Lens solution SOS

I just got my P25 PhaseOne and Mamiya 645 AFD and went to talk to a brother of a friend who is an architect here in NY... and guess what .. he has work for me. Now I have to find the wide solutions.

Zoerk ??

HARTBLEI ??

Or Sinar etc,

What do you think. I will probably do a model first and after they want to assign me an apartment interior... so I have to find a solution in one or two weeks, or sooner.

thanks

Hi Leonardo,

I am very glad to read that you've received your first assignment in NY with your new gear. I wish you all the luck in the world, or as they say in the theater world, "break a leg"!

Lot of success and may this be the start of a great career for you in the Big Apple .

Regards,

Cem

Rainer is by far the best and worst person to give advice here.

The best, since I know of no other photographer who is so meticulous about his work and knowledgable about choices for architecture.

The worst since he has invested in the best and that is going to be more expensive than the average solutions that may be "good enough".

However, since I developed the motto, ""Good enough", isn't!", I must say that I'd at least look into the lenses he uses. Perhaps after you buy a Zork adapter and then a $450 used Pentax 6x7 lens, you might be far better of with a Rodenstock, Schneider or Sinaron digital lens with a digital 4x5 body to hold the lens and back.

The factors of image circle, movements and angle of incidence to the sensor are all already known by Rainer, not me!

Where you might depart from his choices, I would imagine would be the body.

For the Hartblei,

http://www.google.com/custom?sitese...m&q=Hartblei&sa=Search+The+Luminous+Landscape

Asher

leonardobarreto.com said:

I just got my P25 PhaseOne and Mamiya 645 AFD and went to talk to a brother of a friend who is an architect here in NY... and guess what .. he has work for me. Now I have to find the wide solutions.

Zoerk ??

HARTBLEI ??

Or Sinar etc,

What do you think. I will probably do a model first and after they want to assign me an apartment interior... so I have to find a solution in one or two weeks, or sooner.

thanks

Click to expand...

hm.
i dont see solution from sinar for the mamiya 645. their 35mm af lense is not bad, although not same as good than the pentax 645 35af. you can have an shift adapter from zoerk to use the 6x7 lenses from mamiya with the 645 mount,- but i havent tested them. not sure, but i think 45mm is the widest than. not very wide on a 48mm chip. same about the shift for the 645,- and i hardly doubt that it will be good in terms of distortion.

and everything else will be very expensive, cause it means a whole new system.
maybee you could think in working with not shiftable lenses,- if its just this one job,- depends on also how "big" it is and which kkind of shooting. interior? exterior? how many shots / days of work?

i did good things with fullframe canons and the zoerk adapter and pentax 35/45/55 lenses, which allow you to shift and to stitch,- and the thing might be affortable. or a 5d with a 24mm tse. if you are not doing regularily this architecture work, the expectations of yor architect in terms of 100% "correct" architecture work can not be extreme high..... so some creative solution can be good also.
sorry me for just brainstorming here.... not easy to say any uefull thing about your problem.

Thank you Asher, I was beginning to ask myself if getting a digital back before having clients was a good idea or not, or the way my wife put it: "do you know what you are doing?" -- to myself I answered: "well, Asher thinks everyone should get one" when I went to see the brother of a good friend that happens to be a busy and established NY architect and told me he and his partner have things that need to be photographed.

So in retrospect, I think that doing all the research, finding how to finance and buying the medium format solution was not so bad after all.

The reason is that all of this takes time, -- I have been waiting for a quote to insure the equipment for more than a week now, for example -- so if I had come to NY, met this potential client and then decided to start the process of getting the MF (or even just to rent) and then get back to the client would have been painfully long.

Now I only have to research the wide angle solution.

Talking about this, I just went to FOTOCARE to talk about this and found out that: they do not sell "Phase", and they don't have any wide angle solution for rent ! They showed me an ALPA that I would have to buy, so no thanks, at least not yet.

They dismissed the Hartblei as having bad quality, I think the are correct here.

