NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’ve had an iPhone 6S for a month or so – I bought it because of the improved camera but really haven’t used it much. This morning I shot around the house with an updated version of ProCamera, a camera app, to get to know it a bit better. It does a marvelous job; the app has a very good implementation of HDR, which helps solve many exposure problems. Here are some samples.
Day 1,894 of one photo a day for the rest of my life.
KitchenBananas
On this day last year (day 1,592): Fog. This image really pushes to fog concept pretty hard.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More old lenses. Today I’m experimenting with a 5cm Nikkor-S (Contax mount) f1.4 with a Contax to Leica adapter that I found on ebay (the focusing helicoid for the Contax was on the body, not the lens, so this is a complex adapter). This lens, which is from the mid-1950s, does much better at close focus than infinity, where there is all kinds of junk going on in the corners. Here are two samples on taken with my Monochrom. This lens has a lovely signature in an intimate setting.
A second old lens: an 8.5 cm f2.0 Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar from 1937, also in Contax mount with a modern copy of the adapter referred to above. The mount had a slight ding which caused serious hassles fitting it to the adapter. After fussing with it on and off for a couple of months I finally got it working this week. The focus cam is not correct for Leica so the rangefinder is only accurate at close focus (1.15 m) but is extremely accurate there. This with an M so I could use the EVF to focus and converted to black and white. This is a sensational, charismatic lens, especially given that it is 75 years old. I’ll be doing more work with it.
The Nikkor from the Mad Men era:
Lens testLens test
The Sonnar from pre-War Germany – not a great image – I’m trying to figure out what this lens can do.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – More mementos – these from our living room in New York. I really am in a sentimental place. There is a digital technique called focus bracketing that lets you extend depth of field. It turns out that this is actually easier that messing with tilts (the classical view camera technique for achieving a similar result) as long as nothing moves between exposures. This was taken with my Hasselblad H4D-60 and a 150 mm lens. It’s 7 exposures focusing from near (the front of the tea chest) to far (the speaker grill in the lower left). The frames were stacked in Helicon Focus, specialized software that combines focus bracketed images to produce one in focus composite. The moire on the lampshade is actually not an digital artifact – it results from the interaction of screens in front of the window that illuminates the scene.
