On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 00:27:00 -0800, John Celio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As I mentioned earlier today, I've got a handfull of photos taken with the > Fisheye-Takumar 18mm F11. > > The first eight photos were shot with my MX and a roll of Tri-X 400. They > were scanned with my Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III, "auto-levels"-ed in > Photoshop, and resized to 700 pixels wide so I don't kill my allotted > website space. I didn't realize it when I was shooting, but my finger > managed to get into the corner of a few of the shots. I don't remember the > aperture settings for each, but they were probably f11 or f16. > > One thing I should note about this lens: the aperture is not a normal bladed > aperture. There appears to be a thin piece of metal with four progressively > smaller holes cut into it that rotates as you turn the aperture ring. I > initially thought perfectly round apertures like these would provide for > very good results (as my Leica-freak friends like to point out the > half-million aperture blades in their lenses, forming a better circle than > other brands' lenses), but then I saw the lack of sharpness everywhere but > the center of each photo. > > Today I tried the lens on my *istD to see how the sharpness and DOF looked > at each aperture setting (f11, 16, 22, and 32). > > The bottom four photos are from this test. NOTE: These photos are not > re-sized at all, and are therefore around 2 megabytes each. I did this so > anyone here could take a look at the full-res image if they wanted to. I > should have found a better scene to shoot, but at the time I was mostly > interested in the sharpness falloff at the corners. > > http://www.newpixel.net/special/fishy/fishy.html > > Conclusion: this is a fun lens, due to its compactness (it's essentially a > pancake lens), but not particularly good for digital photography. With good > ol' Tri-X, however, it produced some really cool artistic effects. I'm > going to have to shoot a couple more rolls and see what I can get from it. >
My fave is "Theresa". From the thumb she reminded me of my youngest, Claire, but when I opened it up, the resemblance was less obvious. I liked it 'cause it's a cool shot, not because of the resemblance, BTW. <vbg> The rest are pretty good, too. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
