Buying New Equipment?

[Mike Farley]

Roger Cicala is the former owner (and now shareholder) of LensRentals, a US based camera equipment hire company. For anyone with an interest in seeing the insides of cameras and lenses, his blog is the go to site as the man has a passion for taking gear apart. Since LensRentals has a large volume of equipment going through its doors, Roger C is also able to test multiple copies to establish how much variation there is in performance. You might be surprised at how big the differences can sometimes be.

Another benefit having a lot of equipment is that the company gets to see how reliable it all is, which is information that can often be hard to ascertain, making this link of particular interest.

http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/09/lensrentals-repair-data-january-july-2012

Whilst discussing reliability, to my knowledge at least two members have had to have repairs to the diaphragms of their Canon 24 - 105L f/4 lenses. Talking to repair company Fixation recently, it seems that this might be a common issue for the lens.

The blog itself is not particularly easy to navigate and there is no home page that I can see, let alone a search option, so you will have to click on all the different headings down the side, but this place seems to be as good a place as any to start.

http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/category/equipment

[davidc]

Interesting, I've wondered about taking apart an old film camera and sticking a decent digital compact in it. I like some of the old film bodies but my experience of film is almost all negative so this way I get the best of both worlds

[Mike Farley]

...... my experience of film is almost all negative .......

Have you tried slide film? Boom, boom!

[Mike Farley]

The serious answer is short and to the point. Don't bother. Earlier this year I did come across a photographer who had put an old DSLR inside a view camera, but the small size of the APS-C sensor compared to size of the image circle from the lens meant that he had a ridiculously high crop factor. His only option was extremely long telephoto shots. The main reason I can think of for doing something like this is novelty value.

I am not sure why you would want to try this with any other type of camera as the manufacturers have already developed digital equivalents. You would have to be seriously good at DIY and have the right equipment to get everything connected and set up correctly. I would imagine positioning the sensor to ensure correct focus would be extremely difficult. Even being out by just a fraction of a millimetre would cause problems.

[Mike Farley]

I have just found the perfect bit of kit for any DIY enthusiasts out there.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ecdd/?srp=13

[Mike Farley]

I took this shot earlier this year during the Watercress Line World War II re-enactment event. All is not as this seems for the photographer is the person I mentioned earlier who had put an old DSLR inside a view camera. He told me that the lens had a focal length of 4 1/2 inches and the digital camera looked like a Canon EOS 300D. I'll leave it to the more mathematically astute amongst us to work out what the crop factor is for such a combination.

[davidc]

Oh the plan isn't to use the old lens etc. it's to just rip out the internals and glass from the dodgy lens. So "hollowing out" the old body that looks cool and sticking an S100 inside.

Granted it's probably not THAT likely to happen but until then I'll experiment with the extremely fickle beast that is film. I can't for the life of me understand why people would choose film over digital as anything other than a "for fun" exercise!

[Mike Farley]

Oh the plan isn't to use the old lens etc. it's to just rip out the internals and glass from the dodgy lens. So "hollowing out" the old body that looks cool and sticking an S100 inside.

You would have some issues such as how to trigger the shutter, which is a question I did not think to ask the chap I met at the Watercress Line.

Granted it's probably not THAT likely to happen but until then I'll experiment with the extremely fickle beast that is film. I can't for the life of me understand why people would choose film over digital as anything other than a "for fun" exercise!

Well, that should have a few people choking over their cornflakes! Or perhaps the type who are old fashioned enough to stick with film are also those who do not frequent online forums?

I have heard any number of reasons for preferring film. When Eamonn McCabe gave his Waratten Lecture a few years ago, his argument was that he knew from his years of experience how to produce phoptos that way and he did not want to have to learn all over again with digital. Although he was shooting for publication, the images were not needed straightaway and I gathered that he left others to do the actual processing overnight. That's a solution for which many well known photographers have opted and quite a few do not (or did not) print their own pictures. leaving it to specialists. Taking a picture and producing the final image are different skills, regardless of the medium on which the image was captured.

Some prefer the look of film, saying that they cannot get the same results from digital. Occasionally a digital camera is cited as giving film like results. The Leica M9 is often said to render colours which are similar to Kodachrome, which might be explained by the camera having a sensor which were developed by Kodak. The Leica Monochrom M is supposed to give results which are like black and white film, allegedly aided by having a CCD sensor rather than the more common CMOS type.

When I met Lee Frost in 2006, at that time he was still convinced that film was better. From a commercial perspective it was causing him some problems as picture agencies were returning his slides and would only re-accept the images if they were scanned at his expense. A year or so later, after his conversion to digital, I read a magazine article in which he wrote that he had been mad to persist with film for so long!

Fortunately, photography is big enough to accommodate everyone, particularly those for whom it is the final image which is important, rather than the equipment on which it was made.