More Samples from Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5

I took more pictures with this Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5 than I thought I would.  Anyways, I don't know how many people actually used this lens to take pictures, but in case you are reading this, and you have one in a drawer somewhere, I hope these will give a better idea how it renders pictures.  Who knows, you may even like the way it captures images and starting to use yours.

This lens has sort of a L39 thread which makes it easy to mount on the focusing helicoid.

My apologies for all the tulip pictures.

p.s. Just found the Kodak Color Printing Ektar 70mm f4.5, and it seems permanently mounted on the Yashica 50mm lens barrel; a failed earlier attempt to get it focus to infinity.  Need to get it out and remount in on the helicoid and see how it compares to the 93mm.

Pretty yellow flowers -- NEX-5N & Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5.  Click for larger.

White Tulip -- NEX-5N & Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5

Pink Tulip -- NEX-5N & Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5

ISCO-Gottingen Kiptar 6.2 Inch f2.7 Projection Lens Samples

Seeing Pink -- NEX-5N & ISCO-Gottingen Kiptar 6.2 Inch f2.7 Projection Lens.

Finally got a chance to make this lens mount on the Vivitar focusing helicoid.  It's fortunate that the flange focal distance is relatively long that it can be used with my favourite helicoid.  Too bad this is not the case with the Zeiss Ikon Ernostar 110mm f1.9 projection lens, which has a VERY short flange and I could only make it to work on the 12-17mm focusing helicoid.

In any case, I took out the Kiptar to the back of the house to photograph the crab-apple trees, which is flowering like mad right now.  The lens is not very sharp nor very fast at f2.7, but it's pretty light weight compared to the Zeiss Ikon Ernostar.  The quality is just ok, and the bokeh is accceptable, but for the price ($5), it's fantastic.  I want to mention that for a 157mm lens, without the EVF, it would have been very difficult to obtain critical focus, or keep it steady.  Just wish the price would come down by perhaps 50%, and I am sure more people will buy and enjoy it.

Abandoned Drink -- NEX-5N & ISCO-Gottingen Kiptar 6.2 Inch f2.7.

Bokeh -- NEX-5N & ISCO-Gottingen Kiptar 6.2 Inch f2.7.

Jupiter-9 85mm f2 LTM Sample

Rusty Can -- NEX-5N & Jupiter-9 85mm f2 LTM. Click for larger.

Have been playing with the Russian Jupiter-9 85mm f2 for a few days.  Didn't take too many pictures, but I already know I will like this lens very much.  I once had the M42 version of this lens, but it didn't seem as big or heavy or as good as the LTM version.  Many people complain about the weight and size of this lens; they really should try shooting with a Canon 1D series and the 85mm f1.2L.  Now that's big and heavy.  Size and weight is all relative.  To me, it's not a big deal.  In fact, I like the hefty weight.  It feels nice in my hand.

Getting the Most Out of Your Old Lenses - Part I

If you read my blog, you are most likely an old lens lover, as I am.  As much as we love our beautiful old lenses, we often find that they don't perform as well as we have hoped.  Typically, pictures look foggy, have very low contrast, and flares very easily.  This is especially true for very old lenses with single coating, or no coating at all.

In Part I, we are going to talk about using proper hood for the lens.  Hoods are one of the best and cheapest way to extract the best optical potential from a lens.  You may be very surprised what a difference a hood can make to your pictures.

I have had the Voigtlander Skopar 8.3cm f4.5 lens for a number of years.  It was first used on the Canon 5D but the results were not good at all. There was always a white area in the center of the picture, even when shot indoors.  I first thought it was the internal reflection from the lens barrel, though it might be a factor, but even after spaying the barrel with black paint, it didn't make too much of a different.  I then added a hood to it, and it improved things markedly, but the foggy center remains in most pictures, until one day I put on a very long hood.  Problem mostly resolved, although in some situations, the white spot is still visible, but not very frequently.

The picture below shows the effects of using no hood, short hood, and a long hood:

Left: No Hood, Middle: Short Hood, Right: Long Hood.  Dramatic, eh? Click for larger.

As you can see, the right hood made a huge difference.  But where to find the proper hood?  Most old lenses we get do not come with hood, or they were never designed to accept one.  Fortunately, they are easy to make using black craft paper and glue/tape.  Sure they don't look very nice, or even ugly, but that never deters me :)  I have thick skin!  I am luckier than most since I have so many spare parts from disassembling old lenses and other devices, and  because I am a packed rat.  I keep a lot of junks around. In the example of the hood(s) for the Voigtlander Skopar, I found some black tubes that fit almost perfectly.  The tubes were just taped to the front of the lens with electrical tape.

