Old lenses

I had a friend who swore by his old lenses.  Modern lenses were, in his mind, cheap plastic things.

He was right. Modern lenses are cheap, and there is a lot of plastic in them. They are however, MUCH better then older lenses – even if the old lens was in “as new” condition, which they are not.

We tend to forget these days, that by far the great majority of photographs were viewed as 4 inch by 6 inch prints.  That’s 10cm x 15cm, or about half the size of an iPad screen.

These days I look at photographs on a monitor around 30cm x 25cm, or 4.5 times larger.  And I zoom in to “Actual Size” or even larger, to check for defects and correct focus.  A photograph that would have been fully acceptable in my 35mm film days goes straight into the trash folder today.

Computers now design the lenses, they contain machine made glass with high technology coatings, they are designed to work with modern cameras.

An older lens is usually worn in its movement, allowing alignment to slip, it is full of dust and dirt, and often fungus and scratches.

And even if it were in new condition, it would not have been designed for a modern DSLR. It certainly wont have the required electronics, nor will it have the essential anti reflection coating, which means light will be sent back onto the sensor.

And it would have been designed by calculators and even slide rules, manufactured with old technologies. In the nineteenth century, opticians dug to the level of the Seidel aberrations, called mathematically the third order aberrations, to reach basic anastigmatic correction. Opticians needed to calculate for the fifth order aberrations by the mid-twentieth century to produce a high quality lens.

Today's lenses require seventh order aberration solutions.

And it will have been made without the stringent quality assurance standards that we expect today.

It was made for those 4x6 prints. No one got a magnifying glass out on them and if they did, they blamed the developer not the lens.

Some old lenses are really good, even today. The Tokyo Kogaku R-Topcor 300 F2.8 is still a legend, and it was made in the 1950s.

But my friend didn’t have one, and he never will.

Holding on to an aging consumer quality lens from the 1970s is a waste of time.

The Megapixel Wars

I started out with a very very basic digital camera, although in its day it was state of the art. The Sony Mavica was revolutionary, it had a 3.5 inch floppy disk (remember those) that slotted into the side, a big battery,  a 10x zoom lens (40-400mm) and took VGA photographs sized 640 x 480.   

It cost a fortune, but there wasn’t a lot of competition, and what existed was far more expensive. Its photos where not very good, but printed onto a postcard sized print they weren’t too bad. And that’s the size we used to print film camera photos at.

And those VGA photographs were 0.3 Mp.

I then bought a 6Mp Pentax istD that I didn’t like for various reasons, before buying a 5Mp Canon A540 that took staggeringly good photos for its cost and size.

I then jumped to succession of 10 Mp Canons, and to be honest although there is a noticeable improvement from 5Mp to 10Mp, it isn’t double. It is probably nearer to 10%.

I now have an 18Mp Canon EOS-M.  Are the photos 4 times better then the A540?  Absolutely not.  They are probably 50% better, and half of that is probably the more advanced processing hardware and software, and the better quality of the actual CMOS rather than the number of pixels it has on it.

And that completely overlooks the fact that the A540 had a cheap tiny plastic zoom lens, whereas the EOS-M has a razor sharp prime 22mm prime lens.

Yes if you zoom right in and “pixel peep” until you see the individual pixels, then you will see a difference.  But photographs are not seen like that. 

They are a holistic eyeful of vision. And even that Mavica could produce them.

The Pacific

In 2007 I bought a Canon Powershot A450.  This was a point and shoot entry level digital, with a 5Mp sensor and very little manual functionality. This turned out to be an absolute gem,  and sold me on Canon. The images from it were really snappy, and went up to 2592 x 1944.

I took it with me on a trip to Vanuatu, and the photographs were great. They were not technically perfect, nor was my framing and composition perfect.  But I was getting a lot better, and the camera simply took away all of the worries and fiddling.

The photos were better then I was getting with a Pentax istD.

Part of the reason was back to light.  In the tropical Pacific paradise of Vanuatu there was a lot of light, and it was clean light.  The colours were vivid and bright. The ocean was a mass of blues and turquoises, the flora and fauna was a range of brilliant greens.

After the initial visit to Vanuatu I was offered a two year contract working around the Pacific. It was an opportunity not to be missed, and I wanted to utilise the trip to improve my photography, and to keep the memories.

But photography on remote atolls isn’t quite as easy as it sounds.  I was warned that the humidity, the fine coral sand, the salt mist the general hard life of travelling soon wrecked cameras. I needed a cheap camera that would take decent photographs and wouldn’t  break my heart if it fell in the ocean.

Removable lenses were clearly out – I didn’t wast fine dust or humidity getting in.  I also didn’t want anything to big, to avoid attention from subjects, to avoid being stolen, and to make transport and carrying easy.

