Order Here

Walking the evening streets of Tel Aviv recently, I saw this "Order Here" sign. "Gotta dial negative exposure correction", methinks to myself. To my great surprise, it turns out that pulling out severely underexposed image, the color information was still there. 

So, have a look. First, is the image as it was shot - no processing applied whatsoever:

Really, my only goal was not to burn the sign.

With some very basic tweaking in LightRoom and in Color Efex Pro, I arrived at this rendering:

I am really quite happy with how it came out. 

My gear strategy and some other ramblings

Back in the previous decade, when I was shooting Pentax, and like many others I was hoping and waiting for that Pentax full frame camera. Now I can see that I was misguided in that waiting, but in hindsight we're always very wise.

Some time later I have decided that I wanted to move to a smaller and lighter system, yet I did not want to abandon my full frame hopes. So, I bought into Leica M-mount lenses, assuming that if an adapter can be made for any suitable camera system, it will be made for certain. 

Given how expensive Leica lenses are for casual hobbyist shooter, I started with Voightlander lenses. Unfortunately, I damaged my Heliar 15 and the manner in which repairs were performed was unsatisfactory. Unfortunately still, my Nokton 40 developed a strange instability of one of the inner elements resulting in bad differences in sharpness across the image and so it left my photo bag too.

Fine, I said to myself, there must be another option. Enter the Zeiss lenses. Small, with that lovely "look" and as I can see now, sufficiently sturdy construction. On Ricoh GXR-M they are producing lovely images since 2014.

My admittedly naive hope was that one day I could mount my Biogon 25/2.8 and Biogon 35/2.0 on some full frame camera and enjoy the fullness of my frames. Wrong!

Recently, thanks to my most generous friends, I had tried both lenses on Sony A7.3 and Sony A7. To paraphrase a catchy song title - Corner smearing killed the full frame star.

Granted and readily admitting it here, I was somewhat hypnotized by the avalanche of new camera announcements - Sony, Canon, Nikon... Later on I learned from infinitely wise interwebs that Fuji cameras albeit cropped, have their own share of problems with Biogon lens design.

Since my main camera is Olympus EM-1 and since for long time I was considering an idea of fast autofocus prime, I bought Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 15/1.7. My previous fast prime is manual focus Mitakon 25/0.95, which acquitted itself with fantastic shots I brought from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. More on that some other time.

So, nowadays I still have my small, unassuming Ricoh GXR-M for my Leica mount lenses and M-to-K bayonet adapter to mount my Pentax primes. 

And for all things autofocus or extra small and light, I have my Olympus camera.

In theory I could move to another camera system, say Sony or Fuji. However, as I am working on photo album from our family trip to Russia this summer, I am not seeing a good reason. I am not seeing an increase in image quality that would truly justify the cost and the hassle.

It seems I am content for now. 

New beginning

After more than a year long hiatus, I'm resuming my blog.

Much and many waters have flown. Many shots were taken. Some gear ridden of, some acquired... You know, the usual way of life of hobbyist photographer of the modern times.

I hope to be able to write more about gear, or at least try to express my opinions on current offerings and the gear that I get to use. And of course pictures will be posted, hopefully regularly.

I have also traveled a little. Namely, after more than a quarter century pause, I visited the city of my birth - Moscow, and I got myself introduced to the infinite beauty of Saint Petersburg.

Have a look:

New addition to the stable

Thanks to a friend, I had a chance to try excellent Olympus 7-14/2.8 lens. So I thought I had to have some extra-wide in my photo bag. I chose to prefer smallness to other lens parameters and hence got myself Olympus 9-18/4-5.6.

Not much to review here - the lens is very small and light, takes 52 mm filters up front. The 7-14 lenses (Olympus and Panasonic) don't have an ability to take front filters because of the form of the front element. The Olympus 9-18 lens features collapsible design - you have to extend the lens before the first use and if you don't, the camera tell you to do so.

In terms of construction, it is very tightly made, although of plastic. Finally, it has just a single zoom tube which makes it a bit more sturdy.

As far as image quality goes - everything is fine. The extreme corners at widest zoom setting are ever so slightly soft, but this is to be expected. However, this does not seem to pose any problems for me.

Let the pictures talk for themselves:

United colors of Mitakon (Speedmaster 25/0.95)

Informal lens review

Intro and stuff

Having entered the m43 system, specifically Olympus, I couldn't stay for long without a fast standard prime lens. My favorite focal length (in terms of 35mm format) is 50 mm. Generally, if at all possible, I prefer my fast standard prime to be as fast as possible.

