photostream

A copy of the October 1958 edition of Modern Photography recently came my way (thanks, DCW). Aside from the usual ‘look at the prices!’ fun, there were a number of other things of note about the mag.
To start with, get these headlines: “Lens vs Film Designers: who’s winning the race?” Yes, an article [...]

The idea that the best camera is the one that happens to be in your hand at the time you want to take a photograph is something that gets repeated so often that it because the verbal equivalent of a sunset photo. Yeah, right, neat. Next?
It is, however, something that I think a [...]

You might remember the debate a while back about whether the qualities of lenses are less important when used on digital cameras. Also the one about how the task of developing a technical stlye seems to have become harder since we swapped chemicals for Photoshop. They are both on TOP somewhere, I think, [...]

Putting a lens from manufacturer A onto a body from manufacturer B seems to be growing in popularity, despite the obvious downsides of rarely being able to keep even basic communication between the two. Not many people are prepared to go to the lengths of this chap, but less hard work variants are all [...]

Diglloyd reports on some prototype Zeiss lenses optimised for infrared. Although they are prototypes, the author has had and used the lenses (in Nikon F mount). Infrared isn’t my thing, but as another sign of Zeiss’ renaissance this is really interesting. Zeiss is putting stuff onto the market that nobody ever dreamed [...]

I’ve read a number of ‘easy MTF’ pages. Not much of it ever sticks in my memory. I can’t even reliably get the letters in the right order :-)
This isn’t a repeat of Mike’s TOP post, because excellent though that is, it still leaves a lot of questions begging. But first, this [...]

I was researching something else entirely, when I came across this thread about lens names.
The following post by Ole Tjugen manages to pack a tremendous amount of lens history into just a few sentences:
Back in 1866, Steinheil in Germany and Dallmeyer in England patented virtually identical lenses at practically the same time. Steinheil called his [...]

Erwin Puts has just published an interesting article about lens testing. Mike Johnston has already published an interesting analysis of Erwin’s article. Both repay careful reading.
I was most struck by this part of Erwin’s ‘upshot’ (conclusion):
At an aperture of f/4 both lenses perform visually equally well and that is what most reviewers will [...]

It was Sunday. So I dipped into a couple of forums to see what was going on. It was bokeh everywhere. Never has so little been said about so much, but in so many words. Etc.
I retreated to the Large Format Forum…..oh, no, they are at it as well. However, [...]

At the beginning of chapter 10 of his book ‘The Craft of Photography’, David Vestal writes:
Picture contrast starts with subject contrast. The subject’s range of luminances – measurable brightnesses – is transferred by the lens to the film as a range of relative exposures. When developed, these become a density range, more or [...]