> Posted by Ian Craigie
We have pretty much wrung out this topic. I will selectively comment with minimal quotes, to save world-wide band-width. Please understand that much of the thread was intended to provoke introspection and discussion among the whole readership – and may not have been specifically aimed at you, yourself.
The Mamiya7 was more an ex&le than a suggestion, but apropos. A lot of travel shooters like it. I have done travel with a Mamiya RB67 in the past, and got loads of healthful exercise and massive neck and shoulder muscles by the end of the trip. I also got some good shots for happy editors. I would have much preferred the Mamiya7 had it existed.
With medium format, a large arsenal of lenses is really not needed. A wide is essential, normal useful and a short tele optional. Feet provide the zoom on location and cropping in the darkroom. You have a big chunk of film to work with. A 50mm and 150mm would be a decent minimum kit. I would probably go with the 43mm 65mm or 80mm and the 150mm, though I might skip it in preference to cropping. Far lighter than the full Nikon F3 kit I used to haul. I understand there are bargains to be had now in used medium format, which could make it both no compromise and thrifty. The X-Pan also really looks good to me as a travel camera.
Such a kit is a perfect compliment for a Coolpix model. Now all the stuff I would have shot with the Nikon F3 and Leica are more than well covered by the Coolpix, and anything where ultimate technical quality is needed goes to the medium format. On my last major travel shoot - the USA Pacific Northwest - I did carry a 180mm Zeiss Sonnar, but found that I only used it rarely.
The scanner was purchased last summer. If there is more travel this year, there will be more film shot. My experiences with using a flatbed to scan film had been dismal at best, and the cost of a medium format Nikon or Imacon scanner was too high to be justified. The prints from these scans are superb. Scanning is labour intensive, but so is the processing of digital shots. To deal with this, I only scan and process as needed for prints or for web. Film is actually a pretty good long term storage medium, and if it is well organized, access is pretty quick. By the way, I get good scans from chromes, but have found that negs actually are more flexible and offer greater quality in the end.
The Coolpix battery pack does add to the weight, but in a good way. Without it, the cameras I use are too light and too small. On the CP8400, it is particularly well designed, moving the centre of gravity lower and adding mass to make the camera much easier to hold with slow shutter speeds. I have always done a lot of vertical format shots, and the added shutter and zoom rocker are absolutely wonderful. It transforms an engineer's exercise in miniaturization into a useable hand-held camera. Nice to have the extra power with AA cells as well.
> systems, and while acknowledging the introduction of DX lenses,
> basically these lenses are usable on both.
The DX sensor is roughly the size of the APS frame, and the lenses are designed to ONLY cover it. While some may have an image circle approaching the 44mm diameter to cover a 35mm frame when stopped down, there may be extreme fall off at the corners.
> With so many companies going under, it simply seems a little strange
> to me to abandon certain features that favourably distinguish Nikon as
> a brand from others in the market. If they are competing with much
> larger corporations, then surely they must look to any advantages of
> their current system - and being able to migrate from one format to
> another as a photographer's needs change makes a unique selling point
> for Nikon.
To the best of my knowledge, Nikon is a member of the giant Mitsubishi group of companies covering heavy industry, weapons, banking, motorcars and so on. The living symbol of Japan, Inc. While Nikon may be essentially an autonomous company in day to day operations, they certainly have cross holdings and support of the rest of the group – which contains some of the biggest companies on the planet.
> Your preference may not be mine, but what you may consider a
> inconvenience (locking an aperture ring) is minor compared to my
> complete inability to use an non-electronic camera body with a G-lens.
True. I have used so many cameras, that being confronted with a new one is pretty much routine. I shoot with it until it becomes natural, then it goes into service. If you want a gizmo designed one way or another, I don’t begrudge it.
Any given control is implemented in so many different ways on so many different cameras, that it is simply not an issue here – and a bit difficult to see as an issue. The point is that they are all used interchangeably and I don’t even think about the differences. Take focusing for ex&le. The Nikon and Bronica focuses by rotating the ring one way, and the Leitz, Olympus and Canon lenses the other way. The Plaubel has a knob on top, the Linhof on either side of the flat-bed and old Mamiya had it on the side. The GraflexXLs use a lever attached to the focusing ring, but rotate like the Leitz lenses. The WideLuxe is fixed focus and the Coolpix either focuses itself or uses a rotary control almost identical to the Plaubel. Of course, the same control is used for setting the aperture and shutter speed as well as manual focus.
As you pointed out, I do feel strongly that one can adapt and such details are trivial. On the other hand, there certainly are deal-breakers. If a particular design of an aperture ring is vital to your work, and an alternate means of control will mean poorer images, then your position is certainly valid.
Who knows? Maybe Nikon will someday make the dSLR equivalent of the Epson R-D1 – a total nostalgia digital camera, right down to a manual shutter cocking lever! It is about as manual as a digital camera can get, using M-mount Leica-compatible lenses. If Nikon won’t, perhaps Epson will. Nikon is certainly open to licensing its technology, with both Fujifilm and Kodak using it.
> Again, if it is absolutely essential to lens development to migrate
> all lenses to the G-type, then by all means do so. But if the latest
> lens can be used on a D2x AND an FM2, then why not support both? You
> will have your clustered, familiar controls, and others will at least
> have the option of using their FM2 when the need arises.
Nikon still makes a full line of AIS lenses. They also make G-type and D-type. The lens mount on a D2X will mount a half-century old, pre-AIS lens made for the original Nikon F, and even function in manual mode. If you want a lens with an aperture ring, you can buy it and use it.
If you really WANT to work with such lenses, there is probably a higher compatibility of ancient lenses with Nikon than with the others - with the exception of Leica. I do know that there is no compatibility at all with even the most recent Olympus lenses, but have not really checked out Pentax and Konica-Minolta. Of course, like any other manufacturer’s lines of products, different lines have different features. While I might have an obsessive fetish for the little fork on top of old Nikkors, I realize that it has been dropped since lenses with CPUs in them have been added. However, I can still get one with the little fork.
> Some have said yes, and others no. You have made a strong case for yet
> other considerations, and I appreciate this. It may well mean a
> different choice all together. Fine.
Of course, each person must define what is a deal-maker/breaker. I, for ex&le would be less than enthusiastic using a digital camera now, that lacked the swing and swivel viewfinder. After using the live real-time histogram, I would be most reluctant to give that up as well. Both make a clearly visible improvement in my images.
While digital photography adds another dimension – it is mostly a matter of replacing the sensor with film and the flexibility the sensor provides. Basic photography – film/sensor speeds, lens apertures, shutter speeds, depth of field and so on follow the same rules of physics. I expect the engineers and designers at all the camera companies are far from a consensus of what is the ideal camera in any given form factor. To the best of my knowledge, the Epson R-D1 is selling great not in spite of its quaintness, but because of it. I would love to have one, but certainly not as a primary camera.
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