Given these requirements (software engineer speak here), I went out to the web to find one such lens. Soon enough I found this little gem: Zhongyi Mitakon Speedmaster 25 f/0.95. I admit, there was a bit of uncertainty here. The manufacturer is obviously less known than Cosina Voigtlander. And Voigtlander Nokton 25 f/0.95 is quite a contender.

However, the main reason I went m43 was small size and light weight. So, Mitakon won hands down.

I contacted the factory directly and let me tell you - they are very fast to respond.

So the lens arrived a week ago.

Mechanicals

Ergonomics and materials are excellent. The only plastic I could find were rear cap and pinch-type front cap. The lens markings are printed. More about the markings later.

Both aperture ring (stepless) and focus ring are very smooth. This lens is very pleasant to work with.

Image quality

In my eyes, this lens punches well above its very modest price point. You could look up prices on the net, but let me show you some pictures. They were processed to taste in Adobe Lightroom and Nik Color Efex Pro.

Wide open at day light:

Tree trunk and some leaves:

Some out of focus rendering:

At infinity at bright day light:

Almost against the light:

I am yet to try this lens at low light, but judging from the kind of portraits of my daughters I was able to make under the room lighting, I have no doubts in ability of this little fellow to produce excellent images.

Some quirks

Infinity focus

No lens is perfect, really. This one is not an exception.

According to the web, early samples had some issues with infinity focus. Mine has the following point that I should keep in mind. The hard limit of the focusing ring seems like just a fraction of a hair in front of infinity. Initially, I thought that I would have problems with that. However, as it turns out - this is virtually a non-issue. When I tried not to set it to infinity blindly but rather, do the work and focus properly - the infinity focus is accurate and the lens is very sharp in the center of the frame.

At this time, I tend to explain this by the fact that the printed markings on the focusing ring may be just a tiny bit inaccurate. Absolutely not a problem for me and my Olympus EM-1 - the magnification, focus peaking, and excellent viewfinder make it extremely easy to get properly focused images.

Misc image quality issues

There are just a few of them;

1. The image borders at infinity even stopped down to f/6.3 or so are a bit soft. Nothing dramatic, but ever so slightly soft.
2. Under some very high contrast I got a bit of a purple fringing. Fixed with a flick of finger in Lightroom.
3. This lens does not like light sources to be in the frame - it flares. Given that it has 11 elements in 9 groups of optical formula, I can readily excuse that minor misbehavior. Even mighty Olympus 12-40/2.8 pro zoom catches flare every now and then.

Final words

In one sentence - I cannot possibly recommend this lens strong enough. Small, very fast, smooth to operate, surprisingly sharp in the center of the frame wide open. What's not to like about it?

The quirks are minor and none of them poses a serious limitation. At least for the kind of photography I am doing. 

So, for now the lens will stay mounted on my camera and I will be looking forward to giving it a low light workout.

Enter the Olympus

It turns out I might have chosen a rather limiting name to this blog. Some time ago I mostly switched from Pentax K-5 to Ricoh GXR-M as my tool of choice. However, AF and other advantages of K-5 have their use.

Unfortunately, recently it has become progressively more difficult to use my K-5. With DA* 16-50/2.8 lens, even not taking into account battery grip and sometimes flash, it weighs 1.3 kg, which meets very strong opposition from my wrists.

So, after a bit of research, deliberation, and general doubtfulness, I have decided on my next move. Pentax K-5 is about to be retired. Instead, I have bought into micro four thirds (m43) with Olympus E-M1 and Olympus 12-40/2.8 zoom lens.

It seems to me now that this combo is just the right tool for my needs whenever I need AF, zoom, touch AF, flip out screen, and other modern goodies. 

The operating of the camera is different, though the responsiveness of E-M1 is excellent, focus is accurate and very fast. All in all, in terms of camera operations, this is a good step up from K-5, though it will take me time to fully get used to it and to sync to its rhythm. 

The lens is very sharp even wide open, and in terms of size, it balances very nicely on a largish EM-1 camera body.

As far as IQ goes, K-5 has less noise and more room for error in the dark tones department. However, EM-1 compensates rather nicely by being smarter than me and exposing to the right, but not too right. 

So, I am a happy camper in the process of learning my new gear.

To be continued...

P.S. I am not changing the name of my blog. By Pentax Ways is certainly making a turn or a twist...

After a long period of silence

I haven't been posting for a long while to my blog. Many events happened since the last post very early this year. Some of them are personal and therefore will remain outside of realm of my public photo blog. Some events, however, could be shared.

