A New toy

[Mr Darcy]

A friend visited today and gave me a new toy to play with

While it has limitations, I am sure I am going to enjoy this.
And best of all, I think my 2x converter will work with it.

No prizes for guessing what it is:


(And I will try to keep this effect under control in future, but I just had to do it once )

[surenj]

Mirror lens?

[Sylvia]

Pin Hole of some sort?

[Big V]

350mm tamron mirror lens?

[the foto fanatic]

A DVD player?

[Reschsmooth]

Doughnut maker? Or 500mm mirror lens

[ATJ]

Cataracts?

[gstark]

Whatever it is, it appears to have some sort of a focus issue.

I'm in the mirror lens camp.

[zafra52]

It quite a good technique to keep us
all in suspense. Is it a new lens, a
camara, a mirror, It’s a microscope?
No! Suffer you lot!

[sirhc55]

Out of focus lensbaby

[Geoff M]

I have no idea, but would err towards a mirror lens if pushed.

[Mr Darcy]

Doughnut maker? Or 500mm mirror lens

Yes to both

Whatever it is, it appears to have some sort of a focus issue

Yes I've discovered the AF is glacially slow on this beastie. Now I come to think on it, I've been to glaciers that move faster.



I remember when these first became popular. Lots of doughnut shaped sparkles on lakes. Then the fashion changed to "creamy" bokeh and they vanished almost overnight.

However I think that if I use it as originally intended as a field use telephoto, and can control the doughnuts somehow, it will produce some stunning images.

[Remorhaz]

Lucky the D800 has AF capability to f/8 on all those centre focus points

[Murray Foote]

Good point, except that when Greg says the AF is slower than some glaciers he has seen (2 metres per day would be the fastest) I think he actually means it is manual focus.

I thought I posted a comment at the start of this thread. Don't know what happened to it. It will be interesting Greg to see how good you find the image quality but it should be light and portable and fun. I had access in the late 80s to a Tokina 500mm that focused close enough to double as a macro lens. I also used to have a Vivitar Series 1 600mm but sold it in the early 90s so don't know how good it would be on a modern body though nowhere near as sharp, I would assume, as a 300mm f2.8 + TC200III.

[Mr Darcy]

I think he actually means it is manual focus

Lucky the D800 has AF capability to f/8 on all those centre focus points

While it won't autofocus, the in-viewfinder focus assist lamps work on both the D800 and the D7000

it should be light and portable and fun.

Precisely. And it came at the right price
I am actually wondering if these might be more use now than back in the day. Then you had two degrees of freedom: Shutter and Aperture. This "lens" fixes the latter, so you only have one degree of freedom left. That made it pretty limiting. These days, you can lock aperture (by selecting this lens) and still have a reasonable amount of latitude by playing with ISO and shutter. Actually aperture is not quite fixed. The manual talks about changing effective aperture by adding ND filters. The original ND4 that comes with it is long gone though.

The post 1983 versions of this lens focused down to 1.5m and were quite an effective macro. My one is the earlier model that close focuses to 4 metres. There was an even earlier model that was f/5 but close focused to 15m - if you can call that close!

[the foto fanatic]

I used one like this back in the (film) day.

Apart from the specular highlights that form donuts, not a bad bit of kit.

Have fun.

[Mr Darcy]

The first real photo:


I found I needed to up the contrast slightly and lower the metered exposure by 2.5 stops! It may just be the image, but on the other hand, the lens may just be faster than advertised. I will leave it at f/8 for now, but I may adjust the setting in the manual lens section if the issue continues. Focus was easier than I expected to set as long as you start somewhere in the right ballpark, but the DOF (about 25mm at 6m) is quite small & even slight movement leads to donuts. I think a tripod is a must. This was handheld. Also, shooting into the light is a real no-no. Not for flare which seems nonexistent, but to avoid the OOF sparkles.

[aim54x]

looking good!!!

[Steffen]

I guess the exposure oddity is due to the fact that the camera falls back to centre-weighted metering with non-CPU lenses. That just isn't as clever as matrix metering, and it's easy to see why it would have overexposed this particular shot.

Cheers
Steffen.

[Mr Darcy]

I guess the exposure oddity is due to the fact that the camera falls back to centre-weighted metering with non-CPU lenses.

Except the manual claims 3D metering with non CPU lenses. Still early days yet. Play and learn.

EDIT:
I rechecked the manual it said:

• Enables color matrix metering (note that it may be necessary to use centerweighted
or spot metering to achieve accurate results with some lenses, including
Reflex-NIKKOR lenses)

So it looks like you are right, but I have to select it myself.

[Steffen]

Either way, I wouldn't consider this a weakness or drawback of the lens. Once you're aware of this you can easily work around it.

Cheers
Steffen.