Ross London Xpres 105mm f3.8 Nikon D810

One of the nice things about larger format lenses like the Ross London Xpres 105mm f3.8, is that their flange distance is often longer than most SLR camera mounts, and this makes them adaptable on DSLRs, even on Nikon cameras which is usually the least adaptable mount of all D/SLR cameras. This particular lens, having a very long flange, is even usable with the Vivitar Macro 2x Teleconverter helicoid.  I have a number of these Vivitar macro teleconverters, and I used one of them for the Nikon mount.  Even with the Vivitar focus helicoid, a 10mm spacer is required to make the lens focus to infinity.

This lens has one nice feature on its shutter: T setting. This setting allows you to trip the shutter and it stays open until the shutter is tripped again. This makes it unnecessary to remove the shutter blades in the lens, but at the same time, the shutter is easy to trip so often I have to re-cock the shutter and make it open again before use. A small inconvenience I can live with.

Ross London Xpres 105mm f3.8 on Nikon D810

I am not a big fan of using adapted lenses on DSLRs, having done that with the Canon for many years. They are nowhere as convenient as using an EVF on mirrorless cameras. But the Nikon D810 has a very nice optical viewfinder, and I find that I don't have much trouble getting critical focus, even with slower lenses. The non-swivel rear screen is still a big negative for some low angle shots. That said, I kind of enjoy using the D810 with some of the manual focus lenses. Aside from the nice viewfinder, the image quality is the biggest attraction.

Winter in the city - Xpres 105mm f3.8 on Nikon D810

Miss Toronto - Xpres 105mm f3.8 on Nikon D810

The Xpres 105mm f3.8 lens works really well with the D810, despite the high density sensor. So far, I am really, really liking this lens and how it renders pictures, even though I have only used it a few times. The bokeh is especially smooth and beautiful, but the lens is also quite sharp.  One thing that I have noticed, and that usually does not happen with the Sony A7, is I get more blurry pictures with the D810, even though I set the minimum shutter speed to 1/125s. This camera requires a much higher shutter speed to get sharp pictures.

I am looking forward to using this lens more, especially in the spring when we have more colours to fill the camera sensor.

Bokeh Samples - Xpres 105mm f3.8 and Nikon D810. This pictures need to be viewed at large size to appreciate the details.

When Lens Conversion Goes Wrong, or Why Lenses with Auto Aperture Control Suck

I was somewhat encouraged by the semi-successful conversion of the Vivitar 40mm f1.7 from the Vivitar 35ES, so I ventured on to start another rangefinder that did not have aperture control: the Minolta Electro Shot.  This camera has a 40mm f1.8 lens but much larger than the Vivitar 40mm f1.7. Well, things didn't turn out as well as the Vivitar conversion.  The Electro Shot does not have separate shutter and aperture blades, like pretty much all other rangefinders from that era, but it employed a single shutter/aperture system. I didn't know this until the very end.

Lens Conversion Gone Bad

As I assumed the shutter and aperture blades were separate, and from experience that I gained, the shutter mechanism is usually accessible from the front. But when I disassembled the whole front, there was nothing.  All the controls are from the rear of the lens.  Long story short, in the process of trying to find the mechanism for aperture control, I mistakenly loosened three screws on top of the lens from the rear, and this caused the aperture/shutter blades to fall out of the lens :(  The timing and shutter/aperture control system is very complicated and I decided to just give up on aperture control. After some more thought, I further decided that I should make another Borg lens, with a Steampunk look.  Incidentally, my first Borg lens was also a Minolta.

From now on, I will stay away from rangefinders that have no manual aperture control on the lens. It's just not worth the trouble, unless the camera is dirt cheap or is unusual.  Of course, this could change if I gain enough skill to make more complex parts to enable the aperture in the lens.

Wilted Rose - Minolta Rokkor-QF 40mm f1.8 & Sony A7

Vivitar 40mm f1.7 from 35ES

I got this Vivitar 35ES rangefinder, rumored to be the same camera as the Minolta Hi-Matic S7 II, to see how hard it is to convert the lens which has Automatic aperture control to be used on the Sony A7.  The aperture is not manually adjustable, obviously, but it is not controlled by a geared motor like modern lenses are.  The aperture is still mechanical and I was able to link the aperture to the ISO Shutter Speed ring on the lens. Not perfect as there is no indexing, but it allows the aperture to be controlled.

Tried it out today and I am very happy with how it renders images.  More to come.

