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Marcus Rowland

Marcus Rowland

Member Since 19 Feb 2017
Offline Last Active Mar 26 2024 02:03 PM
*****

#47143 Need Shutter/Cable Release/Remote for Nikon D3400

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 10 March 2017 - 11:12 AM

That's certainly a possibility. I will have my little Fuji bridge camera with me so I won't be without a camera altogether, whatever happens.




#47141 Look! Up in the Sky! It's Supermoon!

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 10 March 2017 - 10:30 AM

I agree entirely - I got to play with a Solid CAT lens in my Canon days when I was working part time for a camera shop and it was brilliant - unfortunately I bought my Canon F1 for less than the lens cost, I simply couldn't afford to buy one. But I've also tried cheap mirror lenses and have NOT been impressed.




#47105 Camera straps

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 09 March 2017 - 09:38 AM

Just the original wide strap that came with my D50 - no sign of any weakness developing, and I'm used to it.




#47086 Look! Up in the Sky! It's Supermoon!

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 08 March 2017 - 04:39 PM

The December 2016 "supermoon", Nikon D50 and a cheapo T-mount 500mm f8 lens (not a mirror lens, it's really 500mm long!) Hand held at 1/250th F16, a VERY clear night in London for a change. I've cropped it and upped the contrast a little, otherwise unedited.

 

184798_original.jpg




#47028 Is this extortion or what?

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 06 March 2017 - 01:52 PM

It's amazing how the idea that you own a program seems to be being eroded - I'm still using fairly old software on my real computers (e.g. Windows 7 and Office 2007 on my PC, Office 2008 on my Macs) since I refuse to participate in this game for any software I use productively. A pox on paying a yearly rental for software! On the iPad and iPhone I'm just very selective and delete apps if the adverts make them unusable. Fortunately I'm not a huge games person - the only game I play obsessively on any computer is Oolite, the free Elite play-alike, and that's about as non commercial as you can get. Apart from that I play a few solitaire and puzzle games, and not very often. If things get truly bad I'm probably going to switch to Linux, if the major distros ever get round to adding support for my printer and scanner... (and no, PLEASE don't start telling me how to write my own drivers etc., I don't currently have Linux installed at all except in a virtual environment and I really don't want to change unnecessarily.)




#46944 Simple fix for auto-only M42 lenses on Nikon

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 04 March 2017 - 02:18 PM

I see a lot of M42 lenses, and generally want some test shots to prove that they're working before I sell them on. I've got an M42-Nikon adapter with a corrective lens, of course, and it works well for most lenses. But every now and again you come across one that is M42 auto only, with the rear stopdown pin but no other way to stop the lens down. It's usually a sign of a cheap lens, but some surprisingly good lenses have variants without a stop-down switch, including some Helios and other Russian models, some Tessar and other lenses for Praktica, etc.

 

In the past I've tried taping the button down, which sort of works but the tape tends to come off pretty quickly, and may stop you from screwing the lens all the way in.

 

What I finally came up with (and can't believe I didn't think of it sooner) is simply a shim, a ring of hard black 1.4mm plasticard (plastic sheet) cut so that it fits in the mount around the corrective lens. As you screw the lens in the pin is pushed in by the shim, after that the aperture is manually controlled. A single shim will push the pin in far enough to stop most lenses down to F8 or so, two will push the pin all the way in. I'd recommend going with one unless you really need both, to avoid strain on the pin etc.

 

I made them very easily, the only tools needed are a pair of sharp dividers, a ruler or calipers for measurement, a sharp knife or scissors for trimming, and possibly sandpaper to get rid of any loose bits of plastic. Start off by measuring the inner diameter of the tube (which will be around 40mm) and the diameter of the lens and its surround - in my case 32mm. Then use the compass to scribe two concentric circles in the plastic - and keep going until you are nearly all the way through the plastic. After that the card outside can be got rid of fairly easily, just cut a slit to get it started, then bend it back and forth around the rim until it separates. The inner part is a bit more difficult, but if you're careful you can separate the ring without breaking it. I'd recommend sanding off any loose bits of plastic, but I forgot to buy sandpaper so I wasn't able to do it for these pictures. The last picture shows the lens (a cheapo 135mm) stopping down to F22 with two shims, before I could only use it at full aperture.

 

The converter:

 

shim_01_zps60tg98uv.jpg

 

Tools etc.:

 

shim_02_zpshdjsdxo0.jpg

 

Cutting the rings

 

shim_03_zpsispjatxq.jpg

 

Separation

 

shim_04_zpsi8ydvwpn.jpg

 

The (fairly crude) result

 

shim_05_zps7kn1hbyh.jpg

 

Fitted in the converter

 

shim_06_zpsieu1qg5c.jpg

 

Stopping down the lens

 

shim_07_zpsjw3n2brk.jpg

 

Later - I forgot to say that I did it this way because I already had the plasticard - if I hadn't I would have probably found a plastic box of suitable thickness and started from that, or looked for ready-made shim rings of some sort. Mostly, this is just to show that shim rings are a solution to this particular problem.




