Experimenting With Vintage Lenses – Nippon Kogaku NIKKOR-S Auto 50m F/1.4
Another lens that recently arrived with me is this beautiful Nippon Kogaku NIKKOR-S Auto 50m F/1.4. It’s a fast little lens that I’m told has quite a quirky bokeh, so I’m looking forward to putting it through it’s paces. If you’d like to read a short review of this lens, click here to read Josh Solomon’s take on what he describes at “the underdog”. Image results will follow soon!
Experimenting With Vintage Lenses – Nikon Nikkor 28mm f/3.5 (Pre Ai) (K Version)
Another lens I’m about to experiment with is this gorgeous little 1970s Nikon Nikkor 28mm f/3.5 (Pre Ai) K version lens. This one has been purchased to use with an R72 infrared filter and again, I’ll be posting some image results over the coming days and weeks.
Experimenting With Vintage Lenses – Minolta 70-200mm f/4
As we begin to emerge from this difficult period I’ve decided to draw a line under it by doing a few things I haven’t done in a while. I’ve been planning to test a few vintage “non-Nikon” lenses for some time now and this Minolta 70-200mm f/4 comes highly recommended by several colleagues. These can also be purchased cheaply (think £30-£60) and if you decide to not keep it there are plenty who will take it off your hands again. I’ll be updating the blog with the results over the next few weeks so please keep checking in!
Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not!”
Some of you might recognise the series of books the one above belongs to. My son loves them so imagine his surprise when he leafed through this latest copy only to find both his Dad’s name and image half way through!
simple, effective and cheap reflector/diffuser holders!
Product and macro photographers are rather forced into having a reflector and diffuser fetish.. I regularly set up shots using 7 or 8 reflectors, flags, scrims and diverse diffusers and have often torn my hair out trying to position one “just so”. You would have thought that numerous companies would have produced a multitude of cheap solutions to the problem but actually, not really! Manfrotto has a few hideously expensive articulated arms, 6-8 of which would set you back about a grand or more! There are some Chinese companies that produce a couple of gooseneck products but either the necks are two week or the clamps are, so they’re not particularly effective, even at £20 a pop. So now let me share a top tip that I recently discovered: I give you the Lonzoth Universal Phone Holder Clip! These are very simple plastic covered wire goosenecks to hold mobile phones but with a few big differences.
- The goosenecks themselves are incredibly strong and actually need a bit of effort to bend into place. That means, however, that they’ll support the weight of anything you’re likely to use as a reflector and then some! OK, the phone clip is not designed to hold pieces of card and therefore could be a tad strong but it does work and is easily modified to be stronger if necessary.
- They have screw down clamps to attack to the table, which unlike clips, actually stay in place!
- You can purchase them in white, which means they won’t reject weird and wonderful colours all round your shooting table or subject.
- Finally, they’re £7.99 a piece, a veritable bargain for something this useful.
So there you go. Simple, effective and cheap reflector/diffuser holders!
