Gentle reader,
[UPDATE begins near the bottom of the page.]
I have, as written in the last post, accepted that I have enough recorded music, and am VERY happy with my sound system. I am, in fact, listening to it in here on the silver speakers that I featured on their new stands, in my last post. I was able to sell the oak tower speakers to a very nice man in Maryland, which ironically is where they were handmade by someone else who will forever be a mystery to me.
Nonetheless, I still sometimes, "for old time's sake", swing through one of my old thrift store "haunts". At The Village, a fellow shopper was looking at a couple of camera lenses, one older, one more recent. He liked the former and handed the newer one to me. Turns out it was a mint condition Sigma 70-300mm autofocus zoom lens in Nikon mount. It was less than ten dollars so it came home with me. A few weeks later, I stopped at SAVERS thrift store and almost overlooked a small black fabric covered box with a $2.99 price sticker on it. I opened it and to my surprise and delight was a Nikon 55-200mm digital autofocus lens inside! I couldn't believe it! Again, it came home with me.
Most digital SLR camera buyers choose the "kit" lens which in the case of APS-C* sized sensor digital SLR cameras, is usually 18-55mm in focal length. Sellers will often offer a companion lens of the same brand, usually 55-200mm. Thus two lenses will cover from wide angle to telephoto. This Nikon lens was one of those latter lenses.
*APS was a film format that replaced 110 and hoped to supplement 35mm by being quick-loading. Like 110 and 126 film cartridges before it, APS film was drop-in. Open a door on the bottom of the camera, drop the cartridge it, close the door and the camera did the rest. You sent the exposed film cartridge off and it came back with the film still in it, but developed, along with your prints. There were three types or shapes of the pictures one could choose with APS:
- H for "High Definition" (30.2 × 16.7 mm; aspect ratio 16:9; 4×7" print)
- C for "Classic" (25.1 × 16.7 mm; aspect ratio 3:2; 4×6" print)
- P for "Panoramic" (30.2 × 9.5 mm; aspect ratio 3:1; 4×11" print)
Advanced Photo System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
*Provided the above table. So, most makers, but not Canon, chose APS-C as the size to make the sensors of their digital SLR cameras. In the case of Nikon and Pentax, both makers chose to use the SAME MOUNT as their 35mm film cameras. So, almost any lens that fits a Nikon or Pentax film SLR will also fit a digital body from the same maker. APS-C sensors are 50% smaller than "full-frame" or 35mm sized sensors of 24mm by 36mm. Thus, a digital 18-55mm lens multiplies (x1.5) out to: 27-82.5mm in 35mm format or "full-frame" sized sensor. Digital-only lenses, while they will mount on 35mm film SLRs have too small of an "image circle" and any pictures made with said lens on film will have vignetting, or blacked out corners on the image.
The cool thing about using FILM lenses on digital bodies is that 1.5 multiplication factor seems to add distance in the case of normal (50mm) to telephoto lenses. Thus, a 50mm film lens will produce an image on a digital body similar to a 75mm film lens would on 35mm film. 200mm will look like a 300mm image, etc. The converse is wide angle lenses are expensive to make and work on a digital SLR because sensors only collect light that is directly pointed at them where film will gather light from angles. That is why digital wide angle lenses, such as 10-25mm (15-37.5mm) on a film SLR are so expensive to buy. Confused yet?
I chose Nikon because once expensive film SLR bodies were dirt cheap as so many people were buying Nikon digital bodies. I also chose the D70s body direct from Nikon "Remanufactured" because it was considerably less expensive than a brand new one and still came with a warranty. We Scots like to save our pennies.
*Provided the above table. So, most makers, but not Canon, chose APS-C as the size to make the sensors of their digital SLR cameras. In the case of Nikon and Pentax, both makers chose to use the SAME MOUNT as their 35mm film cameras. So, almost any lens that fits a Nikon or Pentax film SLR will also fit a digital body from the same maker. APS-C sensors are 50% smaller than "full-frame" or 35mm sized sensors of 24mm by 36mm. Thus, a digital 18-55mm lens multiplies (x1.5) out to: 27-82.5mm in 35mm format or "full-frame" sized sensor. Digital-only lenses, while they will mount on 35mm film SLRs have too small of an "image circle" and any pictures made with said lens on film will have vignetting, or blacked out corners on the image.
The cool thing about using FILM lenses on digital bodies is that 1.5 multiplication factor seems to add distance in the case of normal (50mm) to telephoto lenses. Thus, a 50mm film lens will produce an image on a digital body similar to a 75mm film lens would on 35mm film. 200mm will look like a 300mm image, etc. The converse is wide angle lenses are expensive to make and work on a digital SLR because sensors only collect light that is directly pointed at them where film will gather light from angles. That is why digital wide angle lenses, such as 10-25mm (15-37.5mm) on a film SLR are so expensive to buy. Confused yet?
I chose Nikon because once expensive film SLR bodies were dirt cheap as so many people were buying Nikon digital bodies. I also chose the D70s body direct from Nikon "Remanufactured" because it was considerably less expensive than a brand new one and still came with a warranty. We Scots like to save our pennies.
Today, since I was trying to make this new lens (the Sigma already displaced the flash/case from the camera backpack) and deciding whether I could let any of them go to new owners, I decided to do some group shots.
