpler and the corners get nice and contrasty, sharp too, as one stops down toward the middle apertures. The lenses I am interested in are so similar to early, all metal Nikon lenses when it comes to dress and construction. And, incidentally, the lenses in which I am most interested are the ones that are currently (still?) available in the Nikon F mount. 

I experimented with my friend, Paul's nearly brand new Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 lens last month. At the time I thought the Sigma Contemporary series 65mm f2.0 was so close in focal length and so much better an all around performer that I would pass on Paul's offer to sell me the lens at a most advantageous (to me) price. But over time the samples I shot with that Voigtlander 58mm lens have grown on me. Made me realize that I grew up and learned my craft at a time when these lenses, or lenses like them, were our aspirational tools. I loved re-connecting with the feel and the visual structuring of this type of lens when I revisited the 58mm in March. 

Last week I took delivery of a brand new Voigtlander 40mm f2.0 Ultron SIIs. It's the latest permutation of that lens, evolved over time, by the company, and looking so much like a metal focusing ring Nikon 50mm F lens from the 1960s. Even down to the "rabbit ears" aperture grabber on the aperture ring (used to connect to pre-AI camera metering systems from the middle ages of photography). 

 

A couple of days ago I put up a quick gallery of images I shot with the lens on my first foray out with it. It balanced nicely on the front of an SL2 and I liked the images a lot. You can see them here: https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2023/04/stuff-photographers-worry-about-that.html just scroll down past the "gray space" (type). 

My takeaway is that the lens does a lot of stuff just right. The focal length is between the 35mm that most prefer and the 50mm+ that I'm used to. It makes this lens wide enough to capture environmental portraits without a lot of elongation of noses or novel recessions of ears, etc. while getting enough of the background in to make an interesting image situated --- somewhere. The lens is quite sharp in the center of the frame which works well for portraits (and most other subjects) and then field curvature makes the far edges and corners less sharp and more nicely out of focus. Stopped down to f5.6 it's as sharp as anything I own. 

The 40mm Ultron is currently available in a Nikon F mount for around $419 USD. I think it's a good value for the price. And my success with the 40mm pushed me to go back and look at samples I shot with the 58mm. In retrospect I like those images a lot. Especially the combination of the color and contrast; even with images done at the maximum aperture. Can't wait to try it out as an APS-C portrait lens on a CL.

I texted Paul today to ask if he still wanted to sell his 58mm. He was game. I asked why? He liked the lens so much that last time I was playing with it he was pretty sure I would want one and so, when he found a copy in just as good shape, and for a great price, used, he bought it as well. Now he's got two and I got the feeling that he was holding one back for me until I came to my senses and just bought it. We've both been buying and selling lenses to  each other for about 25 years. I think he's got a good intuition about what I will eventually want to own....

In about an hour we'll meet for coffee at our favorite coffee shop. I have already written out a check for him. Sorry. No Venmo here. Just old school banking. We'll compare notes about life and work and then I'll leave with the 58mm, bring it home and put an adapter on it. Tomorrow I'll go out with the 58 or the 40 and spend some time playing around. It'll be a nice change since it feels like it's been raining for a month here and the weather is supposed to start clearing up. 

Now, why the Nikon mount? Well, I look at it as today's universal mount because the flange distance is long enough to enable one to mount it on just about any mirrorless camera being made right now. Were I to suffer a severe concussion, wake up and for some reason want to buy a bunch of Sony A7xxx cameras I could use any of these current F mount Voigtlanders on those "cameras" just by switching out inexpensive adapters. Another reason is that these two lenses, as far as I know, are only available in Nikon F mounts or Pentax K mount versions and I'm thinking the Pentax mount is part of an ever shrinking market. Getting adapters for Nikon to L mount is simple right now --- not so sure about Pentax to L mount...

That's all the lens news I have for today. Stay tuned for a gallery or two of the results from both. 

Resoundingly old school. Maybe bordering on "ancient school."