Artist working on canvas in one of the studios at UT's College of Fine Arts. It looks like "Monochrome" because it was taken with black and white film and printed on double-weight paper...

B at the easel. 1980.

Tri-X. Canon F1. 50mm f1.4 FD.

A quick post about the lens adapters I've been wading through...

from a previous year's Eeyore's Birthday Party.

I take too much for granted. When I bought the Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 M mount lens last October I just figured everything would work well with an inexpensive lens adapter to mate my new lens with a Panasonic S5. I looked for one that was guaranteed to work at infinity. It did. And beyond. The lens adapter maker compromised focus range for being able to reliably get to infinity. That meant that the adapter was a little bit "thin." Sure, I could always hit infinity focus but that thin-ness meant that the lens would happily focus beyond infinity and would do so by sacrificing both some of its close up performance and any semblance of accuracy for the lens's distance scale. Without a true stop at infinity and no accuracy to the focusing ring one loses the ability to just rack to the stop at infinity with any assurance of sharp focus and also results in the loss of hyperfocal distances focusing or estimated focus settings based on distance. The lens still worked with the camera and made nice images but the adapter took away benefits that I, for one, would have enjoyed. 

When I got home I bought a couple other adapters in the lower price ranges and each delivered much the same results. Since I played with three different adapters I came to the (erroneous) conclusion that the Voiglander lens was out of calibration vis-a-vis focusing. I actually disassembled the lens (partially) to see if I could correct it but it was beyond my capabilities. I was luck to have taken photos during disassembly and luckier still to get it all back together and working as before. 

This past week I got two (new to me) Zeiss M mount lenses and thought that they would show me once and for all where the focusing culprit lay. They did. The focused perfectly on a friend's M10R but once again, using my adapters gave me the same results I was getting with the Voigtlander lens. 

I finally borrowed a Leica brand M to L adapter and tried again. Bingo. Right on the money. That adapter resolved the issues I'd encountered earlier. I was a bit deflated. I love the idea of $25 adapters but I loathe the idea of $450 lens adapters. One of our readers here suggested the Hoage macro M to L adapter which can adjust to closer focusing but also is known for accurate infinity focus. Another "feature" is the price of $89 instead of $450. I ordered one which came yesterday afternoon. 

And it worked. It worked as well at infinity (hard stop) as the Leica adapter. I could choose just to use it there and be done with it but I also tried out the close focusing ability and was happy to see that it cut down the minimum focusing distance by about half. I don't expect to need that feature too often but it was nice to have. 

It's nice to have that all sorted out. I have the one Hoage Macro adapter right now but will probably order a second one so I can have an adapter for both the 28mm and 35mm and use them on two cameras at the same time. But maybe I'll just be lazy and parsimonious and stick with one. .. ... ....

I am equally happy to report that neither the 58mm Voigtlander lens nor the 40mm Voigtlander lens (both adapter from Nikon F to L mount) don't suffer the same issues. They are able to go to a true infinity and then also to match up on the focus rings to estimated distances. Fiasco dodged by sheer luck, I guess.

Wanted to share this right away in case someone was toying with following my cheapskate example. $89 seems to be the baseline for accurate performance with M to L adapters... Tragic. But useful to know.

 

Street Photography?

More like rural highway at dawn photography. From an old ad campaign from the 1990s. 

The lenses arrived. They are as cute as can be. Tiny and mechanically perfect. Here's my quick, first look at the Carl Zeiss 28mm f2.8 Biogon ZM.

 

I opened the box in the dining room, put the 28mm lens on the SL2 body, turned around and snapped my first photo of the day. Just a shot of my living room at the house. Not perfect but fun. For me.

What I quickly found was that when used on a digital camera like the SL2 the 28mm does have some vignetting. The lens is certainly sharp enough across the frame but there is a slight blue shift in the vignetted areas. A partial and mostly successful workaround for this is to go into the SL2 menu and find the M rangefinder lens profile that most closely matches this lens. For my taste it's the profile for the Leica 28mm Elmarit. The version just before the ASPH version. Applying this in camera to my Jpeg files (yeah. I was shooting medium sized Jpegs.. .. ..) went a long way to correcting the vignetting and the slight corner color shift.

Speaking of color, I found the rendering of the Zeiss 28mm to be cooler (more blue) than the rendering of the Leica lenses and Voigtlander lenses I have been using. Correcting the color back to where I like it also tames the apparent/inherent (almost like poetry...) contrast of the files a bit. All part of the learning curve when trying out new lenses for the first time.