1. I have almost completely left DSLR/Pentax gear. I still have SMCP-A 50/1.2 and SMCP-FA 77/1.8 Limited that I occasionally use. Sometimes, I'd use my K-5 and Sigma 17-70 or Sigma 24-60 lenses in order to take pictures for my younger daughter class at school. There auto-focus and zoom lens come in very handy.
2. All other photography these days is happening with Ricoh GXR-M. Recently I acquired Zeiss Biogon 35/2.0 which together with Zeiss Biogon 25/2.8 are my main photographic tools. Given that Biogon 35 arrived quite recently, I expect it to be my lens of choice as I learn to use it and as well enjoy the process.

Hopefully, next year I will be posting more pictures in my photo-blog, so please stay tuned.

Voigtlander Super Wide Heliar 15mm f/4.5 Aspherical II

A new lens has recent arrived from Cameraquest.com. The title has its name, which is rather longish... So here are my first impressions:

Ergonomics
It is positively tiny, given that it is so wide and that it does cover full 35mm frame. I opted for the second edition of this lens, mostly because it has Leica-M bayonet and hence no adapter is required. Additionally, unlike its predecessor it boasts 52mm filter thread, so that one day I might buy it a protective filter. Yes, I am protective filter kind of person...

Gives its angle of view and relatively slow f/4.5 aperture, it requires minimal focusing that is easily done by means of scale. Even if you miss some, it will be really quite hard to notice. Therefore, it can be conveniently used without need to attach the EVF to my Ricoh GXR camera.

Image quality
Is probably second to none. That is, it is sharp from corner to corner even wide open. Also, it does not seem to have any geometric distortion whatsoever, and this is really very nice. I could catch a flare but I did not observe any contrast deterioration and in fact the flare wasn't very prominent. I admit - I looked for it.

Sample images
Below are few samples processed to taste in LightRoom 4.4.

Conclusion
This one is definitely a keeper.

Ricoh GXR-M mount module, Novoflex K mount adapter and Pentax SMC A 50/1.2 mini-review

Look and feel

As you can see - it is fairly small. The camera body is very convenient and ergonomically comfortable for my hand. The adapter that I have supports both lenses with aperture ring and without. That is, the adapter has its own ring that can set aperture ring to any position between fully open and the one set by the aperture ring. Since Pentax lenses without aperture ring are fully closed by default, you get the full (step-less) range of aperture values. Alternatively, you can rotate the adapter to fully close the aperture and control the aperture from the lens.

Camera body (the body and the M-mount module) provides metering (including matrix metering, which seems very accurate so far). There is no electronic communication between the lens and the module, however you can set the lens name, the lens focal length and the lens aperture from the menu. The convenience of this feature is somewhat questionable, as you won't really want to dig into menu each time you swap lenses or change aperture on the lens.

Focus peaking is very useful and even fully open it is not that difficult to get accurate focus, although certain practice is necessary.

Image quality

The first two shots are made at f/1.2 or fully open. Both fast shutter of 1/4000 sec and generous leeway the camera electronics provide for recovery of bright areas help here.

The last shot is made at f/5.6 (of f/8.0 - see, now I don't have this recorded) with focus set to infinity. Here there're no surprises in terms of sharpness, etc.

Conclusions
So far I would say that this is exceptionally good gear. It is light, convenient, easy to use with image quality second to none. You can have either more expensive camera with more megapixels or another mirrorless camera that could use Pentax K-mount lenses via adapter, however even today Ricoh GXR system that is made on somewhat dated sensor is perfectly useful.

Highly recommended if you're not deterred by manual focus and electronic viewfinder.

Catching the moire

I took this photograph mostly because I saw this gentleman lying beneath the palm either reading or taking pictures with his cell phone. The lens was probably set to f/5.6 or f/8.0 and it was rather quick grab. Little did I know that I actually caught a very healthy specimen of moire... Look for yourself...

Of course at this small size it is hardly visible at all. Below is the screenshot of my LightRoom 4.3 showing this photo at 1:1 scale... Pretty much the same kind of moire is visible when this image is exported as is at full resolution...

I wouldn't draw any conclusions at this time, but this manifestation of the moire certainly attracted my attention...

Gear diary

Two small boxes arrived from Adorama. One with Ricoh GXR Mount module and another with Voigtlander Nokton 40/1.4 classic. What a lovely combo this is. I am yet to fully master the manual focusing with the aids provided by the module, but suffices it to say - I can hit the target at wide apertures, though not always. Evidently, a practice is necessary.

In terms of convenience and ease of use - this combo is second to none. Matrix metering is very accurate. The colors and the tones of the module are lovely. It is light, it is small and the image quality is excellent.

2013 #15 - Saint Peter's

Trying my freshly acquired Ricoh A12-28 module...

