Contina Accompanies the K-7

A few days ago I shared some graffiti shots from my K-7. I had one of my Zeiss Ikon Contina Matic IIa viewfinders with me, too, and grabbed some shots with it. This was a camera I had taken out the week before but failed to use the entire roll. First, some shots from the previous week at Yerba Buena Gardens.




A backhoe and its shadow. The latter looking like an abstract horse to me.


Someone needs to gentrify this thing.


I could never live or work in the building with this detail on the front door. IT looks like a very abstract face and it creeps me the heck out.


A repeat of an image also captured on the K-7. Here we see why SLRs are better than viewfinders. The SLR did not partially crop the subject due to parallax.

Macros for Tuesday

For years my Sigma 50mm macro lens was my favorite. It's still top five, for sure, but as my work has changed my lens taste changed. Now, I more favor wide-angle lenses And I've taken so many macros in my life, now, that I struggle to find new, creative ways to use this incredibly nice lens.


1/500th, f2.8. Wide open, some edge details can be a bit soft on this lens, but it still performs with great precision.


1/125th, f5.6. A few stops down and it's noticeably sharper. The lens stays this sharp or better for the rest of the aperture settings.


1/125th, f4. A fountain bubbbler in Yerba Buena Gardens.


1/60th, f4.


1/60th, f6.3. Edited to increase contrast.

The Canon Can, but Can it Can-can?

This Saturday Special Edition features a new digital SLR -- a Canon T1I (EOS 500D). The lens is the kit 18-55mm job. Readers will know I have mixed feelings about Canons. My AE-1 is a brilliant camera. The FD lens is marvelous. My RT and I have a troubled relationship. This T1I only muddied the waters further.

I had this camera with me when I took the AE-1 inside the now-demolished building. Likewise, I had it for Yerba Buena Gardens. Here are some shots from the trip.


Digital monochrome conversion. Window looking out the rear on the second floor. The wall just off-frame to the right had the hole I shot through and shared the result of earlier this week.


A 'found still-life.'

NEXT! Let's show off some Photoshop work!


Stopped down, this lens is great. Wide open, it's AWFUL. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that wide-open it is one of the three or four worst-performing lenses I've ever used. Also, this camera's high-ISO performance is meaningfully worse than My K-7's equivalent performance. Honestly, using this camera doesn ot make me understand all the fuss about Canon. Sure I love my little Elph, but I can't fathom this camera being a viable, professional-grade camera.


Same image without the extraneous building cloned out.

So what do I mean when I rail against this camera? In honesty, the good results are VERY good. However, I downloaded about 600 files onto my computer after this photo walk and of that 28 images of reasonable quality emerged. Granted, some of the shots were multi-image stitches, but with those taken into consideration, I still took more than 150 single-frame shots and had less than 30 return results that I felt reflected what I would expect of myself to share on this blog.


Edited from the raw to enhance details in the ruffled petals. I'd never edited from raw before, but I can understand why photographers prefer it. However, to my taste, I prefer editing from jpgs as the jpg performs more like film.


I dig how the glass pinched the reflection.


A cherry blossom, late, after all the rest on the tree had fallen.


I have no idea what kind of flower that is.


Not all Heaven is in a rage. I, however, am furious about this poor wide-open performance. Look at how blurry the robin's face is! This lens performs terribly on this camera. Now, how will it perform on film? I'm not sure yet but I will endeavor to find out in a couple of weeks with my RT. I suspect it will perform better because film has a greater circle of confusion (CoC) tolerance than does a digital sensor, especially with how tiny the pixels on an 18.1-megapixel APS-C sensor are. Even Zeiss lenses, which have a CoC tolerance of 1/1,750th the image size (opposed to other high-end lenses which are 1/1,500th) can't provide pixel-sharp images on DSLR sensors much above eight or twelve megapixels. Nayway, that's all neither here nor there for this post. We'll leave it at this: I expected greater performance from this camera than it delivered and I feel with full confidence than the K-7 is a markedly superior performer to this one. The K-7 also feels more solidly built.


A cow bird, maybe? I'm not sure.

And to answer my own question, the Canon can, but it cannot can-can.

AE-1 and a Now-demolished Building

I took my AE-1 into a building that was torn down last week. In fact, as I was making my way around the building, the preliminary demolition crews were in there, thankfully just assuming I was supposed to be. So I managed a few photos from inside the building and outside, too, before walking over to Yerba Buena Gardens.

This combination -- with Kodak Plus-X 125 -- is a fabulous combination and this roll returned a great number of good photos. In fact, today's post has TEN photos. I think that ties the most photos for one day with my Nikon F3, the film camera I think of as returning the best and most consistent shot quality.


Firemen up a ladder, photographing the building I had just been inside of. The old warehouse-turned-sweat-shop-turned-pigeon-and-hobo-coop was pulled down last week to make way for a new fire station.


I was unsure how this shot would turn out. I liked the VERY polished fire truck bell. The result is not unpleasing. Kodak's Plus-X is one of the best films ever made. Top five, certainly, along with engineering masterpieces such as Kodachrome and Velvia. Results like this illustrate why -- rich tonal range and an almost tactile quality.


Inside the building, a ladder leading to the roof. I have all the exposure information for these written down, but have lost my notebook.


A different shot of the ladder. The red filter has darkened the sky and made the near-invisible clouds more prominent. A nice effect hinting at foreboding. So I didn't go on the roof.


Looking through a hole in the wall from the second floor to part of the sweat shop area. For photo processing, this was actually composited from two images, one focused on the wall and one focused on what was below.


After leaving the domed building, I walked to nearby Yerba Buena Gardens and grabbed this shot of the nifty reflections on this building. Each pane reflects a different part of the neighborhood. I'm assuming that was an intentional design idea. It works nicely.


Another building near Yerba Buena.


This is the statue I actually set out to photograph last Monday. The Shaking Man.


I'm told this statue represents a business person and the different meanings a handshake can have. You may remember that I've photographed it before with my Nikon F3 on a rainy day. However, those results were not up to par, so I wanted to try again with better weather.


Overall, these shots turned out somewhat better than the go-round from the end of January.

Yerba Buena Gardens

My Nikon F3 is my best film camera and one of my two favorites. I can't tell you any of the shutter speeds, though, as the F3 has to be on automatic to work. The LCD screen in the viewfinder that tells me the shutter and exposure information is shot.


f5.6. One of my favorite pieces of art in SOMA. It's interesting, fun, and colorful (though that doesn't translate in monochrome.)


f3.5 Another angle.


f3.5. Shaking Man, a sculpture of a businessman shaking someone's hand. I'm told it represents various ways that business people approach business. I don't see it.


f3.5. The church north of Yerba Buena Gardens from behind a waterfall.


f3.5. This guy approached me to find out if I was a tourist who wanted a photo of a homeless guy.