I received quite a lot of feedback on my Leica M10 review especially regarding the B&W pictures – of which there were clearly more than there are usually to be found in my other articles – and I was asked to write a piece on how I process my B&W images. Then in the Voigtlander VM 35mm 1.2 III review people asked how I archive that vintage/film look, so I decided to combine both in one article.
We would like to make a little experiment: You can send us a raw file and then some of us will process it, show our settings, discuss our approach and maybe compare our results.
The idea is that you can compare our results to your own processing and maybe improve on it. At the same time we can compare our results and learn something as well. So everybody benefits 🙂
The easiest way would be to leave a comment with a link to the raw file. But you can also send an E-Mail to xxxx.
In many of our lens reviews we talk about certain kinds of aberrations, so this article shall give you an overview of typical lens aberrations, tell you in what lenses to encounter them and how to cope with them.
We may publish another article in the future that will go further into detail, not only naming the aberrations, but talking about what causes them.
Hi Juriaan,can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you use manual Lenses?
Juriaan: I’m a hydrobiologist from Ede in the Netherlands. In the beginning of 2012 my photography journey started out with a Fujifilm bridge camera. In 2013 I bought my first interchangeable lens camera, a Nikon D7000 including a 10-20 and 18-200. While using this camera I improved my skills quite a bit and I discovered my love for astro photography.
However, size and weight bothered me a lot, as did the average quality of my lenses, especially the annoying autofocus and bad manual focus implementation made me switch to an A7S in 2015. I got the Samyang/Rokinon 14mm T3.1 and the Loxia 2/50 along with it. The manual focus experience of the Loxia hooked me up on manual lenses. I found some old m42 primes, including the Pentacon 1.8/50, which I could use with an adapter. I liked working with those lenses a lot so I started to collect them at thrift shops which resulted in quite some nice lenses over the years. This way I could discover a broad range of (bokeh) rendering for little money. As I hated the from factor of the Samyang 14mm I added the little Voigtländer 15mm f/4.5 to my kit. Using manual lenses helped me to improve my photography a lot in a short period. Being unable to just point and shoot I had to overthink things much more which is the best way to learn quick. To everybody who starts with photography I can only recommend to get one or two cheap manual lenses, it will help you to understand the exposure triangle quickly, and it slows you down which makes you think more about things like composition.
Last two years I already visited (by airplane) the Balkan countries Montenegro and Albania for a hiking vacation with my girlfriend and a photography trip with my photo buddy Rick. The wild nature of the Balkans attracts me a lot. As the Balkans are not well known yet, and a lot of people from West Europe think its still dangerous there (most area’s are safe nowadays), you can walk around in the mountains without seeing anyone for a whole day.
The Balkan countries also have very nice, often old cities at the Adriatic coast which are touristic, but not nearly as those in e.g. Italy.
Below you can find a few pictures from my trip last year, which convinced me to go back again this year. Most photo’s of this year can be found in high resolution here. The timelapse video my friend Rick made is also worth checking.
Continue reading Travel report: A journey through the Balkans