I have gone Bonkers

Mawz has gone completely bananas over his Bessa R new rangefinder, and acquiring rangefinder lenses. His change of gear has negatively affected my camera upgrade plan, again. Meanwhile, I have gone bonkers buying yet another lens! I feel like a mouse picking up morsels after the man had his dinner. No, I feel like a gear whore who never get enough. No, cross that, I am a gear whore who never get enough! You see, I have been eyeing his Nikkor 35/1.4 for sometime, but being one of Mawz's favourite lenses, he would not let it go until the other lenses that make him lose his mind come around. In this case, the Nikon 50mm f1.4 LTM, and the Voigtlander Heliar 15mm f3.5.

His Nikkor 35/1.4 is finally in my hands, which feels heavy, but at the same time, my wallet feels light. Actually, make that down right empty.

The Nikkor 35/1.4 is indeed quite a nice lens. Sharp and has good details wide open, but contrast is very very low, giving you a kind of slight soft filter affect. If you shoot something that's black wide open, the captured image actually looks light blue. Completely usable, especially if you shoot black and white. At f2, this lens is bitingly sharp. In fact, it might be too sharp for portraiture use, as you will see pores and body hair sharp and clear.

So far, I have only shot a couple of dozen pictures with it, but it works well on the G1. Will try it on the 1D mark II and see how it goes.

My Love -- G1 & Nikkor 35mm f1.4 @ f1.4

Sigma Filtermatic Multi-Coated 24mm f2.8

Took the kids out to the beach in the evening yesterday. Brought the Sigma 24mm f2.8, Minolta MD 50mm f1.2 and the Vivitar 35mm f1.9 with me. Used all three of them, mostly with the Sigma 24mm until it was too dark.

As with most "ultra wide" angle lenses of the olden days, this one has built-in filters. Can't say I am a big fan of this design, because you have to use one of the filters whether you like it or not. At least the design of the filter selection is one of the best I have seen. You push down on the ring and then turn to select the filter. The Takumar 17mm f4 fisheye, on the other hand, is terrible. The indentation is too light and the filter gets moved too easily.

The built-in filters are Yellow, Orange and 1A. In the end, it was interesting to experience with the yellow and orange filters in combination with the G1's black & white modes. The black and white pictures came out better than I expected with the filter dialed in, especially the yellow filter. The orange filter made the scene too dark. Now I know how the yellow and orange filters interact in black and white. Even though I shot in RAW, I could not process them as colour any more since they are just in shades of yellow or orange.

In terms of optical quality, I can't say how it performs in the edges, because the G1 uses a very small percentage of the lens. It's pretty sharp when properly focused. The contrast is in the low side. Pathetic in the flare resistance department. Side lights causes everything to have a white out effect. A hood is almost a requirement for this lens, but too bad I didn't have one on yesterday. The colour is on the warm side, since it's has a permanent skylight filter built-in.

The lens itself is solidly built, like most older lenses. Although the lens says mutli-coated, the front elements do not look multi-coated, perhaps that's why the flare is so bad, but the rear elements are multi-coated.

My take? It's a nice normal lens for the g1, although it's kind of slow at f2.8. Optically ok, but bulky for a 24mm lens.

Click on the picture for a larger version

New Toy -- Minolta MD Rokkor-X 50mm f1.2

I was browsing the pawn shops on my way home yesterday, and saw this mint beauty locked up in the glass case, looking desperate and helpless. I could hear it scream "Free me! Free me!". I asked to have a look at it and once in my hands, I know it deserves to be freed. This one looks like new!

Ever since I sold my MC version (MC 58mm f1.2 that I wrote in April) of this lens, I had regrets. I have been on the look out for a replacement. According to most sources, the newer MD 50mm version is sharper than the MC 58mm version, but in my hasty test, I found the MC to be better, both in terms of bokeh and sharpness. But they were shot on two different cameras (1D Mark II for the 58/1.2). Of course I will need more time to get to know the new lens and use it for a while before I can conclude. One thing is for sure, the MC 58mm f1.2 is heavier and has an eight blade aperture and the new MD 50mm f1.2 has only six. This will affect the bokeh for sure, either good or bad.

In terms of using the lens, I think I prefer the newer MD 50mm f1.2. It's lighter, focuses very smooth and balances well.

Will update how it performs after some use.

Old Car -- G1 & Minolta MD 50mm f1.2 @ f1.2

G1 & Minolta MD 50mm f1.2 @ f1.2

Leap of Faith

This is one of my favourite cloud pictures. I jokingly told my wife that one day, I would like to publish a book of clounds. My wife took this to heart and found a very old book of clouds, written by a retired UK meteorologist that explained all types of clouds with pictures.

