It’s been said numerous times that the best camera is the one you have with you. The one electronic item that I carry more than any camera is my cell phone, so it stands to reason that I should have a phone that I can use as a camera “two birds one stone”. While not the latest phone, I replaced mine recently with a Nokia N95 which has a 5Mp sensor and a f2.8 lens. When compared to a dedicated camera the focus is slow and the controls are limited but working around these limitations is part of the appeal.
Because the sensor is so small separating subject and background with shallow depth of field is a challenge and you really need to select material that lays on different planes or has good contrast. The photo’s I took were either taken with the phone set to capture black and white or with an eye to converting them to B&W later. I will do some more with colour in a later post.
I only wish every lens I have was weather proof. The SMC D FA 100mm Macro WR is though and it is an amazing lens with great build that suites the K-7 very well. Manual focus is very smooth with this lens making it ideal for shooting video. As a prime lens and a macro you get an optically brilliant performer and with the curved aperture blades the out of focus areas are rendered in a beautiful creamy softness even at apertures that on other lenses would give an harsher geometric bokeh. So what if anything are the drawbacks to this lens? One fact of life for a macro like this is that in auto focus it can take longer to focus from it’s minimum to infinity and if you miss it can end up doing a bit of hunting. This prevents it from being an ideal all around lens at this focal length but if you take this limitation into consideration the results can be stunning.
As an aside I continue to be amazed at the accuracy of the Auto White balance of the K-7. it just gets it right and there is little or no adjustment required. This is great for video where RAW is obviously not an option.
This still image at the beginning was taken with a mid 1950’s Braun Paxette II which I hope to post about separately after I get another roll of film through it.
As far as I’m aware there were very few wide angle capable point and shoot cameras ever made. Ricoh made several including the R1s that I own, but most point and shoots started around 35mm at the wide end. And then there is the Pentax Espio 24Ew. The EW stands for ‘extra wide’, it’s lens goes from 24mm to 105mm. This camera was released in 2003 right in the middle of the digital camera explosion. I have to admit I only paid about 1% of it’s original cost making the film inside it more expensive than it is. When you first start this camera up the lens is at a position somewhere greater than it’s widest so in order to get it where I want it I have to hit the zoom out button. The lens does some amazing contortions to fit within the cameras 1 1/2 inch depth which then expands to a ridiculous 4 1/2 inches at 105mm. So how was it? It does an admiral job, There is definitely softness at the edges at 24mm, which is really the only focal length of this camera I’m interested in and also vignetting depending on the aperture which it selects and you have no way of knowing what it is. These limitations aside and considering the difficulty and finding anything this wide in a film point and shoot it does a pretty good job.
“This stuff won’t keep for ever you know!” that’s the little voice that prompted me to pull a pack of Polaroid Spectra out of the fridge. I wasn’t even sure if it had survived the refrigeration as it is never supposed to freeze, yet the back of the fridge seems to produce some sub arctic temperatures at times. Well it appears to have survived OK and I received the pleasurable experience of watching my pictures develop, take that digital. I would like to take some portraits too as I use up the last of this film.
One of the features of the Pentax K-7 is that you are able to move the sensor by small amounts along the focal plane. The effect of this is to adjust the position of the image formed by the lens on the sensor. This differs slightly from moving the camera and therefore the lens and sensor. Figure 1 shows a lens and sensor positioned so that light from point (A) goes through the center of the lens and reaches the sensor at it’s center (A1). In this scenario point (B) is obscured by point (A) and none of it’s reflected light reaches the lens. Now if we were to move only the sensor using the composition adjustment feature of the K-7 as in Figure 2 The image formed by the lens is relocated on the sensor but because the lens has not moved the relationship of the elements in the scene remain unchanged and point (B) remains obscured. Now if we were to reposition the entire camera as in figure 3 the new position of the lens allows some reflected light from point (B) to reach the sensor. So even though (A1) reaches the senor at the same point in figure 2&3 the image formed differs.
A simple way of demonstrating this effect is to close one eye and hold a piece of paper edge on in front of the other eye. What you will see is a very thin slice of paper, now swap which eye is open and closed while not moving the paper. Now you will see a partial side view of the paper, just as if you repositioned a camera. Of course the distance between your eyes should be greater than the amount the sensor is able to shift so the effect is exaggerated.
Here is the effect demonstrated in practice.
This is the neutral position for the scene
Sensor shifted left
Sensor Shifted Right
Notice how even though the position of the element within the frame changes the relationship does not. The ball appears to just visually touch the right hand edge of the blocks in all three.
Camera shifted right
Notice how in this instance the right side of the block is now revealed.
So the composition adjust of the Pentax K-7 allows you to modify the framing of a scene while preserving the relationship of the elements of the scene. It also allows rotation of the sensor to further aid in composition. This feature is found under “Rec. Menu 2”
In the spirit of my relentless pursuit of testing irrelevant cameras. Here is the Canon WP-1 a water proof camera with it’s 32mm f3.5 lens. The lens has a lot of barrel distortion and doesn’t provide much contrast. What contrast you do see is the enhancement I have provided during scanning. While it has a dedicated macro mode the flash is forced on limiting it’s usefulness. So while it has a useful and somewhat unique focal length and a large viewfinder it is not a very good performer, and besides it’s gaudy.
Where do you see rectangles, everywhere? If you can imagine the world in front of you as a flat two dimensional plane it can be an interesting exercise to look for ways to divide it. It can be helpful to look through the viewfinder to generate that flat view and frame a scene but with practice you can spot images without the camera. So why would you want to do this? Like any exercise in seeing it helps to broaden your visual acuity.
I find I really like the 35mm focal length that the Olympus XA2 has as well as many other small cameras from the late 70’s early 1980’s. It’s noticeably wide yet gives a convincingly natural field of view. With the Xa2’s three zones of focus you might think that it would be difficult to achieve sharp results but this isn’t the case and it also frees you to work on composition rather than focus. These images where processed in Lightroom.
It’s nice when things turn out like you planned even when your pushing the boundaries of your experience. I needed to take public transit to get downtown Vancouver so I ended up on what is called the “Skytrain” which was originally built for Expo 86. I brought along my Olympus XA2 because it fits in a pocket and I like the images it produces. During the commute I considered taking a few exposures inside the train but didn’t really see anything that was all that compelling. However as I was standing up the entire time I was near the ceiling and observed that the people where smeared into a diffuse reflection above. So I turned the camera upside down and pressed it against the ceiling. This did two things, it eliminated any camera shake and recorded the reflections. Really only one person paid any attention to me and even that was for only a brief moment.
Let me explain, from around 1957 to 1963 there was a Japanese camera company that manufactured under the name Beauty. There really is very little information available so I’m relying on Camarapedia for much of it. http://www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Beauty_Lightomatic. This particular camera the Lightomatic, “wasn’t everything in the fifties ‘omatic?”, has a fast f1.9 45mm lens. The selenium cell is attached to a meter visible on the top and is coupled to the shutter and aperture. A unique feature of the film advance lever is that it needs to be left partially out otherwise the shutter is locked. The viewfinder has parallax correction and shows a generous amount of area outside the picture frame. It’s an attractive camera that I will need to test further to determine it’s strengths and weaknesses.
