I can’t believe no reviewer has yet mentioned the A700’s new Immobilizer Subject Stabilization Ray, clearly demonstrated in the above photo. The implications for candid photography are immense. We all know that the ability of in body IS to reduce camera shake allows you take pictures at previously unthinkably low shutter speeds, speeds so low that the subjects often move on their own. With the A700’s new Immobilizer Subject Stabilization Ray (ISSR), pesky subject motion is no longer a problem. Simply line up up the subject in your crosshairs . . . uh, viewfinder, and engage the ISSR. They won’t move no matter how long the exposure takes. Great for kids and pets too.

ISSR aside, the A700 looks like a fine camera, and unlike the recent Nikon and Canon offerings, the eye-relief doesn’t appear to entirely suck, although it’s a little unclear what 25mm without the frame and 21 mm with the frame means. Is this a removable eyepiece frame? In any event, with one of those fancy Zeiss 16-80 zooms, this would probably be nice piece of kit.

Seriously? Who builds a pro camera (D3) with an eye relief of 18mm? Even their new pro-sumer (D300) camera only has 19.5mm of eye relief. Canon isn’t much better with 20mm for the new 1Dspq43 Mark IIIIXV, but at least the 40D gets 22mm. (Utterly Off-topic Obervation: Someone in the Canon product-naming department must have worked for the Royal Ordnance Ordinance Factory in a previous life.

I don’t want any of these pieces of junk for myself, but I feel for my oppressed, be-spectacled, digital shooting brothers and sisters. Unite! Unite! Stand up for rights!

A couple of bits of gearheadedness to pass on:

• Colin pointed out a little propaganda-review of the ZM Biogon 35 over at Zeiss’ website (PDF version here).
• Jeff Ascough on Cameras and the Desire to Upgrade. Jeff Ascough is arguably one of the best wedding photographers in the world, a dedicated M shooter, and he isn’t buying an M8. His three criteria for new gear purchases are insightful.
• Olympus has released some more notes on the long-upcoming E-3. I’ll be curious to see if this thing ever makes it to market.

Editor’s Note: Two typos in a six line post is exactly the kind of accuracy and attention to detail for which I strive (2 points to whomever can point out the overly pedantic bit of grammar in this post). Would you believe that I used edit and index books for a living? Sigh . . . I gotta stop trying to write this stuff before my coffee kicks in.

Despite my recent comments about using what you are comfortable with, at the moment, I can think of two great ways to spend $5000:

1. Buy an M8.
2. Buy a Seitz Roundshot.

The Case for an M8

It’s fairly hard for me to justify buying an M8. I’ve gone through three digital cameras in as many years. The Canon 10D lasted 4 months before I traded it in for my first Hexar RF. The KM 7D a year later followed on the heels of the great gear purge of ought-five that saw the mad sale of my Hexar AF and Nokton 35 F1.2. The 7D fared poorly; I’m fairly certain I’d sold it within three months at least in part out of bitterness over the lost Hexar AF and Nokton. My current digital, a D80, I’ve had for almost a year, but it’s been sitting unused on the shelf for most of that time. It doesn’t know it yet, but it’s days are probably numbered.

Given this serial dissatisfaction with digital, why would I go spend almost $5K on another? Well . . . one could make an argument that all of the other digitals were discarded because what I was really waiting for was a digital M or, better yet, a digital Hexar. The M8 might just be good enough. Although I haven’t been all that impressed by most of the reviews or most of the resulting photos, Dante Stella’s recent piece on the M8, has sparked my interest again. He’s described the M8’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that makes sense to me and that runs parallels to my own thoughts on camera design. I’m intrigued again.

Intrigued or not, the M8 would essentially allow me to continue what I’m doing but without dealing with film. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. Film has a certain rhythm that I’ve come to appreciate. And, as Colin has noted, there’s something about the tangibility of film. I know that regardless of my scanning or photoshop skills, I could go rent a darkroom and print my negs. I probably won’t do it, but it’s nice to know that I could. I also know that even in the event of a massive and multiple hard drive failure, I’d still have the negs. I’m not sure I’m ready to give that up. But with the pile of undeveloped film growing again, I can see the appeal of at least lessening the amount of time I spend with my hands in a changing bag, spotting negs, mixing chemicals, etc etc etc. It’s usually fun, but not always.