This particular picture looks like a person jumping from one cloud to another, hance I named it Leap of Faith. Picture was taken early morning at the Tommy Thompson Park with a Leica 50mm f2 Summicron and 1D Mark II.

I had a 19x13 inch print made from a Shinko sub-dye printer and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, the Shinko broke down after this picture.

Leap of Faith -- 1D Mark II & Leica 50mm f2 Summicron. Click for larger size.

Star Party at the Ontario Science Centre

The Ontario Science Centre sometimes host interesting events after hours. Some of these events are free to everyone and you don't need to be a member to participate. One such free event was the Summer Star Party – From Galileo to the Moon that was hosted on Friday July 24. The event had an excellent presentation on the landing of Apollo 11 by Space Historian Randy Attwood with video and voice recording of the actual landing. For people like me (and my kids), this was like an eye opener to the Apollo Missions. Other activities including the appearance of Galileo himself, as well as a workshop on telescopes. Too bad the weather did not co-operate and we could not see the International Space Station that was passing by, through the telescopes.

If you have kids, you should check out the Calendar at the Ontario Science Centre. Better yet, buy a family membership. It will pay for itself in only a few visits. The Gold Membership include iMax features as well as parking, so it's an even better deal.

Waiting for Galileo -- G1 & JML 25mm f0.95 @ f0.95. Click for larger size

Interesting lighting -- G1 & JML 25mm f0.95. Click for larger size

Canon EF 17-40mm f4 L

I don't think I have ever missed a lens more than the Canon EF 17-40mm f4 L. I considered the 24mm f1.4L a very good lens, but I don't miss it terribly after I sold it. But, this 17-40 L, it keeps coming back to haunt me. Not in my dreams, not in my sleep, but whenever I look back at the pictures I took with it, I wondered why I sold it.

The 17-40mm f4L, for many, many Canonites, is the first wide angle L lens. It's relatively inexpensive, at least compared to its bigger brother, the 16-35mm f2.8L, for less than half the price. True, you lose one full stop of light, but it's a good compromise, as f4 is completely usable. On 1.6x cropped bodies, the wide end is still a respectable 27mm, which is wide enough for most people.

Many people would say the edges is really bad on this lens, or that it's not very sharp. I wouldn't doubt copy variance between lenses, but the one I owned was extremely sharp, even at f4. I later also tried a used one at Downtown Camera, and it was excellent on my 1D Mark II, again af f4. I didn't use it on full frame, so I can't comment on the extreme edges. Then again, the 16-35mm f2.8L that I had was not even as good at the 17-40mm f4 on the edges, and was not that sharp af f4.

As for optical quality, it inherits the L lens DNAs. Contrasty, great colour, reasonably well built, very fast focusing, due to the use of ring UltraSonic Motor (USM). It can focus really close for some really nice special effects on close ups. The hood was somewhat useles and big, but does provide good protection in the case that it falls rim down.

I still want to buy another 17-40mm f4L, since the 16-35mm f2.5L Mark II is rediculously priced, but somewhat afraid that I would get a lemmon, especially on full frame. Perhaps, it's better to have the great memory of the great copy I had, than lots of headaches if I get a dud.

Toronto City Hall at Night -- 300D & 17-40mm f4L. This picture was published in the Ming Pao Chinese Daily.

Picutre Cars -- 300D & 17-40mm f4L

Fences of Osgood Hall -- 300D & 17-40mm f4L

Rust -- 300D & 17-40mm f4L

Toronto City Hall -- 300D & 17-40mm f4L

Data Storage and Backup Headaches

If you have been shooting digital for a few years, you will face the storage and backup problem sooner or later. If you shoot RAW, storage becomes more serious. If you shoot RAW + jpg like me, the situation is even worse.

I did a rough calculation last night, when I was copying files to my new Drobo, my G1 pictures took up about 175 GB of space, in the span of 4 months. At this rate, a terabyte hard drive will be good for a couple of year, if I don't do any edits.

In the past, I bought drives as needed without much regard to data safety. Even though I have been messing around on and off with SCSI RAID setup since the early 90s, and later IDE RAIDs, mostly for speed (striped), data safety didn't register in my head. At least I didn't take action on it, until few years ago. Two of my primary hard drives blew up due to a faulty power supply. More than 200GB of pictures, which were not backed up, were lost. Still have the 250GB dead drive lying around and I am hoping one day I can afford to recover the data off of it.

Since then, I took some action, like getting a workstation class of computers (Dual Xeon Dell) with good reliability, uninterpretable power supply (UPS) with power conditioning, and small steps in burning data on DVD/Bluray. Later on I tried the NetGear NAS (SC-101) and Western Digital World Edition, but both are disappointing.

