As third lens of the prestigious Otus lineup, in 2016 Zeiss released the Zeiss Otus 28mm 1.4 Apo Distagon. At that time it was the biggest, heaviest and most complex 28mm fullframe lens ever seen and it came with an eye watering price tag of $5.000, putting it far ouf of most people’s reach. On the used market you can now find this lens for less than half that – still a lot of money – is it worth saving up for this lens? Let’s try to find out!
The Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f/3.5 is a vintage lens, originally designed in 1929. Renowned for its simple yet ingenious design and impressive sharpness, it’s also celebrated for its remarkably light weight. Historically, 135mm has been the classic focal length for portrait photography, and the most popular telephoto focal length for most photographers. Therefore almost all of the lens manufacturers had at least 2 of them, a f/2.8 and a f/3.5, many offered other speeds in between or even faster than 2.8. The Sonnar design, with its compact size, made it a popular choice for photographers on the move. While Carl Zeiss produced numerous Sonnar 135mm lenses, other manufacturers have also developed their own Sonnar-inspired lenses incorporating modern technology. Despite its historical significance, I found the Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f/3.5 price more reasonable than other coveted vintage lenses, prompting me to purchase one for testing. (I bought mine for €10 but prices normally start from €20)
I tested this lens on a 46 Mp Nikon Z 7II (Sample images Nikon Z6 and Nikon Zf)
You can see this review as a YouTube video here!
The Zeiss ZM 21mm 4.5 C-Biogon is the widest of the three “Classic” designs in Zeiss’ ZM line up. It has long been discontinued and it wasn’t in production for a long time, so it is a bit rare and rather expensive on the used market. I always wondered how it would compare to the similarly compact yet newer Voigtländer VM 21mm 3.5 Color-Skopar and now we will finally find out.
Lens is being tested on 42mp Sony A7rII and 24mp Leica M10
When Sony released the first affordable fullframe camera with the A7 in 2013 almost none of the enthusiast photographers were aware of issues related to filter stack differences. Filter stack describes what is in front of the sensor and different manufacturers decided to go for different thicknesses here that can influence how our lenses perform. If you stay within just one system this is usually not something to care about, but when adapting lenses it is very helpful to be aware of this topic.
In this article I try to tell you about these differences and for what lenses they matter, so you can find out if it is something that might affect you.
There are already two articles covering Portra 800, but both times they have been developed in the ECN-2 process by Silbersalz35. What was missing was Portra 800 developed in the more common C-41 process, so here we go.
Exposed as ISO640. Processing (C-41) and scanning was done at urbanfilmlab in Germany.
Continue reading Analogue Adventures – Part 30: Kodak Portra 800 C-41