The Case for a Roundshot

Michael Reichman’s recent review of the Seitz Roundshot 28/220 came to my attention just a few days after having stumbled on “America by the Yard”, Robert MacKay’s excellent book showcasing some of the best Cirkut images from the 1900’s to 1950’s. I was vaguely aware that there had been some really, really large format panoramic photography done in the past, but the book turned out to be a revelation and potential inspiration.

The Cirkut and the Roundshot 28/220 work on the same principle; the film and the lens both rotate, but in opposite directions. The result is a photograph that can be as wide as you want - up to or even beyond 360 degrees - with a corresponding growth in the negative size as you go. The early Cirkut cameras produced negative that were literally yards long by up to 16 inches tall. The Roundshot, by comparison, uses 120 or 220 film, but the principle is the same.

In either case, the great appeal lies in the resulting images. Long, wide and fairly distortion free if you pay attention to the bubble level. The Cirkut was often used to create giant portraits of whole towns, factory floors, quarries etc. You have to see these to understand the impact entirely. The town and group portraits are particularly fascinating, being a kind of group photography that is certainly posed but almost entirely free of artifice. Do a google image search on Cirkut Cameras and you will start to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

As a modern day stand in for the Cirkut, the Roundshot has a lot of appeal. It would just be too much fun to take one of these things around to small towns, county fairs, all manner of gatherings etc. The documentary possibilities are huge even before you get to architectural photography. With a little luck, you might even be able to get a grant to do this.

This would be something entirely different from what I’m doing now. I’m not sure how much my skills would translate into something like this. I might be entirely lost, up a $5000 creek with no paddle. But it might be a hoot.

Choices, Choices, Choices

All this is working from the erroneous assumption that I’ve got $5000 to spend on camera equipment. I could do it, but it would seem kind of silly given the circumstances of my life at the moment, which perhaps isn’t a reason not to do it. 9 months ago I was thinking about spending $10K for to go to Salt’s documentary program. Heck, if that’s my yardstick, I could buy both the M8 and the Roundshot, and still be ahead of the game considering I wouldn’t be loosing all those wages by being in school full time. Hmm, see how that works? You talk yourself out of spending $5K by way of talking yourself into spending $10K.

If you had $5K to spend on photography, what would you do?

photo courtesy of www.anthonysnaps.com

That’s my rig. The camera I carry everyday, everywhere. It’s sitting on the floor next to me as I write this, and it’s twin with the 50 Hex is sitting by the door, ready to go. After using these Hexars for couple of years, they’ve become a part of me. I feel kind of naked without one of them, but I don’t even notice them when one is hanging off my shoulder. There’s something to be said for any camera that you can use and forget. If you’ve got one, hang on to it. There will always be time to upgrade later, but there will rarely ever be enough time to bond with another old favorite.

BTW, Kate calls pictures like this ‘camera porn,’ a term also useful for things like the KEH catalog.

In certain forums, people like to joke that a bessa l makes a good rear cap for one of those super wide voigtlander novelty lenses. It would be a funnier joke if the bessa l wasn’t actually such a crummy camera. The Hexar AF, on the other hand, makes a great rear cap for the super sweet Summicron-killing lens to which it’s permanently affixed.

hexar af, tri-x in diafine

The hexar af’s heritage seems to go back to the time before af point-n-shoots, back to the days when compact fixed lens rangefinders were what you bought when didn’t want the complexity of an SLR. It shares many of the same design conceits; it’s smallish, ruggidish, has automatic and manual controls (better than most of it progenitors), and an absurdly good lens for the price.