Vivitar 40mm f1.7 converted to Sony E-Mount

Delicious bokeh - Vivitar 40mm f1.7 & Sony A7

Beauty Biokor-S 4.5cm f1.9 In Use

This lens turns out to be quite nice.  I mounted it on my A7 for about a week and shot a few hundred frames. I enjoyed it as a walk-around lens.  The Pentax helicoid provided a very versatile focus option from extreme closeup to infinity, all without having to add extension tubes.  The funky looking honey-combed defuser panel for the light meter cell adds a touch of vintage charm.  The only negative is the sticky aperture ring, and I did have to use it a few times for some pictures with a bit more depth of field.  Not a big deal, but an annoyance just the same.

I like the smooth bokeh from this lens.  Some very slight swirl when pictures are taken at certain distance, but overall very pleasing.  It flares quite easily, like most old lenses.  A hood helps a bit but not at all situations.  Overall, I think it was worth the effort of the conversion.  This lens produces nice results.

Reflection - Biokor-S 4.5cm f1.9 @ f1.9 & Sony A7

Slightly Swirly Background - Biokor-S 4.5cm f1.9 @ f1.9 & Sony A7

Nice Smooth Bokeh - Biokor-S 4.5cm f1.9 & Sony A7

Flare - Biokor-S 4.5cm f1.9 & Sony A7

The Beauty Biokor-S 45mm f1.9 Conversion

This is an interesting camera.  I never knew this brand even existed until I got this camera.  Some Googling reveals there are some fanatic followers for some of its rangefinder camera.  The one I have, unfortunately (or fortunately), has damages, and was dead.  I don't have to feel bad gutting it for the lens to transplant it for use on digital.

A Beauty, no?

I originally wanted to preserve the built-in focus mechanism, but the lens has some strange designs that prevents this from happening.  On most rangefinders, there are two focus guides; one on each side of the lens and are small and very close to the helicoid.  On this lens, there is a single focus guide and is placed quite a distance away from the helicoid.  If I were to retain the original focusing, I would have to machine the mount much larger than the diameter of the lens to accommodate the focus guide.  If I were more skilled, I could probably create my own focus guide, but I am not there yet.  In the end, the built-in focus is abandoned, and the Pentax 17-33mm focus helicoid is used.  There are many advantages of using a helicoid with 16mm of focus travel, and one of which is extreme close focus while still retaining infinity focus.  Another advantage is the focus feel.  The Pentax helicoid is smooth as silk and what a pleasure to use.

The skin on the front of the camera need to be removed, which will expose the screws that secure the lens module.  The top plate probably does not need to be removed, but I did it anyway.

Once the screws were removed, the lens module can be pulled out easily.  Note the focus guide circled in red.  

I need to use an M42 mount for the lens, so that it could be screwed on to the Pentax helicoid. This M42 mount came from one of the three sections of a Pentax extension tube.  I have to somehow mount this onto the lens.  The obvious way to do it is to attach it to the inner helicoid.  The only problem is there is less than 3mm of space available between the lens and the focus helicoid.  I machined the inner helicoid tube from its original 25mm to about 1mm thick, and the M42 mount to about 3mm, just thin enough to achieve infinity focus.  I then epoxied the two parts together.  Since the weight of the whole lens is held together by the glue, I am not too comfortable trusting glue to handle this by itself, so I intend to drill/tap and screwed them together for some added assurance.

Remove everything at the rear of the lens, but keep the retention plate.  This plate is used to hold the M42 mount to the lens.  See next picture for the plate. The screw circled is a key that makes sure the plate does not move around.

On the left is the M42 mount I cut from the Pentax extension tube and machined to the required thickness.  In the middle is the retention plate that I machined so that it will fit inside the back of the M42 mount.  These two pieces are glued together with metallic epoxy. 

The retention plate is glued onto the M42 mount. Note the recessed groove; it's just small enough that the retention ring can't go through the hole.  This is where the retention ring on the right will be pressing on while screwed onto the lens.  This secures the mount on the lens.

All the pieces fitted together.  The notches circled in red is where you use the spanner wrench to tighten the retention ring and secure the mount.

Disabling the shutter

This is actually the trickiest part that took more time.  It involves disassembling the front of the lens.

Remove the retention ring with a spanner wrench and remove the diffuser piece. Next unscrew the front element group, and take out 3 pieces under it. Now remove the 3 screws circled in red.

Once the 3 screws are removed, lift this piece out, and the piece below it.  This will expose 4 more screws that need to be removed.  Note the small retention ring in the middle, pointed to by the blue arrow.  This one also needs to come out.

Take out the piece secured by the 4 screws, and now the inner retention can be removed.  Note the locking screws in red.  It needs to be turned so that it's not touching the retention ring.  Using a pointed spanner wrench, remove the retention ring.

Once the retention ring is removed, take it out, as well as the two other pieces under it. This is the end of the disasembly.

This is where you will find the shutter cocking mechanism, circled in red.  Find the part that actually engages/disengages the shutter, and glue/solder it in place.  For this particular lens, I just removed the shutter blades using a long nose plier since I didn't feel like I wanted to go through all the disassembly steps, but I did the steps here to show where you can do it without removing the blades.

Everything together.  Looks nice with the Canonet hood :)

A real beauty, ain't she?

One issue that this lens has, is the very stiff aperture ring.  I think there are two much gunk that gums it up.  But, I am not going to do further disassembly to fix it since I hardly use the aperture :)  I shoot mostly wide open.

Next time, we will look at some pictures taken with this lens, and see if Beauty is only skin deep, or it actually has substance.

Minolta Rokkor-QF 40mm f1.8 Conversion Part Deux

I first converted this lens with filter ring and glue, as I wrote in this post with more pictures here.  It was a relatively easy conversion so I decided to redo it with the lathe, to hopefully make it look and work better.

Most of the conversion work was already done so this second conversion was pretty quick. I just needed to machine the spacer with the required thickness for infinity focus, drill and tap holes on the lens board and the newly machined spacer to attach them together, and then do the same for the E-Mount adapter, which was original a Rollei to E-Mount adapter with a missing lens release pin, and I decided to to use it as the mount.

The part at the right is the spacer I machined.  The left part goes inside the spacer.

I am quite happy with this particular conversion.  The lens fit together very well with no play and wiggles, except at the mount if you really twist it hard.  I did messed up the spacing of the mount and it's not perfectly centered, and this has the effect of off-setting the aperture index mark slightly.  Not a big deal but I could have done much better.  When I get more adapters, I will redo it, or, my next exercise, make my own E-Mount!  Another small problem is the focusing is not as smooth as I would like, probably because the focus guide hole is a bit tight.  Hopefully I can tweak it and make it feel a bit smoother.

Home made drill bit sleeve for the collet.

For this project, I used the milling attachment that came as part of my lathe.  It was used to mill the path for the focus guide to go through, and also used to hold the parts for drilling, as I don't have a drill press.  There is also a set of collets that came with my lathe but none fit the tiny drill bits, so I made a sleeve from the shaft of a Dremel bit.  A hole was drilled with the same drill bit that this sleeve will hold.  Once the hole was drilled, I cut a slit on one side of the shaft, thinking that should be good enough and it should give and clam on the drill bit when put on the collet.  But because it was made of hard steel, the sleeve didn't clam on the drill bit at all, so I had to cut more slits on the other side and is now working like a charm.

All done.  Looks pretty good, eh?  You can see the aperture index mark is off to one side.

This has been a good exercise for me.  This gives me more confidence that I could do more complex conversions later on.  Below are pictures I took after the new conversion, with the Sony A7.

My First [Simple] Lathe Project

Yesterday I finally found some space to setup the lathe.  Unfortunately I have no metal rounds to practice with, so I used a projection lens I bought from the camera show couple weeks ago as the practice piece and first project.  Yes, I know.  I am trying to walk before I learn how to crawl, but hey, I have many hours of YouTube experience under my belt.  That's got to be good enough to get started, right?

Immediately, I found many problems. The carriage had quite a bit of play.  A quick consultation with the Taig Micro Lathe guide fixed it by adjusting the gib screws. Then the 3-Jaw chuck is grossly out of true.  It's so bad you can see the wobble and it would be impossible to turn anything like this until I find a way to true it. The 3-Jaw chuck is supposed to be self centring, as all the jaws move at the same time when you tighten/loosen it, but it's not doing a good job at it. Luckily, there is the 4-Jaw chuck that was included with the lathe, but that brought up another problem.  The 4-Jaw chuck's jaws are independent.  You can tighten each of the 4 jaws individually.  But, in order to make the work piece perfectly centred, one needs a dial gauge, which I have, but I don't have the base to set it.  So in the end, I just did many trial and error tightening and retightening until it was visually running true. This is a laborious and imprecise process without the dial gauge.

Finished - I will not show you the 100% crop of the turned area.  It just looks disgusting.

I removed the lens elements from the lens; they came off easily by unscrewing the front and rear groups.  This is part of the reason I wanted to use this lens.  The lens barrel was then mounted on the 4-Jaw chuck with as true as I could visually tell, and started turning.  I just wanted to remove the grooves on the lens so that it would have a smooth surface, and it would also provide a stop for the step-up ring that I would use to mount it to the focus helicoid.  This turned out really bad ugly.  For one thing, the tool bits were all dull, and I think the speed I was using was a bit too slow.  I am not sure what kind of metal the lens barrel was made of, but it was not aluminium or brass. In the end, I removed the large, smooth grooves on the lens, but left behind tiny and sharp grooves.  It looks nothing like the smooth finish I see on YouTube!

Angenieux 70mm f1.5 Projection Lens on the helicoid

Next I wanted to bore the hole larger on the 30-52mm step-up ring, just large enough to slip on the lens barrel.  This part was done relatively painlessly.  The aluminium of the step-up ring was much easier to work with.

