With all the hubbub these days about mounting Contax and Leica onto the Micro 4/3 mount Panasonic G1, I just want to say something.

I can mount Pentax lenses on my … wait for it … Pentax bodies!

I now have a Pentax ME Super, manufactured between 1980 and 1986.  I am in love – it is more compact and convenient than the K1000 I used to have before digital – and the viewfinder is even bigger.  I have just finished my first roll of TMAX 400 rated at … wait for it … ISO 400.

And I have my trusty K100D (2007) and it’s close partner, Photoshop CS2 (2005).

On these two cameras, 20 years apart, I’ve been mounting the A 50/1.7 (1984-1989) and A 28/2.8 (1984-1988).

The total weight of the two cameras and the two lenses:
170g + 165g + 445g + 560g = 1340g or about one D3X

I took only the ME Super and the 50mm to the zoo yesterday.  Usually I’m with 50-200mm on APS-C.  It is said that you can zoom with your feet when using a prime, but in this case I used the Tarzan method.  I just exuded some hormones and the animals came to me. *

I’ll be sure to post something from that first roll, scanned by my Epson 2450.

Currently following the TMAX LOVERS pool and the ME Super pool on Flickr.

Stats on weight, dates, etcetera taken from Bojidar Dmitrov’s K-Mount Page.

* Just kidding – actually I brought a toddler who speaks several animal languages.

This is me singing and playing at home.  Roger Quilter was a British Composer.  The text is from Tennyson.

Just wondering. Why can’t we have open financial books in our government? Every time a new government takes over, they complain that the reason they can’t meet their fiscal promises is that the last administration cooked the books. The Liberal/NDP/Bloc coalition said they couldn’t nail down any hard details for the economic stimulus package they wanted to propose, because they can’t plan anything specific, because they don’t know the status. What’s so secret about it? Why not open it up, so that the entire parliament can work together on the budget, and everyone can contribute to it based on full open knowledge of the current status?

All right, here are my picks for all time greatest, watch-again, watch-again movies.

To make this list, a movie had to achieve all of the following criteria:

• Floor me on first viewing and make me want to watch it again right away
• Make me feel good, a deeply satisfying theatre experience
• Impress me on second viewing with originality, artistry, technical excellence, etc
• Have a message, a deeper meaning
• Make me keep thinking about it (possibly for weeks, and in some cases committing large parts of it to memory)
• Withstand the test of time
• There’s also a geek quotient in most of them, if you look for it…

1. Seabiscuit (2003)
2. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
3. Goodfellas (1990)
   
4. Heat (1995)
5. The American President (1995)
6. The Matrix (1999)
7. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
8. So I Married An Axe Murderer (1993)
9. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
10. 12 Monkeys (1995)

Honourable Mentions: Die Hard (1988), anything for which Anthony Minghella won an award nomination, the Alien franchise, and Forrest Gump.

The links are to Wikipedia.

So … what are your top ten?

My barthii sword is flowering!

Have left the tank alone mostly, trusting in the external filter to last for a few months without maintenance.  Just removing algae regularly and feeding well.

Here are some of my Royal Gold Barbs, and a bit of my Siamese Algae Eater too.  Pic taken with the new lens; FA50/1.4.  The plants are barthii sword and valisneria.

These fish are speedy, and aggressive when it comes to feeding.  The keyhole cichlids and the Siamese Algae Eater still rule the roost and get their own way in any dispute with these barbs, but I think the barbs are very comfortable especially being a group of six that tends to school together.

Here’s my first humble attempt at a pixel-peeping lens comparison.  Please leave your comments!

One macro subject certainly won’t show all there is to know, but it does show up some differences.

I bought the FA 50 to replace my A1.7 chiefly for the autofocus, but before I get rid of the A1.7, I thought it would be fun to compare the two very similar lenses optically.

