Agnus' Blog

Since I was a bit diappointed by the image quality of the Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35 mm f/2.8 (especially with regard to the sharpness in the image corners) I purchased its successor over ebay. Yersterday the Flektogon 35 mm f/2.4 arrived and I am all enthusiastic. And by the way: the Jupiter-9 85 mm f/2.0 also found its way to me through the bay! Images will follow.

Ich habe heute einen Großteil der Bilder meiner Tochter Ida nur noch für Freunde freigegeben, da aktuelle Ereignisse in unserer Umgebung im Zusammenhang mit Kinderpornografie mich nicht ganz unberührt gelassen haben. Ich bin mir bewusst, dass dieses Verfahren natürlich keine absolute Sicherheit bedeutet, ggf. werde ich sie später ganz löschen.

So finally after weeks of processing and sorting out (and making a photo-book for our most hospitable hosts) I will post my photos of our vacation in southern France. We stayed at the house of my firend's parents in Pomy, a very small village in the département Aude, région Languedoc-Roussilion. I tried to capture the unique atmosphere of the place in my photos and hope I succeeded.

Just a very short entry to direct your attention to this excellent resource on photographic optics.For me, the articles about depth of field and bokeh were of special interest.

I have now had some more opportunities to further test my manual focus lenses with M42 screw mount. Now that my autofocus-confirm adapter has arrived I moved from the focussing issue to the next problem: light metering and erronerous exposure aswell as milky pictures when shooting backlight photos.

The first part seems to be a known issue and apparently relates to an exposure compensation algorithm that EOS-bodies apply to compensate for non-linear light metering. Look here and here for further information. (Hier auf Deutsch.) My AF-confirm adapter emulates the presence of a 50 mm lens at aperture f/2.0. All lenses I tested seem to exposure correct when set to this aperture. The lower the aperture the higher the degree of overexposure (up to + 2 EV @ f/16) and that ssems to be true regardless of which lens I have screwed on. I tested this behaviour on the following lenses (M42-mount) on my EOS 400D:

• Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35 mm f/2.8
• Helios-44M-4 58 mm f/2
• Hanimar 55 mm f/1.4
• Auto Revuenon 55 mm f/1.4
• Porst Tele MC auto D 135 mm f/2.8

It seems as if I have to live with the overexposure and as far as I am aware of the issue and shoot in RAW I can deal with it.

But last weekend another issue showed up: when shooting backlight photos all of the above lenses show not only flares (reflections of the aperture ring but the whole picture looks milky, misty, glaring, contrast-poor and whatever else you might want to call it. Further down you will find some samples.

I agree these pictures were shot without lens hood but I never before in my short photo-career have produced such pictures with one of my new Canon-, Sigma- or Tamron lenses and I didn't use lens hoods in the beginning. The horse was even shot with the built-in lens-hood extended!

Has this to do with coating? Has anyone made similar experiences and/or has an explanation for that behaviour?

backlight 3

backlight 2

backlight 1

My father lent me four manual focus lenses, which I intend to test during the next couple of days/weeks:

tiger

Auto Revuenon 55 mm f/1.4
Hanimar 55 mm f/1.4 (looks very similar to the previous)
Meyer Görlitz Primoplan 58 mm f/1.9
Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50 mm f/2.8

I do have an awfully hard time focusing with these screwed to my EOS 400D, expecially under low light conditions, open aperture and short DOF. More than 70% out of focus so far. But I like the feel of it very much. Since my first SLR is the EOS 400D I still own now, this experience is absolutely new to me.

The tiger to the left was shot with the Auto Revuenon. No post processing.

I purchased a used Nvidia 6800 Go and exchanging the overheated graphics adapter was easier then expected. I even seized the opportunity to increase my RAM and harddisk-memory and did a fresh Windows install - now my old laptop is faster than ever before!

I'll won't be able to drop by very often during the next couple of days (weeks? months?) due to a broken graphics adapter in my laptop. Apparently I can replace it with a little help from a more experienced friend of mine and will be able to re-access my photos and the Ipernity-network soon.

Wish me luck,

Christian

I also wanted to try this, so here is the result:

I want to highly recommend this movie to you. I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie that moved me so much and made me talk about it with my wife even days after we saw it. It is also very interesting from a photographic point of view and features one of the best camera-jobs I've ever seen in a movie.

Watch it!!!

Great update indeed. Especially the local editing tools (brush, gradient) are simply amazing. I also downloaded the new camera-profiles from adobe.labs and have replaced all my pictures' camera profiles with the new Adobe standard profile. The yellow- and red-tones are much more natural now. Try it out!

I'd like to direct your attention to this very interesting and comprehensive article concerning the management of your digital photo-data. Enjoy.

As you might have noticed (but probably have not), I am not very active in my own groups anymore. First reason is lack of time, but the second is the disappointment with what's happening with groups here on Ipernity. Most of them degenerated into mere dumping grounds for pictures (have they ever been more than this?). I received not response whatsoever to my postings and so I backed more and more out of my own groups. Even though one of them ("Corrosion And Decay") sees more and more members joining every week I don't feel anyone is really interested in the other pictures in the pool. Correct me if I am wrong but to me the groups here seem almost dead. For my part, I concentrate on my network's posting and don't pay  too much attention to groups anymore.

A disappointed

Agnus.

This highly interesting article has been brought to my attention by my friend ozean. What was new and astounding to me was the fact, that the author recommends exposing your pictures thus, that the right (=light) side of the histogram is used to the max. I have always slightly underexposed my pictures to avoid blowing of the highlights and loose the information. I was in the believe that (at least when using the RAW-format) you can get more details out of areas clipped on the left side of the histogram (=black) during post-processing than out of areas clipped to the left (=white). The issue of that signal/noise ratio being better on the left histogram side was absolutely new to me.

I hope this is of interest to you, too. I would like to hear your opinion and how you go about.

Thanks again to ozean. There is a lot more intersting stuff on that site!

The Luminous Landscape: Maximizing S/N Ratio in Digital Photography

On of my photos of the old tunnel underneath the Elbe river here in Hamburg is now featured in the Schmap-Guide of Hamburg. I don't consider it one of my best photos but I have to admit, that I am a bit proud. Schmap discoevered the photo on flickr and asked me, whether I would submit it.

You can see it here:www.schmap.com/hamburg/tours_tour3/p=63834/i=63834_4.jpg

Schmap

Some friends and I regularly meet and cook together - you could call it a cooking-club. Most of the photos I shoot there are kept private because not everybody wants to see his face on the internet. But at our last meeting I tried to focus more on photographing the food we prepare and to document the process of cooking. I find some of these photos quite ok, so I made them public. More pictures will probably be added in the future.

A food album will also come soon. Please tell me what you think.

duck breast in the oven

Bis in einer Woche.

I'm on holiday - until next week.