How do you determine the length of the hood?  At first I thought the one I put on the Voigtlander was long enough, and any longer would vignette, but I was wrong.  You would be surprised to find that hood can be very long before they would vignette.  The best way to find out is to make one with paper and experiment until it provides full protection from stray light, but would not vignette.  I can be wrong here, but I think the length of the hood could be as long as the focal length of the lens.

So, put your hood on your lens, and make beautiful pictures with quality the designers intended!

Kodak Color Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5 Sample

Young Leaves -- NEX-5N & Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5. Shot with aperture disc on.

I have a few of these Kodak printing lenses that were used in the copiers or printing machines.  They don't have  focus control and most of them have a fixed aperture disc inside the lens.  This particular one says Kodak Color Printing Ektar Lens 93mm f4.5, but has a disc aperture with a small round hole, which I estimate would make the lens around f16, because the ISO goes up to 640 in very bright light at 1/125s.  The picture above was taken with the aperture on, but the aperture disc is removable.  Below shows a picture with the aperture disc removed:

Red tree -- NEX-5N & Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5 without aperture disc.

As with most lenses of this kind, it isn't usable without a hood.  There is coating on the lens, but not something comparable to the multi-coatings on modern lenses.  The lens is sharp with the aperture on, but then again, a Coke bottle at f8 is probably very sharp too.  Some test pictures wide open shows that sharpness is pretty good too, but suffers from fringing in strong lights, especially in the edges, and the contrast isn't very high at f4.5.  Not much use, I guess, but satisfies my curiosity.

Shown with the disc aperture inside the lens.  Disc can be removed. Click for larger size.

Sony FDA-EV1S EVF for NEX-5N - Some Observations

For me, the major flaw of the Sony NEX-5N was the lack of a built-in viewfinder, optical or electronic.  Without a viewfinder, it's difficult to see anything under bright lights.  This is especially bad for manual focus lens users.  If you can't see clearly, you can focus accurately.

Fortunately, Sony made an optional EVF for the NEX-5N, the FDA-EV1S external viewfinder. Unfortunately, it's not cheap; it costs slightly more than half of the NEX-5N with a kit lens.  I bought mine used from Adam, but it was defective.  Took it to Sony's repair center and I was given a brand new one.  Haven been using it for about two weeks. Below is my impression of using it.

Bleeding Hearts -- NEX-5N & Kodak Printing Ektar 93mm f4.5. Click for larger.

Without doubt, the EVF helps a great deal in a few areas.  It addresses the biggest issue of unreadable LCD screen in the sun.  Another advantage is when using long lenses.  The EVF helps to stabilize the lens and thus reduces handshake.  These are the major concerns that I have, and the EVF does its job well.

It's not perfect, of course, and this is not even taking into the account of the high price.  First of all, there is no locking mechanism on the adjustable viewer.  Very frequently, I find my glasses pushes the eye piece and moved it upwards, when I really want to see horizontally.  This annoys me a great deal.  Secondly, I find the image inside the viewfinder to be of very low contrast, which makes it very difficult to focus on something that's not very contrasty. In this aspect, I find the EVF on the G1 much better for manual focusing.  Lastly, light leaks too easily into the viewfinder through the eye piece.  Again, the G1 has none of this problem, because the eye-piece is very large and soft that forms to the eyeglass.  The eye piece on the Sony EVF is very hard and small, compared to that of the G1's eye piece.  The blocked up shadow area problem that many people have, is not too much of an issue with me.  I am actually OK with it, but the three problems listed above just bothers me.  I guess if you don't wear eye glasses, you have fewer problems.

Despite the issues I have with the EVF, I find it indispensable for shooting in day light, or with longer lenses.

How I Process my Pictures

A few readers asked how I post process my pictures, and I was hesitant to answer.  Not because I want to keep it to myself, but because it varies, depending on the kind of picture.  I process people pictures slightly differently than say, flower pictures or landscape pictures.  You may be disappointed how simple it is, though.

I don't shoot commercial products, so absolute colour accuracy is not important to me.  I strive to make the pictures with the looks that I like.  This may include adding vignetting, boosting colour saturation and/or contrast.  We will look at one example for this post, but if there is interest, I will expand on the topic to cover people pictures, which, unfortunately, is not my strong topic.

I like pictures with more saturated colours, except portraits, which i try to make the colour as real looking as possible, except those I want to leave alone to preserve the atmosphere/ambiance.  I know saturated colours are not accurate, but I like it.  Same reason so many people who love Velvia slide film.

All my pictures are shot in RAW.  Not exceptions.  If I need a quick jpeg, I would shoot RAW+JPEG.