So, in a way, it was a success, only because I was able to use the lens and I didn't have to go nuts trying to find a ring that fits the lens barrel and trying to glue it so that it's parallel to the mount.

What did I learn from the first lesson in using a metal lathe?  It's kind of fun, but what overwhelmed me was the sheer amount of metal shavings from such a small and simple project.  A Shopvac is a must.  To make the lathe run smoothly and efficiently, it needs to be optimally conditioned: true chucks, sharp bits, right kind of bits, right accessories and most of all, the skills to make it sing.  I will keep doing simple projects until I am comfortable to convert a real lens.

Daisies - Angenieux 70mm f1.5 Projection Lens & Sony A7

Cintagon II 48mm f2 from Argus V-100 Rangefinder

The Argus V-100 I got from the camera show was a nice surprise.  That beautiful 48mm f2 Cintagon II lens caught my eye immediately :)  I was afraid the price would be high, as the seller has some very expensive stuff, but it turned out to be very cheap, because it was in the junk bin.  Fast lenses were expensive and not often seen in the old, old days, so I was super excited.

This V-100 was made in Germany, probably by Iloca.  I read somewhere that Iloca was bought out by Argus.  This may explain why this American company had cameras made in Germany.  Most models of the V-100 came with a 52mm f2.8 Triplet lens, rather than this faster 48mm f2.  If you are looking for a V-100 with a specific lens, be sure to check what lens it has.

Blue Eye looks good, no?

The camera seemed to be working; shutter opened and closed, winder worked too.  The only issue it had, was the missing plastic button that ejects the knob/crank to rewind the film, and also to opens the film chamber as well.  I was hesitant to take it apart, fearing the reprisal from Camera God, but now that it was "broken", I guess it was OK to take the lens out to give it a second life :)

The lens module was easy to take apart, and the lens is more or less self-contained, which was a relief.  I will post some pictures in a later post on how it was taken apart and how I converted it to Sony E-Mount.  One surprise was that this lens shares the exact same helicoid/focus design as the Rodenstock Ysares 50mm f2.8 lens.  There is a certain mystery about who made some of the lenses for Argus.  I know Steinheil and Enna were two of the manufacturers that made lenses for Argus.  It's interesting that the Cintagon 48mm f2 has the same focusing mechanism as a Rodenstock lens.  Could there be some links between the two companies?

Argus Cintagon II 48mm f2 on Sony E-Mount, with Series VI hood

Another nice thing about the lens is that the front group of elements can be unscrewed, exposing the shutter blades.  I used a pair of long nose pliers to remove the blades, so that I don't have to worry about the shutter closing on me.  It also allows me to clean the lens easily.

But wait, there is more!  The lens uses Series VI filters and hoods, which is relatively easy to find, and I have few hoods in this size.  How's that for nice surprises?

My gut feeling was correct.  This is a nice lens. It's relatively sharp at f2, and even the edges are not bad wide open. From f8 on, the edges are reasonably sharp too.  Of course, even a coke bottle can be sharp at f8 at infinity, I am more interested in the rendering characteristics in closer distance. This Cintagon does not disappoint.

Wide open at minimum focus distance, the bokeh is a bit swirly but not distracting, not unlike the Rodenstock Heligon 50mm f2, which I rather like. I won't be surprised if they share similar optical designs.  Sadly, the Lens Collector's Vade Meccum (http://antiquecameras.net/lensvademecum.html) does not have any information on the Cintagon II 48mm f2 lens.  I rather like the rendering characteristic of this lens.  To be sure, it's not a very contrasty lens, but pictures hold a lot of details, and very malleable in post processing from RAW.

I only had one session shooting with this lens.  The rather long minimum focus distance sometimes leaves me wanting, and I may convert it again to be used with a focus helicoid, I found it to be an enjoyable lens to use nevertheless.  Who knew a few dollars could provide so much fun?  New Year Resolution be damned!

All pictures below were taken with Cintagon II 48mm f2 & Sony A7

The Mystery Lens

I have a few lenses, naked, without any barrels.  I don't remember what the reason was for their unfortunate treatment, possibly due to mechanical issues.  One of them really caught my eye with its very nice coating, so I put it on a focus helicoid and gave it a try.

Short conclusion: average lens for bokeh, but very sharp stopped down.

The lens has very clean optics, and judging from the relatively large rear element, it's pretty certain the focal length is 50mm, with an aperture between f1.7 to f2.0.

It's too bad the bokeh doesn't excite me.  I was hoping for a better lens.  Oh well, at least it drove me out to take pictures :)

Lighting Fixture - wide open

Bokeh #1

Bokeh #2

View between two buildings - possibly f5.6