2013 #14 - Gabrieli

Galia started with Ricoh GXR and A12-50 module today... Here is what came out...

Gear diary

Another Ricoh GXR camera body and A12-28 (APS-C sized 12 MP sensor, 18.3/2.5 lens) lens module have recently arrived. Lens has provision for the shade, but it comes without one. Other than that - it is even smaller and lighter than A12-50 module. The only functional difference between A12-28 and A12-50 is lack of macro mode. However it focuses as close as 20 cm, so it can be used for exaggerated closeup...

My first impression is that the picture quality is just as good as that of A12-50. By the way, it happens to be direct competitor (at least in terms of sensor size and focal length) to newly introduced Nikon Coolpix A.

Gear diary

The FA 20/2.8 has been sold. It hasn't seen much use as of recently...

Gear diary

Sold

1. CSJ Flektogon 50/4 with tilt adapter was sold. Modern optical viewfinders and my multifocal glasses eyes don't work together well.
2. Metz 40 MZ-2 was also sold.

Bought

1. Metz 50 AF1 has joined this household just recently. I've tried all the functions and they appear to work very reliably. Except this rather peculiar press-two-buttons-at-the-same-time interface - it is an excellent flash. But after I've set it up - the rest of the operations are clear and one button only, so I expect no real issues here. The remote slave triggering by built-in camera flash is a novelty for me which I find very cool.

2013 #02 - After the rain

Gear diary

The Pentax SMC DA* 16-50/2.8 has been sold. Instead a Sigma DC 17-70/2.8-4.5 was acquired. I am thinking that the faster, bigger, heavier and more expensive lens was a bit of an overkill, given my recent tendency towards Ricoh GXR and mirrorless style of shooting.

As for this Sigma lens, there is nothing special about it - it is just good - it does what it is supposed to do. Notably the build quality is very tight, although if it is zoomed out just a bit less than to the full maximum, there is a zoom creep. In terms of image quality it seems perfectly fine. The only nitpick is that it is prone to fringing aberrations. It is easily solved in LightRoom 4.3, so that I already have a development preset that takes care of the fringing.

Presently I plan to make it my standard zoom lens. Oh, and the above shot was made with it...

Nikonian brothers pay me a visit

Two of my very good friends are Nikonians. They're brothers and their older brother is Pentaxian. So the Nikonian brothers came to see me today. One of them rented D800 and another recently bought D600. Also D700 was brought along as well. So we had great time and these Nikon cameras pack quite a punch.

It turns out that Nikon D800 is more similar to D600 in terms of size/weight/ergonomics than it is to D700. D700 is big and heavy, D800 is not small and not light but its ergonomics are surprisingly good for a person with small hands such as myself.

Interestingly enough, from very brief encounter I should say that Nikkor 24-70/2.8 is better balanced on D700 than on D800. With D800 the combo is ever so slightly nose heavy.

It was dark and raining outside and under the light of a single 60 watt tungsten lamp my Pentax K-5 was no match for Nikon heavy weights... Both Nikons pack some serious pixelage and truly D800 is an amazing camera.

Now I am just as torn as one of the brothers - which one to buy - D600 or D800. Well, not really torn, because presently I am sticking with Pentax, but if I were on lookout for a system to switch to - it would be pretty hard choice.

And here is a quick and dirty grab made by my absolutely tiny Ricoh GXR with A50 macro module focused manually via EVF with the help of focus peaking and 2x magnification...

Gear diary update

The Pentax SMC FA 31/1.8 AL Limited has left the building...

Nifty fifty, twenty first century style

As I wrote earlier, I got myself a Ricoh GXR camera with A12 50/2.5 macro module. In the last several days I've been taking the little fellow out for a workout every single day.

You can easily google this camera and find both detailed technical analysis and countless pictures taken with it. So I suppose it would make sense I skipped all the technical aspects. Suffices it to say, it took me less than a week to get myself fully accustomed to this camera.

The greatest thing about it is that it gives me back the 50 mm. That is, for all practical purposes it is an excellent nifty fifty lens attached to a very easy to use camera. I am thinking that for the time being I am going to "confine" myself to this camera-lens combination.

It is pure joy to review the results and edit the files this camera produces. In fact, I am thinking that in terms of editing flexibility the DNGs from Ricoh surpass those from Pentax K-5. I don't want to pass a judgment here as the jury is still out - you see, I upgraded to LightRoom 4.1 just recently, so it could be that part of the improvements I am seeing are due to the processing software, not the camera itself.

Yet, I am totally in love with this little fellow - a pity really, that I did not get to know it earlier.