#46904 Shutter speed testing software

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 03 March 2017 - 02:11 PM

Putting a white paper with a radial line on a turntable at 33 1/3 RPM and taking a series of photos of it at all speeds has worked for decades. 

 

Record player? What is this record player of which you speak? Haven't owned one, or any records, since the nineties.

 

More seriously - since I tend to sell the majority of bodies (e.g. old Zenits, Prakticas, etc.) for sums comparable to a couple of rolls of film, testing them with film is not an option. I make this clear in the listings when I sell them. I make my money on the lenses, there seem to be a lot of people who want a good f2 lens and don't mind it being in an obsolete fitting, anything I get for the bodies is a nice bonus, but not something I can sink much money into.




#46898 Shutter speed testing software

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 03 March 2017 - 01:18 PM

I sell quite a few old film camera bodies on eBay, and it's nice to be able to say what is (and isn't) working properly when I do so. Mostly it's easy - you can tell pretty quickly if the shutter isn't working at all, if flash synchronization isn't working, if it's full of fungus or the silvering of the prism is failing, if the self timer isn't working properly, and so forth. The hard part has always been checking shutter speed - I can tell roughly if it "feels" right by firing it and watching with the back open, but honesty compels me to say that accuracy there is probably pretty low. The old easy way of checking a little more accurately - fire the shutter while looking at a TV screen and watch the scan lines - has been useless since everyone went over to LCD screens.

 

So a while ago I started looking at buying or building a speed tester. My original idea, since I'm a retired educational lab technician, was to buy a physics gadget called a light gate and appropriate software. This is simply a gizmo with a light source and a detector which can time exactly how long the light is shining, with an interface to link it to a computer (or an oscilloscope if you want to do things old school). Unfortunately that gets to be expensive if you aren't an educational user - schools buy this stuff in bulk and can afford thirty or forty pounds for the light gate, a hundred for the interface (which might be used with lots of other sensors), a couple of hundred pounds for a site license for the software, etc. Private purchasers find the setup costs a little daunting.

 

But it turns out that there are some solutions around. The simple one (which unfortunately doesn't work above the flash speed for the camera) is to record the noise it makes into oscilloscope software such as the free Audacity program (via a computer's microphone) and spot the opening and closing of the shutter. And once you've thought of that it turns out to be relatively simple to come up with something that works like a light gate but connects to the computer as a microphone. Needless to say I didn't think of this for myself - several people have developed solutions.

 

A circuit for PCs is here: http://www.mraggett....uttertester.htm

A circuit for iPhones is here:  https://www.lomograp...for-your-iphone

 

The iPhone app the second article references is pretty good for this purpose; it costs a couple of pounds (sorry, I have no idea of dollar prices) but it automates most of the calculations. You just have to identify the beginning and end of the shutter cycle. Most of the other solutions I've seen use sound recording programs that are a lot more complicated, such as Audacity (on PC and Mac) but free. Having tried both, I greatly prefer the app.

 

For both of these the sensor circuit is really as easy to build as it looks. I think the most expensive component was the plug to connect it to my iPhone. If you don't want to build your own or don't already own the tools, several ebay vendors sell them starting around £10, designed to connect to various computers. To get an accurate result with a focal plane shutter you need to have the sensor in a tube so that the light can only reach it from a narrow angle. I used the barrel of a black marker pen for this, ending in a flat plate to go up against the shutter plane. My light source was an LED bicycle light - nice and bright, and since it's battery powered you don't have to worry about AC waves messing up the signal.

 

One refinement that might be worth trying: Use an infra-red diode as light source and a suitable sensor, that ought to work and with luck there will be a lot less interference from other light sources.

 

The only problem I've found so far is that some late-model film SLRs won't fire the shutter with the back open, e.g. Pentax Z70, and of course this isn't much use for digital cameras. But for the older film SLRs I tend to see it's going to be very useful.




#46865 D50 will not take a pic - No Err

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 02 March 2017 - 02:41 PM

Obvious stupid question - is the memory card OK? The battery? Has the SD card been write protected?

 

Something like this, my first thought would be to switch off, take both out, check that the write protect switch isn't on, and put them back in again. If possible check with another SD card.

 

If all else fails maybe do a complete reset, but that's a bit of a last resort option - https://www.dpreview.../thread/2215134

 

Also, what size is the memory card? If it's over 2gb it won't work, of course.




#46832 Making the world's worst lens a little more useful

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 01 March 2017 - 11:08 AM

You've probably never heard of the Itorex Pan-Focus 50mm f40 - yes, really forty, not 4.0! It's basically a variant on the "lens in a body cap" idea, the difference being that it's much older and is designed to fit into a T-mount. As supplied by the original manufacturer they come with an F40 aperture, a 20mm metal disk with a teeny hole, which can be removed by unscrewing the rear element if you want to use the lens in low light and don't mind a ridiculously unfocused image. It doesn't actually focus at all, with the F40 stop it was supposed to be in focus from 6" to infinity.

 

One recently came my way in a job lot of filters etc. - the snag was that the stop was missing, and one test without it made it clear that it was not going to be much use. I decided to make my own; the snag was that I no longer have a good workshop available since I retired, so accurately making them out of metal was probably not going to be possible.

