Category Archives: Gear Talk

The main reason I bought the Sony NEX 7 was to use with my Leica M kit, even though many reviews that said the NEX 7 sensor has a serious flaw that makes it unsuitable for use with wide angle rangefinder lenses. The NEX 7 sensor has a layer of micro-lenses, these micro-lenses focus the light hitting them from the lens onto the photo-receptor sites of the sensor. On the NEX 7 they’re built with SLR type lenses in mind that sit much farther from the sensor than rangefinder lenses, the light coming from SLR type lenses striking the sensor at nearer to perpendicular angles. Rangefinder lenses, especially wide angle ones, have rear elements that extend much closer to the sensor, causing the light they focus to hit the sensor at much more oblique angles the further they strike from the center. The micro lenses of the NEX 7 sensor can’t seem to handle light hitting them at such extreme angles which leads to color shifting and lowered sharpness at the edges and corners. I won’t dispute this makes the NEX 7 less than optimal when paired with such lenses, the question is: “Is less than optimal still good enough to take good pictures?” The first lens I’ll be taking a look at with this in mind is one of my favourites, the Voigtlander 15mm f4.5 Heliar. Continue reading →

Yeah, yeah… I said I wasn’t going to do a write up on the kit lens on the Sony NEX 7, but after the shoot at the Old Howard Smith Paper Mill I felt I had to speak up for this little gem. I’ll be honest, I never really gave it a chance when I got it along with my NEX 3. I played with it a bit when I first got it then quickly put it on the shelf, because hey, real photographers don’t use kit lenses, right? Well damn, is my face red. Continue reading →

This is part one of my ongoing review of my new toy, the Sony NEX 7. Over the next couple months I’ll be posting my thoughts on the camera paired with various lenses, I didn’t buy it to get into Sony’s E-Mount lenses, it’s primarily to compliment my Leica film kit so I’ll be talking about it with those lenses in mind. Sony’s own lens offerings aren’t amazing so far, I may pick up their new 50mm this summer, but that’s about it. There’s been a lot of controversy over this camera in the rangefinder circles; it was hoped that the NEX 7 would be the Leica killer, a camera the average user could afford that overcame all the little issues we’ve all be complaining about with other mirrorless cameras. It’s got a nice big sensor, gorgeous EVF, lots of manual control nobs and buttons, built in flash, articulated LCD and offers tons of different ways for the user to customize control. On paper it’s almost the perfect camera, but conflicting results with wide angle rangefinder lenses had many people worried. I’ll get to that later, but first let’s start with first impressions. Continue reading →

The Hawk’s Factory Close Focus Adapter is a marvelous little piece of engineering that many people won’t care about, and those that should care, probably don’t know about. One of the biggest limitations of any rangefinder system is close focus ability. Rangefinder bodies and lenses just aren’t designed for it; parallax error makes focusing closer than around a meter very difficult with mechanical rangefinders so there was never really any reason to build a lens that could focus closer than that. Using a rangefinder lens on a mirrorless camera avoids the issue of parallax error, but the lenses still can’t focus any closer than they used to; enter the Hawk’s Factory Helicoid. Not only does it allow Leica M lenses to be mounted on a Sony E-Mount camera, it’s got a built in helicoid to move the lens out a few more millimeters from the sensor. So what… a few millimeters, what does that give you? Quite a bit actually…
Continue reading →

When the mirror-less cameras started coming out a couple years ago, most serious photographers said, “Meh, interesting, but no thanks”. The idea was sound, but the features just weren’t there. The smaller sensor size, and resulting crop factor kept most people sceptical, and the lack of viewfinder scared the rest away. Panasonic made some progress with their G series, but it still wasn’t a serious workhorse; at best the Micro 4/3rds cameras were considered nice snapshot tools to take on vacation when you didn’t want to lug around your Canon or Nikon gear. Continue reading →

Last week saw the release of yet another technical marvel in the world of photography, possibly one of the most important photographic inventions since the digital sensor. Behold the Lytro, the worlds first commercial camera capable of recording depth in a photo, allowing you to change the plane of focus after the shot. I’m not going to go into details on how this little gadget works, there’s a ton online already for those that are interested. It doesn’t really matter, let’s call it Wizards and forget about that for now.

At the moment the technology is too knew to be even considered for professional work. It hasn’t been confirmed yet as the Lytro company has been pretty dodgey about releasing actual technical specs for the camera, saying only that it has an “11 Mega-Ray” sensor, which is exactly what it sounds like… techno-babble to confuse the masses into buying into a big number in front of an “M”, because no self-respecting consumer would buy a digital camera with less than 10 M’s… M’s are good right? That’s where the Jiga-Pixels come from right? One of the pro-photogs that was given a pre-release sample said the actual resolution is somewhere between 1-2MP, so good enough for the web or a 4X6 print.  I knew something smelled fishy when actual resolution numbers where nowhere to be found in any of the press material. Continue reading →