Features and Controls

hexar af, tri-x in diafine

The hexar af is a compact 35mm camera with a leaf shutter, active af, manual controls, parallax correcting frame lines, and a fixed 35 f2 lens. I’ll rant about the lens below, so let’s consider just the body for the moment. Controls on the hexar af are well thought out and easy to use. There’s a very usable knurled aperture control wheel on top, a pair of lefty/righty switches, an on/off mode dial, select and manual focus buttons (both slightly recessed), self timer button and a deeply recessed (poke it with a pen point) rewind button. You can pick it up and take great pictures without ever reading the manual. And with just a bit of use, you can manipulate the hexar without looking at the controls. However, there’s a lot of neat stuff hiding under those straight forward controls. Like an old Nintendo game, mashing just the right sequences of buttons on the Hexar will turn on special features. It’s essentially a user programable firmware. Here’s a few of the most salient features:

1. Total manual control of both exposure and focus.
2. Manual and auto-aperture flashmatic operation with the ability to put in the GN of whatever flash you want to use (Nikon’s SB 30 with it’s multiple manual settings works well on the hexar). The flashmatic mode is essentially fool proof if you know the real GN of your flash. You tell the camera the GN, it takes the distance from the active af mechanism, and picks the right aperture for the exposure. No mucking about with subject reflectivity, just good exposures.
3. Rear curtain flash synch up to 1/250th. This in combination with the flash matic mode makes the hexar af a sleeper of a camera for a wedding or event photographer. You can do fill flash in daylight and drag shutter shots at the reception with ease.
4. The meter switches to spot in manual mode. Sweet.
5. Silent mode. Short of a blimp, this is about as quiet as camera’s get. And yes, it’s quieter than a leica.
6. User programmable firmware. If you mash the buttons in just the right order (documented in the photo.net review) you can add the silent mode and various other neat things to the later models of the hexar. This is just too cool.
7. Selected aperture bias in program mode. In other words, with the mode dial set to P, the camera will try to set the shutter speed from 1/30th to 1/250th to match. If it can’t, it will adjust the aperture appropriately.
8. Super secret shutter priority mode; you change the lowest shutter speed the camera will select in P mode. So if you know you can hand hold at an 1/8th (you can, believe me), you can set the minimum at an 1/8th. Of course this also means you could set it at 1/250th if you really wanted. Neat!
9. Supremely accurate midroll rewind; you can change film midroll without wasting a shot. Nice feature.

The Lens: Summicron Killer, not Summicron Copy

Piles of debased Summicrons with sloppy aperture rings and off kilter hoods beg for mercy in front of the Hexar AF’s lens.

Rampant internet rumors aside, the lens in the Hexar AF is not a summicron copy. It’s obscene that you can buy a hexar af for $300-500 because the lens is worth far more than that. It rivals the three dimensionality and smooth bokeh of the most notorious leica 35’s. It’s a sharp as any lens has a right to be. It’s fast enough to allow shooting in absurdly low light levels with fast film. With the active AF system, you can shoot the hexar af in light levels that would make manual focussing darn near impossible and would throw most passive af slrs into a hunting tizzy. The lens does vignette slightly wide open. I’ve come to like this in a lot of lenses. It gives a very subtle in camera edge burn that works well for portraits. And it’s gone by 2.8, so if you don’t want the vignetting stop down.

Complaints real and otherwise

The hexar af is not without its oddities and limitations:

• You hear a lot of whining about the hexar’s top shutter speed of 1/250th. This is why they make ND filters folks. It’s also why they make fuji acros BTW.
• The fixed 35 doesn’t suit everyone. I’m kind of ambivalent about 35’s. When using a fifty I usually want something wider. When using a 35 I usually want something a little narrower. In my mind, 35’s are good for people I know really well or groups of people that I’m really not a part of. If you can’t find your own way of using a 35, pass on the hexar.
• Although the framelines are parallax corrected, the focus aim point is not. Focusing isn’t through the lens but with a sensor to the right of the lens. I’ve missed focus on a few shots where I was trying to focus on something tiny in the foreground. A few worked in spite of this, but it’s a frustrating design limitation.
• The manual focus is purely manual; you gotta use your brain to figure out how far away the subject is. So what good is it? Use it to preset focus in situations where you are counting on DOF to do most of the work.