I initially bought a Canon SX120, a small DSLR lookalike with 10 Mp, 3648 x 2736 image size, and the equivalent to a 36-360mm 2.8-4.3 lens fixed to the body

I took some great photos with this simple automatic camera.  It would just go in  a pocket, uncomfortably so, but it meant hands free.  It survived boat trips across lagoons. Dropped on sand, used my village children,  left in bars when I was drunk, and a host of other indignities and it kept on taking great photos.  

Not perfect photos.  It’s not a perfect camera. But they were faithful reproduction of what I saw, they print out at up to A4 and look perfect, and I was happy with them.



Later I wanted a longer zoom and HD move capability, so I purchased a Canon SX1.

I still have this pocket rocket – except it really wont fit into a pocket, and is like a shrunken DSLR.  Still 10Mp, and 3648 x 2736 sized images, but this time a CMOS sensor,  and a far better lens – the equivalent to 29-580mm F2,8-5.7, fixed to the body.  And it will shoot full 1080p HD movies.

If the image quality was any better than the SX120 then I couldn’t spot it, and didn’t need it, but the increased functionality and capability made it far more useful.

Sadly the SX120 eventually secured to sand.  The lens iris started jamming and the focussing sounded like a truck pulling away in low gear.

The SX1 is still in use.  I don’t have a lens that can mach its 580mm reach.

These two cameras stayed at my side for two years in places like Vanuatu, Fiji, Kiribati, Tonga, Solomon Isles and Tuvalu. And they gave me 25,000 photographs and hundreds of hours of video of life on these remote islands.

The Old Man

I was buying a second hand reflector off eBay, and the seller invited me to pick it up.  I went over to his home to meet an elderly retired gentleman who had a lifetime of photography under his belt. 

His eyes were now going, he was giving up, and in some ways it was a sad meeting.  His wife made me a cup of tea as I looked at some of his photographs.

Eventually I confessed that I was a hopeless photographer, and told him my background.

His comments were worth gold.

• Firstly, he said don’t chase technology, chase the image. Push the technology you have to produce the best result possible, rather than under use it.  He told me to sell all of my bodies and lenses, buy a throwaway camera, and use it until I couldn’t push it any further. 

• Secondly, he said start working and stop playing.  He said use the rules of ten:

1. Pick a topic, and photograph it ten times, each in a different way.
2. Or limit yourself to taking just ten photos of an event or topic.

That way I would learn to pick the shot in the viewfinder not looking at the “snaps” afterwards, and getting a good shot by chance.

Thirdly he said avoid adding light, move it instead.  The back of his home was a large studio with big glass skylights and windows.  It contained mirrors, backdrops and a lot of very large reflectors, but as far as I saw, it didn’t have the usual massive studio flashes.  He would pick the time when the light was good, he would move it with reflectors, he would shield it with muslin, but he seldom added it.

Slowly, I took his advice. 

In the Beginning

My interest in photography goes back a long way.  A friend who was a couple of years older than me got into it as a kid, and I accompanied him to shots, and stood in his dark room.  I guess I developed my first print aged about 12, standing under a red filtered light in a converted shed.  I can still smell the chemicals, and recall the thrill of seeing the picture appear.  

Around 1973 I bought a  Zorkie 4,  the USSR copy of  the Lieca.   With no light meter, and being a rangefinder, it was complicated and hard to get decent results with.  I cant recall a single good photo from it.

A couple of years later I bought a Zenit EM, also USSR made, black bodied with a light meter built into the body.  This was a bit better, although I found a hand held meter and a lot of guesswork was still essential. Battling the technical aspects was harder than framing and composition.

In the late 70s I went to Dubai, and either just before or on arrival, I bought a black bodied Pentax ME with a 50mm lens.  This had TTL, through the lens metering, and suddenly photography was a lot easier, or at least I had a chance of getting the exposure right.  The ME was an aperture priority automatic camera, with no manual capability,  split screen focussing (manual of course, autofocus was just a dream in a few engineers minds back then), and  no indication of the shutter speed.  You  set the aperture and the ME did the rest. I bought a screw thread adaptor for the Pentax Pentax K mount, and a couple of cheap lenses – a 35mm and a 200mm.  And I had a ball.  I loved that camera, and I lost it only when I got divorced and my wife threw it out.

I then went through a succession of Nikons. Some new some second hand.  I was buying bodies in the faint hope that they would make me a better photographer.

Of course they didn’t, and I spent a fortune.  I didn’t even trade up, I just kept buying.  At one time on the shelf I had a Nikon EM, an FE, and FG-20, and F501 (autofocus!!!) and an F4. 

And I was still a useless photographer.