 

After a couple of trials making the disks out of cut-up soft drink cans I realised that the hardest part was making an exact 20mm disc. Fortunately there's a good source for 20mm black plastic disks - you can buy them in packs of 50 on eBay, sold as counters for games. This has the additional advantage that you can melt holes rather than drilling them, with was my preferred method for getting the pilot hole centred.

 

Since I had so many counters I decided to make a set of stops, like the ones sold for Lensbaby cameras. I was going to cover all apertures, but it became obvious that anything wider than F8 was just a fuzzy mess. In the end I made f40, f22, f16, f11, and f8 - since the plastic was about 1.5mm thick I used a countersink bit to give the openings a sharper edge.

 

The end result... well, it's still pretty horrible at all apertures, you get much better results with any real 50mm lens. But F16 and F22 were just about usable if you didn't mind the limitations of the crappy optics, and the softness of the wider apertures is actually quite interesting. Here are a few photos showing the lens, the stops I made, and some pictures I took with my D50 - I was hand-holding the camera on a day with very variable lighting and didn't have time to get exposure exactly right, but I hope these pictures show the general idea.

 

First the lens and the stops I made:

 

itorex_01_zpsd6anxc3m.jpg

 

itorex_03_zpsj5d0qqqe.jpg

 

itorex_02_zpsivnbueqs.jpg

 

itorex_04_zpswjhzqkaq.jpg

 

Next some photos of the view from my front door - not the most exciting vista, but there are some nice distant buildings with plenty of detail. These are on Photobucket, so reduced in size, but you're not missing much!

 

F40 - 1/30th second
F22 - 1/125th second
F16 - 1/250th second
F11 - 1/500th second
F8 - 1/800th second
No stop (f3.5-ish) - 1/4000th second

 

f40-flats_01_zpslopsaph9.jpg

 

f22-flats_01_zpsya417qfq.jpg

 

f16-flats_01_zpsxjskglir.jpg

 

f11-flats_01_zpsgip4jajj.jpg

 

f8-flats_01_zpsb3ocxfjf.jpg

 

nostop-flats_01_zpsjdtlrprw.jpg

 

If anyone else has one of these lenses you might want to try experimenting with stop size - f40 is simply too slow to be useful for most purposes, and performance is about as good as a cheap Instamatic or similar at F22 and F16, which I suppose is more useful than a blank lens cap.




#46560 Hi there...

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 20 February 2017 - 12:20 PM

The trouble was the idiots who were using infra-red to get photos through clothing - some fabrics are transparent or translucent in infra-red, the manufacturers received so much flack that they had to "improve" the filters, which is why (for example) Sony stopped making nightshot cameras that could actually film or take photos in this spectrum, rather than switching to visible light as soon as you pressed the shutter button.

 

Here's one I made earlier....

 

800px-Sony_IR_01.JPG

 

Sony Cybershot DSC-VI camera in night shot mode, 920nm filter, neutral density filter.




#46529 Hi there...

Posted by Marcus Rowland on 19 February 2017 - 04:27 PM

Just to introduce myself - Marcus Rowland, retired lab technician and author (mostly of role playing games), resident of London, UK. In the seventies and early eighties I did some part time work for Morgan Cameras, a London used camera dealer, so I've seen a lot of strange gear in my time, especially at the vintage end of things. My main interests are scientific and nature photography, macro and micro, occasional pictures for Wikipedia, etc.

 

As of next month I will have been a Nikon D50 user for ten years, before that my main camera was a Canon F1. Since Canon digital cameras use a different lens mount to the F1 I had to sell most of my lenses and switched to Nikon when I went digital. I'm sticking with the D50 because I mostly take photos for web sites etc. and rarely want really high resolution, also because it's reasonably sensitive to infra-red with the right filters and I like messing around with infra-red photography occasionally (though I would LOVE someone to come up with a digital SLR that shifts the whole spectrum to emulate infra-red Ektachrome!) A final reason is that it's cheap and relatively expendable if I get mugged, drop it in a canal, or something...

 

The lens I probably use the most is a Tamron 28-300mm XR, not the most modern lens but it's built like a tank and my go-to lens for eBay listings and general photography, and still has the option of manual aperture control. I've also got a Nikon AF-S 35 1.8, Nikon AF-S 18-55 3.5-5.6 VR, a Lensbaby 12mm fisheye (not the full frame one, the cheaper version for their interchangeable element system), a generic manual 500mm F8 lens, and usually one or two others - I buy and sell a lot of cameras and lenses on eBay, and tend to keep the interesting ones for a few months before I sell them on. For example, I've just finished playing with an Itorex f40 (really) 50mm lens which is a sort of predecessor of Lensbaby and "lens in body cap" designs, and have just begun using a weird 135mm f2,8 bellows-mounted lens for macro photography. And I just picked up an SB-25 flash in a car boot fair (US = swap meet) today, I'll be playing with that and deciding if it's better than the Jessops flash I currently use if I want extra power.

 

My most recent photo - a cactus, about 0.5x with the bellows lens.

 

bellows_4_zpsii6fqwac.jpg

 

Hope that wasn't too boring...