Before and after.  Note the crop marks

  

The screen above shows the picture before and after adjustment. You can see that the original looks pretty dull with the defaults.  I accidentally shot this series of pictures in 16:9 aspect ratio.  It's not a format I am comfortable with.  So I cropped to a more comfy 3:2 ratio.  What adjustment did I do?  Below shows all the adjustments I did in Lightroom. I only touched two area other than cropping: Basic and Tone Curve. 

That's it.  This is pretty much all the adjustments I normally do.  Depending on the picture, I may increase or decrease the above settings to fit my taste.  One other area I may touch is the vignetting section, but I don't do that often.  Below is the final picture, which I used in this blog post (picture is at the bottom): 

Finished picture.  Pretty, eh?

Leitz Hektor 120mm f2.5 Projection Lens Samples

Daisies in Black & White -- NEX-5N & Leitz Hektor 120mm f2.5 Projection Lens. Click for larger.

I now have a helicoid with aperture control, which adds  a lot of flexibility.  Sometimes a little bit of depth of field can make the picture look quite different from wide open.  Often, I like pictures taken wide open.  This seems to bring out the optical qualities of the lens in use.  This is the case with the Hektor 120mm f2.5.  When stopped down, the bokeh looks a bit strange.  Maybe it's due to the aperture blades of the helicoid.  Both the Hektor 120mm f2.5 and Colorplan 90mm f2.5 share similar optical qualities.

Young Iris - NEX-5N & Leitz Hektor 120mm f2.5 Projection Lens.

Helicoid with Aperture Setting

Blossoms -- Schneider-Kreuznach Procolar 60mm Projection Lens

I have a Pentax-M 50mm f2 lens which has defective optics.  I mean it was probably repaired and got the glasses in the wrong order and it produced some weird looking images.  So, it's as good as useless.  I decided to make it into a helicoid by removing the glass elements from the lens.

It was quite easy to remove the elements, but the mount turned out to be much harder.  For some reason, the screws are really tight and I couldn't unscrew any of them without stripping the head.  My original plan was to replaced the Pentax K mount with a Sony E-Mount by using a 52mm reversing ring (E-Mount).  For the time being, it will have to be a K-Mount until I can get those screws off.

There are at least two projection lenses that can benefit from this helicoid: the Schneider-Kreuznach Procolar 60mm and the Leitz Hektor 120mm f2.5.  Tried them both and the results are fantastic, especially the Hektor; it's much sharper stopped down a bit.  Will post some pictures of the helicoid once I get the Sony E-Mount on it.

Tessar Battle: Industar 50mm f3.5 vs Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 5cm f3.5

These two lenses are very small, but the Industar 50mm f3.5 is even smaller than the CZJ 5cm f3.5.  It's tiny!  Both lenses are based on the same optical design and have same maximum aperture of f3.5 and both have circular aperture.  The Russian lens is in M42 mount while the German lens is Exakta.  I used both only a couple of times so I really don't have much experience with them yet, but I like the pictures from them.

I believe these lenses were first designed as rangefinder lenses and later added other mounts, but that doesn't matter.  Let's look at how they perform against each other.  Please note that this is a very UNSCIENTIFIC test.  No tripod, no cable release.  All pictures were shot handheld with the optional viewfinder on the NEX-5N.  So, take everything with a pinch of salt.

Industar 50mm f3.5 on the left, CZJ Tessar 5cm f3.5 on the right.

Getting Close Wide Open

The Industar 50mm f3.5 has a minimum focus distance of 0.65m, while the CZJ 5cm f3.5 has 0.7m.  So close we can ignore the difference.  Not a lens for close-ups for sure.

The pictures below are processed identically, and shown at 100% crop. You can see the colour is slightly warmer and more intense on the Industar.  I think it's a tiny bit sharper too.

Bokeh - Who has the the prettier picture?

Before the test, I assume the bokeh would be similar to both lenses, since they share the same design and have circular apertures.  I think they are pretty close, but you be the judge.

CZJ 5cm f3.5 @ f3.5

Industar 50mm f3.5 @ f3.5

Sharpness - Who Wins?

Most people's main criteria when looking for a lens, but there is more to a lens than just sharpness.  In any case, the Industar seems like the sharper one at the same aperture, just by a hair, but noticeable.

Carl Zeiss Jena 5cm f3.5 @ f8. Click for 100% crop.

Industar 50mm f3.5 @ f8. Click for 100% crop.

No doubt the Carl Zeiss Jena is better build and feels nicer in the hand and is focuses smoother.  But, both lenses are so close image quality.