The focusing ring is about as perfect, in terms of placement and feel, as I could ever want and I was so happy to get back to an aperture ring calibrated in thirds of a stop instead of the full stop settings of the two recently acquired Voigtlander lenses (40mm and 56mm). The lens came without a hood and while I didn't have any issues with flare I'm getting an aftermarket hood just to help keep my greasy fingers off the front element of the lens. 

Below are samples from yesterday's walk. In a surprising break with tradition I did not stop for coffee. I'm finding that I have so perfected my selection of fresh coffees and my unerring brewing process that I have now spoiled myself for coffee done nearly anywhere else. Oh sure, I'll still go out for coffee but more for the social aspect of it than anything else. Sad when perfection in one field ruins your routine in another.. .. ....

Yeah. It's just construction but clicking in on the yellow cranes shows off the saturated color 

palette that seems built into this lens.

A nod to the visitors who want relatively straight up lines in their images... ..

As seen on Sixth St. 

A good test of sharpness and detail at f5.6. Yes. Very "usable"

In defense of the lens, the bottom corners were falling into shadow naturally.

The difference in color here is more down to the shadows being in shaded areas while the rest of 

the scene "sees" reflected daylight. Pretty accurate --- from a physics point of view.

There is a sucker born every minute. And a group of con artists just waiting to fleece them. 

Austin was host this week to a "conference" or cheerleading session about crypto currency.

The Great Tulip harvest of our century. Can't wait to fire up the diesel generators, log into the bank of servers and harvest me some BitCoin. While ruining the environment. Now, where have I put my "Ponzi Scheme" playbook? But the people seemed so earnest. 

They even have their own shuttle bus. That's how you know they've arrived. 

but can the lens do close-ups? 

Sad. One of my favorite stops in downtown, the café/restaurant at the main library,

the "Cookbook Café" is now shut down. No idea if it will re-open or if something 

else will take its place. But you know how much we fear change!

Next up we play with the 28mm's best friend, the Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 Biogon ZM.

And maybe we'll give them both a whirl on the front of a couple of Leica CL cameras

at Eeyore's Birthday Party tomorrow afternoon. 

Might be the way to go photographing for fun without the big cameras.

Landscape crew did a nice job with the lawn. Not sure what kind of mowers they were using... .. . 

Waiting for the Fedex guy. And a reminder that Eeyore's Birthday Party is this Saturday.

Afradet.

I guess we're spoiled for speed. I ordered the two Zeiss lenses on Tuesday and here we are on Thursday with me drumming my fingers on the desk, reading about some guy cutting his grass, and waiting for the Fedex truck to rumble up to curb and then deliver my package to the wrong house.

To be fair though that only happens on about one out of five deliveries. But what bothers me is that Fedex always sends along these authoritative looking emails to let me know about the progress of my upcoming delivery. And those emails are always so, so optimistic when it comes to projected delivery times. Read the fine print on the email and you can see that they've given themselves until 8 pm this evening to effect delivery. But in bigger type on the same email they tease me with "estimated delivery times" which I've never seen actually pan out here in the real world.  The latest email predicts that the package will arrive between 9:40 a.m. and 1:40 p.m. But I'm afraid, as usual, that this will turn out to be an administrative fantasy.

Since I bought two lenses and they have a certain dollar value the shipper elected to send them and require an actual signature to acknowledge receipt. Pretty much means someone has to be here until the package arrives.. .. .. and I would like for the package to arrive. Sadly though, B is back out of town, Ben no longer lives here, and we seem to have given all of the domestic help the year (or decade) off. When I ring the bell for the butler no one ever shows up!!!  That means there's only me to sign for my package. Given the choice, and the fact that we live in an hysterically safe neighborhood, I'd be happy to decline having to sign for the package and would take the bet one way or the other about finally getting the box.

If past performance is any indication of future results I can safely predict that the delivery time will be late enough to rob me of the opportunity to go out for lunch, the chance to get by the Blanton Museum before closing, and will shipwreck me onto this island that I call 'home' for the duration of the day. Thank God the refrigerator is working and there's plenty of nice food in it. Thought I saw a big box of fresh, organic blackberries in there. Merits further investigation. .. ... .... And two Cosmic Crisp apples. WooHoo. 

I'd be happy if the delivery person could just leave the box by the front door. That way I could be as irresponsible and foot loose as I'd like. I'm sure, if history is a guide, that the box would still be sitting there no matter how late my return. 

But the enforced captivity has had its upside. I've been on a crusade to eliminate from my Smugmug.com account all of the files that are no longer pertinent to my work or which no longer give me joy upon seeing them again. As of 12:47 p.m. I have permanently deleted about 27,000 of the 450,000+ images that have resided there. It's a start and it's also a bit cathartic. I mean really, who needs the full inventory of all shot images for Dell headshots from 2003? Or 2004 for that matter? Or another folder of building shots from downtown?