Conclusions

When I owned my Hexar AF, I wasn’t nearly a good enough photographer for it, so it’s probably best that I sold it when I did, altough I sometimes wish I still had it. It was a great camera for shooting in bars; after a few too many pints, that active af system starts to seem like a really good idea.

Other Hexar AF Resources

For more coherent points of view on this camera, see these fine reviews:

• Silvergrain Wiki Hexar AF page (includes an interesting explanation of the af system and notes on fixing problems with the shutter release)
• Dante Stella’s Hexar AF review (enteraining, but not that much more coherent than the review you’ve been reading)
• CameraQuest Hexar AF page

Lost Hexar AF Commands

selecting flash GN	turn off, turn to P while pressing Self
turning on silent mode	turn off, turn on while holding MF button

I’m running low on film, so it’s time to check in on the D80. Flick the power switch. SD card, still plenty of shots left. Battery, nearly full. Nearly full charge? Really? When’s the last time I used this thing? Thinking, thinking, thinking. Sometime before Christmas, and I’m fairly certain that the battery hasn’t been charged since Thanksgiving.

That’s quite an improvement since the days of my 10D or even worse the KM 7D, both of which could drain their battery if you looked at them wrong. A battery that stays charged even when sitting goes a long way towards replicating the ever-readiness of the older manual fiml SLR’s. Not a bad thing.

But, why, might you ask, has that D80 been sitting on the shelf for a couple of months? Well, that’s complicated. Three points:

• The quirks of the D80’s metering combined with the somewhat limited dynamic range of it’s 10MP sensor, require constant attention and a good measure of manual control.
• As with nearly every post AF, multi-function control wheel sprouting, tehcno wonder camera of doom, the D80 provides tons of manual control but no physical feedback as to the settings. The wheels just spin and spin. See some of the recent comments on the K10D over at theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com for more on this.
• Although the VF is fairly large and fairly bright and not entirely useless for manual focussing, it’s got no eye relief. Yes, I know all the cool kids are wearing contacts or have got that fancy new lasiks surgery that can turn your field of vision upside down - no, really it can - but some of us still wear glasses. When wearing glasses, I can’t see all the metering info at the bottom of the vf unless I consciously look at it, in which case I lose about the top third of the frame.

Taken individually, none of these issue would be that bad. So the metering is hinky. No problem, I’ll work in manual. Oh wait, the controls give no feedback. No problem, I’ll check the meter readings in the VF. Uh, now I can’t see the picture. Damn, it’s gone. I should have bought a 30D.

Regular readers will recall that I recently lost the eyepiece for one of my Hexar RF bodies. After a couple of days unsuccessfully trolling the usual internet outlets for weird camera junk, I decided to build my own replacement eyepiece. Unlike a lot of cameras, the standard rear eyepiece of the Hexar RF is not just a clear piece of glass, it’s the last element in a reverse telescope (Note to camera designers: crucial bits should not come susceptible to random unscrewing!). Unfortunately, the diopters for the Hexar seem to work in tandem with the eyepiece, so the -3 and -4 diopters I got from KEH were pretty much useless. Using the eyepiece off my other body and a formula my dad gave me, I figured out that the eyepiece has a focal length of just about 52mm.



A little poking around on the internet located the good folks at http://www.surplusshed.com/. I highly recommend them over Edmund Optics. For one thing, they are significantly cheaper - like $4 for a lens instead of $20. For another, they have a convenient lens finder that locates your lens based on focal length and diameter. A quick search for 50mm-ish lenses around 15mm in diameter located a number of potential candidates. At $4 each I figured better safe than sorry, so I ordered a couple of extras on either side of 50mm. When my order arrived a few days later, it turned out that the 51mm was just about perfect. Next came the task of mounting it on the camera.

Once again I called on the ingenuity of my father (one of the benefits of temporarily living at home). After tossing a few ideas back and forth, he disappeared into the garage. Thirty minutes later he presented me with this:



A strip of copper sheeting was soldered into a cylinder sized to fit over the original screw threads on the body. One end was clipped and bent down to a narrow diameter in order to hold the lens in place. The lens was positioned on top of the threads. The copper cylinder was glued down to hold the whole works in place. Although dad was in favor of painting the copper, I’m thinking about leaving it shiny. Who else has a copper and black Hexar RF?