Then they remembered that Mamiya has a 50mm Shift lens, so that may be my lead. Find, test and research the 50mm.

Anyway that's my story today, take care Asher

Leonardo,

Did you read Michael Reichman's report?

I think the Hartblei might just be fine!

Anyway you can correct it if needed, but what's your time frame?

The Hartblei now comes in Zeiss Distagons which would be wonderful for a 5D or a 1DsII if you still have one. I'm not sure they have them for MF yet!

Asher

Yes, apparently they are NOT going to make the Distagons for medium format, but 35mm.

I think that the Mamiya 50mm F4 SHIFT could be a useful lens, according to Mamiya this is a 31mm equivalent lens, which is not wide enough for a normal lens, but it would be perfect for a stitch solution. If you have a tall building, you set the camera in panoramic position, take one shot with the lens perpendicular to the bealdings beams, shift all the way to the top and shoot the second shot and stitch after. I saw one in B&H for $600.

This could be a reasonable cost solution that requires a bit of more work but no compromise in IQ. The other good thing is that there is such thing as "lens casting" phenomenon to consider.

It seams that --and correct me if I don't know what I'm talking about-- for digital photography, the opposite of film, retrofocus lenses work better than non retrofocus ones because of the angle of the sensel wells vis a vis that of the light coming from the last element of the lens.

So a 50mm shift lens for Mamiya could give less lens cast than a view camera type solution with tilts etc...

leonardobarreto.com said:

Yes, apparently they are NOT going to make the Distagons for medium format, but 35mm.

I think that the Mamiya 50mm F4 SHIFT could be a useful lens, according to Mamiya this is a 31mm equivalent lens, which is not wide enough for a normal lens, but it would be perfect for a stitch solution. If you have a tall building, you set the camera in panoramic position, take one shot with the lens perpendicular to the bealdings beams, shift all the way to the top and shoot the second shot and stitch after. I saw one in B&H for $600.

This could be a reasonable cost solution that requires a bit of more work but no compromise in IQ. The other good thing is that there is such thing as "lens casting" phenomenon to consider.

It seams that --and correct me if I don't know what I'm talking about-- for digital photography, the opposite of film, retrofocus lenses work better than non retrofocus ones because of the angle of the sensel wells vis a vis that of the light coming from the last element of the lens.

So a 50mm shift lens for Mamiya could give less lens cast than a view camera type solution with tilts etc...

Click to expand...

you have to shot with opalglass in any case and subtract that lcc shot after. not so big deal...
dont understand exactly what you will gain with the mamiya stitching. look after the 35mm lense from them, this will give you in any case a wider lense than the 50mm lense if stitched. but its a good idea to buy it and to use it as shift lense. for the wider shots you can use than the 35mm and correct electronically in photoshop.

This is what I mean when I talk about stitching:

P 25 has a sensor size 49mm x 37mm, this is my "film plane" Lenses have a relative "wideness" only to this format or film plane size, in this case it is a bit smaller than a 645 transparencie. If the 50mm was a non shift lens it would be a bit more than 31mm (equivalent to 35mm). This is not very wide at all.

But the Image circle of this lens is 97mm, (all of the area that I colored orange in the photo and that is inside the black line.

As you can see the if you shift and stitch the final image will be as if taken with a much wider lens, or as if taken with a camera with a 50mm but of bigger format, like a 6x9.

leonardobarreto.com said:

This is what I mean when I talk about stitching:



As you can see the if you shift and stitch the final image will be as if taken with a much wider lens, or as if taken with a camera with a 50mm but of bigger format, like a 6x9.

Click to expand...

this is what i did requently with my canon / zoerk system and sometimes with the sinar / HR lenses also, for the same reason,- to have a wider view than the lense allows unstitched.
in this case you have to correct the image after stitching for distortion ( thinking in the larger image circle...).
you have to shoot both shots with lcc fils and than working little bit on the overlayd layers, because they will not fit for 100% in terms of color and levels, for discolorations which will be a tick different.
but no problem. you can do that, its easy.