It turns out that the two lenses have slightly different focal length – the FA is a bit longer; maybe it’s really a 50.9mm and they rounded down.  Perhaps this is the reason that in the F4 shot, the A series lens shot at 1/15 sec vs. 1/10 for the FA.  Shots were taken on the tripod with no SR.  I set the focus point at the centre.

Here are the full frames from the new FA lens, at F1.7, F4, F8, followed by 100% crop comparisons with the A lens.  Click each one for the large view (the first three images are downsized to 1.6MP).

Updated: Lots of talk right now about fast 50s since the DA*55mm F1.4 SDM was announced.  Personally I might be more interested in the DA* 15mm F4 ED AL Limited, but not till I know the price.  Cheers.

FA50, F1.7:

F4:

F8:

Personally I prefer the FA1.4 in the centre crop, it seems to have more contrast.  Click to open 100% crops.

Below you can see the difference in number of aperture blades.

Looks to me here that the A1.7 is the sharpest in the corner at F1.7:

Overall, they seem very similar to me.  Both very good!  The FA 50mm 1.4 will be a great new partner to my A 28mm F2.8, which continues to be my primary lens.

I have a few photos from the A 50/1.7 up on Flickr – click here for the slideshow.  Better yet, see images for this lens from all over Flickr.  And here’s Flickr with FA 50mm/1.4.

Happy lens hunting!

–
Michael Barkowski

The GM-Volt blog has official pictures of the production Chevy Volt design here.

GM is throwing major resources at trying to get ahead of the curve with a car that drives the first 40 miles on electric, then switches to gas.  Their stated plan is to have them on the general market by end of 2010.

The Atlantic published an in-depth story about GM’s effort in their July/August issue.  The full article is on the web: Electro-Shock Therapy.

As more Photokina announcements come out like the Sony A900 and the Nikon D700, and everyone debates who will win, I can’t help wondering why there’s so little talk about the lens “attach rate”.

In Xbox 360 vs. Playstation 3 discussion, the attach rate, i.e. the average number of games sold with a platform, is one of the bragging points for the system.

Similarly in HD DVD vs Blu Ray, the attach rate of movies bought with the player was considered an indicator of buyer confidence in the system.

Thinking about which camera lens mount system has the brightest future, a topic most camera gear fanatics think about from time to time, I’ll usually factor in which camera will sell the most lenses.  As the digital era progresses and competition heats up, I suspect we’ll see more use of the term, “attach rate”.

Snorkelling in the waters of Tobermory is really exhilarating. Cold at first, but you warm up once you get moving. We found gobies in the long cracks of the large yellow rock formations. Jackie’s uncle Kevin says snorkelling in the tropics is like colour TV, vs. black-and-white up here. Ha! Okay, he may have a point, but there’s lots of subtler colour up here, and it really is an adventure and as Dave put it, a visit to another world. We also snorkelled around the small tugboat wrecks near the harbour in town.

Shot with the SMCA 28mm F2.8 lens on my Pentax K100D DSLR.  Someone on the beach asked me how I liked the Pentax.  I said, “I’m a big fan”, and mentioned the lens I was using, which is compact, built tough, decades old, and does everything except autofocus and zoom.  It’s turning into my walkaround lens, although I’m sort of pining for autofocus and macro on it (although I’ve taken some neat macros with it reversed – see my “Macro and Abstract” set on Flickr); enter the DA 35mm Limited Macro to my wishlist.  And in some ways, I’m still trying to get to an updated version of the K1000 + M 55mm F1.8 I used when I jumped into SLR photography on a trip to the east coast.

View of the beach from one of the tall rock formations. A popular spot for snorkellers and divers. The flat rocks seem to be preferred seating compared to the beach of white softball-sized stones. We snorkelled without wetsuits – cold until you start moving, but I love routinely diving down 15 feet or so for a closer fly-by of the underwater terrain.

The top photo looks a bit dull on my screen, so I did some cropping and levels in Gimp – this may reflect closer to what we saw: