The Leitz Elmar 10.5cm f/6.3 – Third time’s the charm! Read the exciting conclusion of my search for a pocketable telephoto lens. Don’t miss the comparison of all three lenses’ characteristics at the end of this chapter!
The Mountain Nikkor covered in part 1 of this short series is a pretty unusual lens but didn’t quite fit the bill in terms of compact size. The quest for a pocketable telephoto lens continued, here’s part 2: the Chiyoko Tele Rokkor 11cm f/5.6
A while ago I wrote about the Chiyoko Super Rokkor 45mm f/2.8 which quickly became one of my favourite lenses. Minolta made a whole set of LTM lenses to go with their Minolta-35 Barnack clone rangefinder camera that they released in the late 40s. Discovering a new brand that made lenses for LTM opens up a whole new can of worms. Luckily for my wallet, based on online reviews the other Chiyokos didn’t hold much interest for me, except one.
The following article is once again a 3-parter but this time it explores long lenses and how they fit into my pursuit of a small and lightweight kit that covers all bases (within reason). This first part looks at the Nikkor-T 10.5cm f/4. It will soon be two years since the first lockdown (by the …
Nikkor-T 10.5cm f/4 – The Mountain, the Berg, and the Molehill – Pt 1 – By Agata Urbaniak Read More
The Lomography Daguerrotype Achromat has been around for a few years now- a replica of one of the original portrait lenses from way back in the day, it’s based on a formula from 1839 according to the manufacturer Lomography. Here you can see it with the f2.9 aperture thing that drops into the slot at the top of the lens. For full details on the lens and its backstory you can take a look at the Lomography website HERE.
This is a review of the Ernst Leitz (Leica) Elmar 9cm f/4 Collapsible lens. Hamish recently reviewed the huge and very fast TT Artisan 90mm 1.25. This is perhaps the antithesis of that lens.
Leica is a polarising company and there’s a lot of polarising opinions circulating about their products. One of them is if you want to make full use of Leica camera bodies, you absolutely must use Leica lenses. It’s because they are “the world’s finest”. So good in fact that the folks at Leica have come up with trademarked names for them (Elmar, Summicron, Summilux, etc) in order to establish them as “the finest in their class”. At least that’s what Chuck Norris of lens reviews (you know who I’m talking about) says, before immediately contradicting himself saying that actually those names on their own are meaningless, like Kleenex or Tang. And then calling Oskar Barnack “The Prophet”, ironically or not I honestly have no idea. Ever the wordsmith and always so measured…