Netgear NAS SC-101 -- One of the very first affordable NAS and Took IDE drives with data mirroring feature. It never worked for me. It was SLOW, unreliable network connections, has no local connection, and has no internal fan for cooling and consequently overheats easily. Average speed was about 3 MB/s. Barely usable as a backup solution, but for primary storage, forget about it.

Western Digital World Editing -- With 1 Tera Byte capacity (two 500GB) that also has mirroring feature. Unfortunately, this one suffers the same limitations as the Netgear -- Slow. It's a lot more reliable, has internal cooling fans and relatively quiet. Average speed is about 6 MB/s. With a gigabit network, this is just unbelievably slow. So, again, it's used only as a backup solution.

Enter the Drobo storage robot. This thing is a godsend. First, it does RAID 5 configuration to provide data redundancy without needing same size drives, and second, you can add larger drives to increase storage without reconfiguring the RAID setup. Just plug in the drive, and the Drobo does the rest.

I have the second generation of the Drobo which has both a firewire 800 and USB 2.0 connection. If you want to turn this into a Network Attached Storage (NAS), you can buy a DroboShare. I am currently connecting it to my computer through the USB port. It is more than fast enough for me, averaging about 20MB/s, about twice that speed with Firewire 800.

I started with two Western Digital 1 Terabyte Drives. This gives me roughly 1 Terabyte of storage, since Drobo uses the space equivalent to the space of the largest drive you have in Drobo to mirror the data. But, if I add another 1 Terabyte drive, I will have 2 TB of space, the space needed to mirror the data does not increase.

For those of you who have a conventional RAID setup will know, you need exact same size drives to mirror the data in a RAID. This is not a real problem for large companies, which typically have a few spare drives on hand at any time, in case one or more drives die. But for a home user, having a couple of drive lying around not used is expensive and unproductive. So, most home users do not have spare drives for their RAID setup. This is OK until a few years later, when one of your drives die, and you need replacement. Now comes the headache. Where to find a 3 year old drive that's the same as the one you are using. You can not buy a new one on the market, because technology advances so fast. Hard drive models usually have 1 to 1.5 years of shelf life. What to do?

The Drobo, on the other hand, can mirror data without the same size drives. If one of your drives die in a few years, just yank out the dead one, and pop in a larger capacity drive. Voila! Your data will be rebuilt automatically, and you can even do this while Drobo is still actively serving data. That's the beauty of Drobo, and is what sold me.

There is only one drawback. High initial cost. The Drobo Firewire 800/USB 2.0 edition costs about $500CAD, without drives, when not on sale. A couple of 1 TB drives costs another $200. This adds up to a lot of money for a home user, especially when you factor in the taxes. So, you really have to consider the balance between costs and data protection as well as future expandability.

Personally, I look at it this way -- Buying the Drobo is like buying a lens. Hard drives are like camera bodies. The initial cost is high, but the storage cost is incremental. You add more space as needed, for a maximum of 16 TB. I think that will last quite a few years, until holographic storage becomes a reality.

A Sample Picture from Minolta MC Rokkor 35mm f1.8

Minolta MC Rokkor 35mm f1.8. A lens that really deserves more attention.

Abandoned Coffee Cup -- G1 & MC Rokkor 35mm f1.8.

WR-X in Side Mirror

I often wonder why I don't use this lens more. Extremely sharp from macro to infinity.

Click on picture to see larger version. 

WR-X -- G1 & Carl Zeiss S-Planar 60mm f2.8 Makro

PK-Mount AM Topcor 55mm 1.7

Just got the PK to 4/3 adapter couple of days ago, at an unfortunate time. Two weeks ago, I still had the PK-A 28mm f2.8, K 50mm f1.4, and a couple of other Pentax lenses. They were all sold at my yard sale. In any case, I still have a few K mount lenses and I happen to have the AM Topcor 55mm f1.7 lens at hand, so I have been using it for the last two days.

After two days of use, I don't see anything exciting with this lens. It's one of those Cimko OEM lenses that has many names on, like Porst, Revue, Chinon, and others. Pretty well built with smooth focusing, but nowhere near what the Takumars feel like. Acceptably sharp when stopped down, but a bit soft wide open. The bokeh actually good. I know two days of use doesn't do justice to write something about a lens, but I have used its cousin, the Revue 55mm f1.7 for some time. They are basically the same lens.

Below are a few pictures taken with it. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

Flower -- Panasonic G1 with K-mount Topcor 55mm f1.7

Rail Road -- G1 with Topcor 55mm f1.7

After Sunset -- G1 with Topcor 55mm f1.7

Waiting for light to change at Lakeshore & Logan -- G1 & Topcor 55mm f1.7