Tuesday, January 05, 2010

An early zoom lens


In an article about prime lenses, Miserere pointed to the first zoom lens for 35mm still cameras. Wow, what a beautiful monster!
It was by accident I found that article by Miserere, but I've blogged before about his articles on the Canon S90. I like his thinking on gear, and he's a very good shooter too.




It's funny, by the way, I keep thinking that I have to choose between zooms and primes, instead of just using both or either. At the very least I feel one or the other should be my primary tool, and the other one quite secondary. Not choosing feels... schizo. Weird, it's primitive thinking. I guess it's the ol' craving for certainty.

Related: an article about "which lens to buy".

6 comments:

Steven said...

There's always a balance. For the style of portraiture I do, I've found that primes, especially Canon's 85mm 1.8, yield the most attractive results. For all of my event and "on the street" work, I shelled out the cash for a Canon 28-300mm. It also takes attractive portraits, but is a little heavy and unwieldy for quickly moving between poses and setups.

Anonymous said...

Primes will generally be optically better and a stop or two faster than zooms. Use the right tool for the job at hand.

And don't forget zoom feet.

-jbh-

RCMEDIA said...

When I was shooting medical photography, my department had a whole army of Leicas. The machines were fantastic - and we only had one really special lense. The Angenieux zoom.

It was the sharpest column of glass in our camera lockup - and we all used it to shoot everything from surgery to macro to landscapes. No distortion at all, and this 70-300mm lens was heavy - it contained REAL Baltic Sea glass, but it was worth using everytime.

It was a true zoom - you could focus on a certain plane and then zoom - and that plane would stay sharp without any deviation.

It was a 2.5 and the front element was 84mm.

Miserere said...

Eolake,

I'm glad you liked my article, and I'm surprised you found it. I'm fond of those articles I wrote for Yvon Bourque's Pentax blog, but it's almost impossible to run into them by accident as they're buried deep in his blog.

I see you liked the portrait of my friend Eva. She's very cute, with a beautiful, quick smile and expressive features. Getting a nice portrait of her is like shooting fish in a barrel :-D (And sorry guys, she's taken!)

As for your either/or conundrum, it's not schizo at all to not choose! Or rather, you do choose: you simply choose all lenses :-)

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Sounds like the right choice for me, if you can have it.

Eva is very cute.
Funny how some people just photograph well (my father did), and some just don't.

I found your article via google. I think I used:
miserere pentax lens
(because of your comment on Pentax here, and I think on tOP.)

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