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Pacific coast trip
Sep. 4th, 2006 05:36 pmYesterday, I took a road trip up Highway 1 between San Luis Obispo and Monterey. The original plan was that I'd be shooting there again today, but my motel booking got screwed up so I ended up driving home last night instead. I have therefore been diligently playing Gun on my X-box 360 (pretty good actually, but not the main reason for the post!)
My reason for the trip was that I wanted to do an initial shakedown of my new Megavision E-series monochrome back. I'll write more about it soon, but suffice it to say, so far so good, and the results are pretty spectactular, I have to say. Ken Boydston (the person who designed the back) spent several hours setting it up for my Bronica, which included fiddling around with shims to get the focus exactly dead on, and at one point actually milling some excess metal from part of the back because it was (probably harmlessly) fouling the bottom of my AE-II metering prism (the back was designed based on the measurements of the newer AE-III version). He and Richard Chang tested all of my lenses, and all but the rather beaten up 75mm standard lens I got with the body were declared very good, and the 55mm shift-tilt lens was described as extremely good. It was suggested that I might like to swap out my 75 for a newer example -- it works, but Ken reckoned that there was something 'just not right' about it. I will hit eBay and pick one up (they are very common and rather cheap, thankfully). All of the lenses (even the dodgy 75) managed to resolve to the limit of the sensor at a working aperture of f/8 to f/11, and actually weren't much softer wide open, which was something of a surprise.
The photos here were all taken with the Megavision back, and have just been adjusted a bit in curves. I did use some unsharp mask, but very little is needed -- other than a couple of cases where my focus was off or I managed to move the camera, everything was pin sharp at 100%.
40mm, f/11, 1/60th sec, deep orange filter
( More pics behind cut )
My reason for the trip was that I wanted to do an initial shakedown of my new Megavision E-series monochrome back. I'll write more about it soon, but suffice it to say, so far so good, and the results are pretty spectactular, I have to say. Ken Boydston (the person who designed the back) spent several hours setting it up for my Bronica, which included fiddling around with shims to get the focus exactly dead on, and at one point actually milling some excess metal from part of the back because it was (probably harmlessly) fouling the bottom of my AE-II metering prism (the back was designed based on the measurements of the newer AE-III version). He and Richard Chang tested all of my lenses, and all but the rather beaten up 75mm standard lens I got with the body were declared very good, and the 55mm shift-tilt lens was described as extremely good. It was suggested that I might like to swap out my 75 for a newer example -- it works, but Ken reckoned that there was something 'just not right' about it. I will hit eBay and pick one up (they are very common and rather cheap, thankfully). All of the lenses (even the dodgy 75) managed to resolve to the limit of the sensor at a working aperture of f/8 to f/11, and actually weren't much softer wide open, which was something of a surprise.
The photos here were all taken with the Megavision back, and have just been adjusted a bit in curves. I did use some unsharp mask, but very little is needed -- other than a couple of cases where my focus was off or I managed to move the camera, everything was pin sharp at 100%.
40mm, f/11, 1/60th sec, deep orange filter
( More pics behind cut )