Zurich, Claridenstrasse

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Zurich Claridenstrasse, 2015-10-04, with Sony A7 and Olympus Pen-F 70mm f/2.0.

The Olympus Pen-F lens is designed for half frame 35mm film, that means 18x24 mm2 is used in portrait mode on the 35mm (the 35mm includes the perforations in order to spool the film - therefore its name). Yet the 70mm lens fully fills out the 36x24 mm2 frame (thought here the image is a little bit cropped on the right, and only slightly cropped at the top and the bottom).

The use of this half frame 70mm lens on a full frame digital camera is is very much to my delight, as it is very difficult to find any full frame prime 70mm lenses (and that is also fast). I realised over time that I prefer the 70/75 mm view very much (and for this the Leica Summilux and Summicrons are unfortunately bit out of reach:). As it happens it is just in this range that a real gap between the very popular 50mm lenses and the again specialised portrait 85mm focal length appears.

At this moderate distance and stopped down the lens seems also more than sharp enough (no extra post processing applied besides the slight crop). Still have to see how it works on close up range and fully open.. but that would be in another post.

Crystal Flowers

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Zurich, 2015-03-03, with Sony A7 and Olympus OM 35mm f/2.0.

The old Olympus OM 35mm f2 lens doesn't have a bad reputation, but is also not especially well regarded. Both compared to other Olympus OM lenses for different focus lengths as well as in comparison to some other often legendary 35mm Leica or Zeiss lenses. However I like its out of focus rendering, which to me is kinda thick and warm (thought it isn't so obvious in B&W :), and for the web resolution it also looks sharp enough.

Black and white conversion is directly out of the camera. Oh, and the flowers are not really crystals or even out of glass, but does it matter?!

Zurich Crane

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Zurich over lunch time with a 10 stop natural density filter and the Olympus OM 50mm f/2.0 Macro and Sony A7. This one is with 30 sec exposure time. I also made one with 1 and 2 minutes, however it seems there are some artefacts coming up in the resulting picture. It looked like maybe (with a second 2 stop filter on top of it) there were some reflections between the two filters, but it was some rectangular imprint, so it must be something like a light leak on the mount or some reflections through the lens adapter, don't know yet, but for 30 sec and one filter it seems to be OK.

Otherwise zero post processing or cropping, the black and white is also straight out of the camera.

Oh yeah, and what do you think of the crane? Art?

Oh, actually this is a macro lens, which is very practical in itself with f/2.0, which can be just as well used as a normal lens. Actually I am surprised, it is one of my favourite lenses, thought I haven't had any picture with it published on the blog yet. And even this time it is no close up photo - for which I like to use this lens very much.

Cross

Erlenbach, 2014-04-21. Sony A7 and Olympus 50mm f/1.8.

Experiment with 1x1 format, even thought not used in B&W, as it typically is.

Full-Frame Camera Mind Share

For the ones not into digital photography, full-frame is today's name for a digital sensor size that has the same size as the effective picture size of the traditional 35 mm film rolls. If you subtract the perforations of the 35 mm film at the top and bottom, then a 36x24 mm area remains for each photo.

With the advent of the digital sensors, such big sensors had been too expensive to produce in the beginning. The bigger the area of the sensor the higher the chance a single pixel is corrupt, resulting in much lower yield rates in production.

The standard sensor size for DSLR (digital single-lens reflex cameras) has therefore become the so called APS-C image size, which is 24x16 mm. Most DSLRs use sensors of this format. BTW, each side of the full-frame format is 1.5 times bigger than for APS-C format. But the area of a full-frame sensor is 2.25 times as big as an APS-C sensor (OK, you do the math).

Since the advent of the Canon 5D, digital cameras with the bigger 36x24 mm sensor size have become available and affordable for serious enthusiasts and of course professional photographers.

I took a look at a Flickr statistic and summed up the average daily users (as of 2013-10-09) who use a full-frame camera:

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

I use this as a proxy for possible market share of different manufacturers. Of course, this is just a rough idea, so lets call it the market mind share instead.

The Leica M9 actually is closer to USD 10'000 then 1'000. So it is no surprise, it has only marginal usage.

But what is also obvious, Sony has also only minuscule usage numbers. If we look only at the currently produced models, it becomes even more severe for Sony (BTW, Sony took over the camera business of Konica Minolta, which by itself took over the Minolta system).

And Nikon is catching up with Canon big time.

Who is missing completely on this list is Pentax. It has a digital medium format, which is even bigger in size then full-frame. However, besides this it has only APS-C cameras and had so big business problems, that they got bought by Hoya and then resold to Ricoh.

Who is also absent is Olympus. They today don't even produce cameras of APS-C sensor size, but years ago have opted for an even smaller image size (the Micro Four Third and formerlay Four Third format).

But the list also can change considerably very soon, as Sony is shortly before introducing new cameras without the traditional mirror box. It has a mount it uses for its smaller size mirrorless Nex line, the E-Mount. The Nex uses an electronic view finder or alternatively a back screen like a compact camera. There is no mechanical mirror needed anymore. That also allows to make the so called flange range, the distance of the mount from the sensor/film pane, much much shorter. Without a mirror in between, there is a lot of space that can be safed.

But also, that space can also be filled with a simple tube or adapter to create the exact flange range of some other traditional mount from Canon, Nikon or whomever.

That way any lens from any manufacturer can be used on a camera. And should this camera have a full frame sensor, these lenses would be used the way they were initially designed.

So lets wait and see when and with what Sony will come out and how it will change the camera circuit.

Fear Fork

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*For your daily dose of Dadaism...

With Sony Nex-5R and Olympus OM 90mm f/2 Macro.

Zürcher Schärfentiefe

Two depth of field exercises (with more, or less - last year for Marcel G.)...


From the entrance hall of the ETH Zürich main building, on 2012-09-14 (with Sony Nex-5 and Minolta MD 35mm f/2.8).


The small model at the Zürich Grossmünster church on 2012-09-15 (with Panasonic G2 and Olympus 9-18mm f/4-5.6).

BTW, Schärfentiefe is German for depth of field, in German also often called Tiefenschärfe. That last word doesn't make much sense however, language wise, as it would mean something along sharpness of depth, instead of the other way around. Like Dickenscheibe instead of Scheibendicke (die Dicke der Scheibe vs. die Scheibe der Dicke), it's just not the same etc. However, if a word is used long enough by enough people, it doesn't need to make sense anymore, it's just a new word (and everybody knows - Stundenkilometer [or Stuckis] is another one)...

Oh, and ironically, in English there is also depth of focus, which sounds more directly a translation of the German word to me, however, it again means something slightly different and is also sometimes falsely used instead of depth of field.

OK, genug der Belehrung:o).

The Niederdorf

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Zurich Niederdorf, 2012-11-24, from Lindenhof.

With Panasonic G2 and Olympus 9-18mm f/4.0-5.6 at 9 mm.