Picked up this little lens on the fleabay last week. It's been too cold to put it through its paces but the few shots I've taken with it are sharp and pleasing.
It's a Magnum CCT 28- 50mm 1:3.5-4.5. Pretty narrow aperture so I won't expect crazy bokeh out of this thing but well see what I get, as soon as it warms up again.
If you have any info on this brand of lenses I would appreciate an email or comment.
So I'm really digging on the iPoo touch (my nickname for it) but it's got some serious limitations. First off why does the iPhoone have a better camera? Can't they fit that sensor into the iPoo? And why not fit it in there? Grumble. It is once thing that makes me want to make my next phone an iPhoone, but I'll probably go android instead.
It has some serious limitations in lower light, things get very grainy, which is good and bad. But mostly bad.
Video is also lacking in lower light.
It is what it is and it does a good enough job if one takes it's limitations into consideration.
I picked up the griffin insane crazy military grade case for it. It's impressive and uh, if you drop the iPoo on hardwood it bounces.
I'm off to have a cuppa and then head to work.
We took a brief walk tonight. It drizzled rain off and on the whole walk so I was reluctant to take the camera out, until I saw the dirty yellow ball. When I walked closer to it and gave it a kick I saw that it had a smiley face on it, how ironic.
I took a bunch of shots of the ball, this time with my kit 14-42mm lens. I finally got my replacement cords in the mail from eBay so I was able to update the firmware on both my camera AND my lens, supposedly it makes a difference. Granted I’m new to the photo game and I’ve used the lens and camera for all of 15 minutes but, I’m not seeing much of a difference.
I think I like the color version better than the black and white. It shows the grit and grime on the ball better than the black and white.
Today was my first real day of walking the Canon 50mm on the Olympus Pen PL2. As I wrote in my last entry it won’t move to another f stop than being wide open at f1.8. At that stop there were some limitations- in the bright afternoon light I had to use the fastest shutter speed available, 1/4000th.
My first thought was, “&^&^*%^&%*&^(*& I wish the damn thing was able to use other f stops and not just be wide open.” Being able to use a variety of stops would make a world of difference in a variety of photos. The low f stop gives the lens a very narrow/flat depth of field. You can see it in this photo of nasturtiums. The center of each flower is perfectly in focus but the petal blur out as does everything around them. The edge of the petal is perhaps a half centimeter closer to me than the center of the flower. Kind of amazing.
The next few pictures shows how hard it is to focus this thing. The first image I simply looked at the LCD. The focus is soft, close but not quite there.
In the next image you can see that it’s closer. I used the magnification on the LCD to magnify the image and really focus. It’s much sharper.
The infinity focus? Not so much, it loses it’s focus about 100ft away.
Verdict? This is pretty bad ass. The color is intense, especially when I’m snapping up close. It’s different than the kit lens at the same settings. I’m not sure why but I really really like it. At shorter distances it does great but definitely drops off the longer the distance.
I’ve also decided that I’m going to *gulp* take it apart to try and fix it... At this point i”m sure it’s broken and I can’t do any other harm to it, other than, well, fixing it. If I can’t fix it I’m definitely ordering a replacement. I’ve seen them go on eBay for $10 plus $5 shipping.
I read this article a few weeks back about vintage lenses on M43 cameras, and I liked the idea. I like vintage things, and the idea of snagging some lenses on the cheap also appealed to my cheap side. I took a look at eBay and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go with Canon or Nikon lenses.
I left the important decision to the god of eBay. I placed two low bids on 2 different assortments of lenses. One auction won out and left me purchasing Canon FD mounted lenses. These can be found for pretty low cash if you are patient. I snagged a set of 3 lenses for $21.75 I’m not sure if I got hosed on teh deal or not but the only one that works right now is the large Quantaray 75- 200mm It’s big and heavy. I’ll go out on a limb here and say it looks totally ridiculous on my Olympus PL2. I can only shoot the Canon 50mm and the JC Penney 135mm at wide open. I’m not sure how to fix that but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.
Anyway, I took this with the Canon 50mm at f1.8. I’m pretty happy with how the image looks, even if it is just my mint plant. I did have to lighten the image with the fill light and then darken the dark areas a tad.
This image is with the same lens, again at f1.8 but with a much faster shutter speed, the fastest my camera will allow 1/4000. This is straight out of the camera.
All in all I find this pretty fascinating and may find myself buying more vintage lenses in the lower focal length- think 28mm
A while back I bought these on fleabay. It seemed a wise investment at the time. I wanted to see if I’d like more zoom, macro and wide angle. I also wanted to experiment with some filters. I’d heard all sorts of marvelous stuff about filters; how they can bump up color, get rid of glare and many other things I was sure pure mythology. Turns out some of it was true.
The first thing I learned was that my $40 set of macro and telephoto screw on adapters are, to put it gently, kinda crappy. For $40 I expected and knew they would not be top quality or fantastic but I guess I did have higher hopes. I knew it would be a throw of the dice for a decent versus crappy lens, and I think I ended up somewhere in the middle.
I look at these as an interesting effect. They have a sharp vignette so even if I’m getting a wider angle that I have to zoom out to eliminate. In some cases if say I’m getting really close with my macro I might want to just stick the lens in there and trim off the vignette. The vignette could be a useful tool in other instances.
I’ve given myself the challenge to walk around with this damn thing on my camera and force myself to use it and see if I can get something decent out of it. I look at it as slapping a toy lens on the camera. (Next camera purchase? A digital Holga kit, or a 17mm lens, we’ll see.)
Because this add on really degrades the quality of the image it needs light and lots of it. In low light the aberrations of the lens can be seen pretty easily. In some of the pictures I thought I had a finger print on the left side of the lens, after checking I see that I did not. My photo walk tonight took place at dusk, so at the start of my walk I had tons of great light only for it to drop off as I finished the walk.
Here in the first image you can see the vignette. It’s not even and it’s very dark. Totally nice bike with it’s design ripped right off of the 90’s era Nishiki’s, which I lust after. Also who’s the moron who locks a new bike to a pole with a crappy lock like that? Jesus, sure your on Cabot St, but you are also on the corner of Railroad St! Damn, the ghetto is just 2 blocks away!
Same bike, but in this image you can see the distortion from the lens in the top left. I did crop this one. For the record this is the only soprt of "girl's" type of frame I would ever ride, because it's awesome.
After this point in my walk the performance of the camera with the adapter lens really drops off. It was getting darker and I was on the west side of the street and in shadow. These pictures are boring but you get the drift.
I end with the better shot of the evening:
All images shot on my Olympus Pen PL2 with a .45x macro/super wide angle adapter from China attached. I used avariety of ISO settings and set the area of focus manually, but relied in these instances, on autofocus.