So, how does it work? Dandy. Comparing the repaired Hexar with my other one, it’s pretty clear that focusing accuracy and viewfinder brightness are undiminished. Eye relief remains the same as well. The replacement lens is not quite as flat as the original equipment. This increased curvature results in a slightly different focal length outside the center portion of the lens requiring dead center eyeball position to hold the whole field in focus. Having used it like this for a few days, I don’t notice the difference when actually photographing. I’ve always been pretty careful about centering my eye, so perhaps other users would have more of a problem with this

I’m quite pleased with this repair. It’s piqued my curiosity about the possibility of building a VF magnifier for the Hexar. A .9 VF would give me a reason to go buy that Noctilux I’ve always wanted.

Update 12/26/06: The copper sleave that I was using to hold the lens on ended up scratching my glasses. Since a couple of months of use demonstrated that the lens indeed worked, I decided to super-glue it on as a more permanent solution. A couple of drops of glue around the edge of lens seems to be holding it in place just fine.

I bought an OM-1 MD from KEH the other day. $60 with 50 1.8 lens. Cosmetically, it’s a bit rough, and there’s some dust in the finder, but it’s still a damn nice camera. Big, bright viewfinder with a screen that clearly shows focus. Small size. Interesting, but incredibly well thought out ergonomics; putting the shutter speed dial on the lens mount means both exposure controls can be adjusted with out chaning your hand placement. And a great lens. The lens draws more like a really good RF lens instead of like a bargain Japanese lens from the mid 70’s.



In some ways, this shouldn’t be surpising. The OM-1 was originally called the M-1 until Leica made them change the name. Despite being an SLR, the influence of the Leica M is clear particularly when you compare the little OM against it’s Nikon contemporaries. The small size of the body and the emphasis on an excellent viewfinder were both intended to seduce Leica users looking for an SLR option. As a companion to an RF, the OM gives you access to some of the benefits of an SLR without saddling you with a huge brick or compromising your ability to see your subject.



If the el cheapo 50 is any indication of the rest of the lens line, the lenses were designed with a thought towards the RF user as well. The 50 1.8 really does draw like a classic RF lens with moderate contrast, great resolution and pleasant bokeh. But it also focusses much closer than an RF could ever hope for. With the current bargain basement prices of many OM lenses, I’m planning on seeing if this holds true across the board.



If you are looking for a bargain camera with great imaging potential, the OM-1 is worth a look.

I lost the eyepiece to one of my Hexar’s yesterday. Unlike a lot of cameras in which the standard diopter is just a clear piece of glass, the eyepiece of the Hexar forms an integral part of the RF. Without it, you can’t see through the viewfinder. Of course, only Hexar eyepieces fit. And of course, since the Hexar RF is a long out production camera originally made by a company that’s changed hands a few times now, locating a replacement part is a pain in the butt.

This is one of the downsides to using abandonware. When it gives up the ghost, you are pretty much on your own. I’ve emailed Greg Weber, the only recognized Konica repair resource in the states and asked on photo.net where, oddly enough, somone else had just lost the same piece off their Hexar. I’ve also bought up KEH’s supply of corrective diopters for the Hexar thinking that if those don’t work for me perhaps I can trade them.

If the Hexar RF didn’t have such completely brilliant ergonomics, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble, but it’s the best designed camera I’ve ever used, much better than an M in many ways. The other day I was looking over Sean Reid’s review of the new M8 and thinking how much they could have improved its ergonomics by adopting the shutter speed dial off the Hexar. Using the Hexar’s exposure compensation dial would have been a good idea as well. Heck, why didn’t they just stuff a sensor into all those Hexar bodies that Sony has got sitting in a warehouse in Germany? But that’s a topic for another day.

Update: Folks looking to replace the eyepiece on their own Hexar RF, should look at this post, in which I detail building your own replacement eyepiece. With some tinkering this could also be a good way to get diopter correction or an increased mag VF. For those wanting to buying a diopter, check out KEH and http://www.photostop.net/Hexar.html.