And I don't know if this happens to you but I have a tendancy to put folders of current work in progress on my desktop and then forget to trash the folders or move them once I've completed the projects. I just dumped about 60 gigabytes of stuff that's already backed up elsewhere off the desktop and off the system hard drive. That's got to be better for the system performance if nothing else. 

Hmmm. There should be a service that comes and waits at one's house just to accept deliveries or to meet maintenance people and refrigerator repair people so that not so busy but very spoiled people can "get on with their lives..." (See what it did just there? A correct amount of dots in my last ellispse... .. nope, lightining doesn't strike twice. .. . ). 

I'd call the service, "We're waiting for You!" A nice little double entendre. 

And in other news: we're slated to have rough weather here tomorrow and tomorrow evening but it's all supposed to clear out and give us all a sunny and cool day for Eeyore's Birthday Party. I'm trying to decide on my costume because I don't want to be one of those old guys who just lurks around on the outside of things grabbing surveillance style shots, with long zoom lenses, of beautiful young people. It's always better to be immersed in the social milieu in the moment. I think I'll go as a Viking this year. When I was in Iceland I saw a lot of fun sloganing around this: If you can be a Viking, be a Viking! Doesn't have much to do with Winnie the Pooh but what the hell? 

 

I reached into a time machine and grabbed an image of the downtown power plant as it looked about ten years ago.

 Austin's old power plant before the downtown building boom. 

No curved building in the background. No pesky skyscrapers.

No surrounding shopping center. 

Two new (to me) lenses arriving at VSL this week. Stay tuned.

 Interesting times for me. I added two Nikon mount, Voigtlander lenses to the equipment inventory this month and learned, in doing so, that I really like the process of manual focusing and that I really, really like some of the quirkier, older (pre-2010) lens designs and resulting optical characteristics that have been floating around for years. 

I did something dumb yesterday. I had a moment between swim practice and lunch with B and I misspent the time looking around mindlessly on the web. I went to a popular website for a camera retailer in the San Francisco area and browsed through their "Recent Drop" offerings. It's a long, rambling listing, with product photos, of used gear that they've accepted on various trades. A lot of Leica, Nikon,  and Sony stuff, and a good number of collectible items as well. 

I was half way down the page of the first 100 listings when two or three lenses just listed caught my eyes. The most important of the them were both Carl Zeiss Biogon lenses for the Leica M mount cameras. After getting re-educated lately about 28mm lenses -- via the tutelage of the Q2 -- I was hankerin' for a manual focusing 28mm lens I could use on my L mount cameras (Leica SLs, Panasonic S5). I wanted a lens that is known to be sharp and contrasty (on all but the Sony cameras with their overly thick filter stacks) and best of all, small in size. A Carl Zeiss 28mm Biogon f2.8 ZM (M mount) in 9+ condition seemed like the way to go. I put it in my shopping cart. I've purchased from this store a number of times before and feel comfortable that they'll stand behind their sales (and product descriptions).

I was about to shut down my impromptu shopping and head into the house but lens adjacent to the 28mm on the page also caught my attention. It was the Carl Zeiss Biogon 35mm f2.0 ZM. And it too was in top condition. Might make a good pairing and both are reputed to share the overall look (color and contrast) of the Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 Planar which I also have. I couldn't resist temptation so I dumped the 35mm into the shopping cart as well. (Both are still available new as current products.. .. .. ).

I was about to complete the order online when I was inspired, no doubt by my recent negotiations with GE over the dastardly refrigerator, to go into an available chat on the website to see if I could negotiate even better pricing (although, in all fairness, the items were well priced already). Having spent two years in Turkey I learned to love haggling with vendors. ...  ..

I asked about a discount for ordering both items at the same time, tossed in my "returning customer credentials" and got into a good natured discussion with a real person. But online. They took a couple hundred dollars off the initial pricing and tossed in free 2nd day shipping. I bit. We'll see if the lenses turn out to be as good as I thought they would be..  ... 

Anybody out there have experience with either of these lenses? Chime in if you have the time. 

The guys are here to cut the grass and do some landscaping. I can't stand the sound of mowers and leaf blowers so I'm heading to the gym for some strength training. Hopefully everything will look ship shape when I get back. Funny, I have plenty of lenses and would always like a few more but in 26 years living in this house I've never purchased a lawn mower or other motorized yard work equipment. A case of different priorities I guess..  .... .  .....