I included the FILM SLR, my N90s which is the bigger one as well as their respective dedicated flashes. The Sigma lens (70-300mm) is second from the right in the back row.
The silver and black one is made by Tokina and is 100-400mm in focal length. It is the only Tokina lens that I recall owning, and I've owned a LOT of lenses! There are many aftermarket lens makers out there, some like Vivitar have been around a long time. Sigma and Tamron are probably the biggest sellers. There are others, some of which I have here: Promaster is one, Quantaray, made by Sigma is or was Ritz Camera's store brand. One of those here as well. There are many others, most that have faded to obscurity.
Below, you can see how much wider and taller the N90s is compared to my digital D70s body. The Sigma fisheye lens is mounted on the D70s digital body, below. The N90s has a 35-70mm Nikon lens on it.
Ok, from memory, let me see if I can identify all the lenses below: Top left is the Tokina 100-400mm, in the middle is the Sigma 70-300mm, and on the top right is the Promaster 28-200mm. All three are FILM lenses, so they work on both film and digital bodies. Next row is (digital) Nikon 18-55mm, then Nikon 28-80mm, and the (digital) 55-200mm lens. Next row down is: Nikon 28-80mm then Quantaray 19-35mm and the one on the right is a Sigma fisheye lens which attaches to the front of a 50mm lens making a round image equal to 8.5mm on film or 12.75mm on digital sensor The corners are blacked out on digital images as it's image circle is not quite as large as the digital sensor. Finally on the bottom is a Nikon 50mm f1.4 (normal) lens. I keep it on the D70s when it is in the camera backpack. Note: ALL but the 18-55mm and 55-200mm lenses are FILM ones. So they all can be used on the N90s and any other film Nikon SLR. NOT in this shot is the 35-70mm lens that was still mounted on the N90s body.
Above is the telephoto lenses: 100-400mm, 70-300mm, 28-200mm and (digital) 55-200mm. Now, the 28-200mm is a Tamron and goes from 28mm wide angle to 200mm telephoto and every single millimeter in between.
Above and below is the same Nikon digital 55-200mm lens along with the 28-80mm lens (note the "D" on it does not mean it is digital), digital 18-55mm and Quantaray 19-35mm film lens. I do not know why the previous owner of the 19-35mm lens blacked out the Quantaray name. They are perfectly good lenses, that, as I mentioned above, are made by Sigma.
I also have a T-mount Sigma 12mm super wide angle lens that will work on both cameras, but I keep it with my Voigtlander 35mm rangefinder camera kit. So, if you include that and the 35-70mm Nikon lens on the N90s, I have one dozen lenses. What's ironic about all this is that I rarely use this camera. I love my Panasonic Lumix trio of cameras with their Leica lenses and these images were made with my several-year-old Fujifilm Finepix S7000 camera. I have made multiple ten of thousands of images with it, mostly for ebay, as it has excellent macro capability. Whew! OK, I am tired now with all this typing.
You may be thinking, "Wait a minute, you said 'Sigma', that say's Spiratone!" And right you are, sharp-eyed-reader. However, if you look at the serial number on the lower right of the lens, that symbol in front of the number is the Greek letter: Sigma. Sigma made these and other lenses in their own name and for Spiratone which was a huge photography company in the last Century.
Note how convex the front element is and you can see others in the image below. Note that this is a "T-mount" lens which means it will work on any 35mm or digital camera that accepts T-mounts. However, the tricky part with modern (AKA: digital) cameras, is getting the camera body to work with the lens. Plus it is only an f8 which means the largest aperture is tiny. Thus it needs a lot of light and/or a tripod to allow for slow shutter speeds.
The Sigma/Spiratone lens gives you a scale to compare in size. Note in the image above that an element inside it is also quite convex.
Now, above, with the small camera flash, is the 18mm image (27mm in 35mm). Note the width and height of things. Now, look below to see how much wider the picture is with the Olympus 0.8X lens which makes it 14.4mm or 21.6mm in 35mm. WOW!
Thanks for looking,
Scott
UPDATE:
As written above, I have a Sigma 12mm super wide angle lens. I decided to show you that lens mounted on the Nikon D70s:
Also mentioned above (somewhere) is the Olympus wide angle auxiliary lens created for their IS-3DLX cameras of yore, of which I have one. It screws onto the front of that camera's 35-180mm lens and converts it to 28mm at the wide end. Or 25% wider. With the Nikon 18-55mm lens on my D70s and a 52-55mm step-up ring, I can (and have, see below) mounted that lens and taken photos with the D70s to show you the difference in width/height this makes. This makes the 18mm end of the zoom lens, 27mm equivalent were it a 35mm film lens, equal to about a 21.6mm wide angle lens or 14.4mm in digispeak. One must be careful as the plastic body of the Nikon lens isn't made to support such a heavy add-on. So, here it is mounted as mentioned:
Fujifilm, the company that made the camera that made all the images above, were quite clever with their Finepix S7000 camera. The lens tube, like in so many fixed-lens cameras, slide back into the body when the camera is turned off. They knew the lens was limited at the wide and telephoto ends so they (and other companies) made auxiliary wide angle and telephoto lenses. Rather than have them screw on to the lens tube itself, they made the camera body accept a screw-in tube with 55mm threads that fits around the extended lens. One can, and I have, adapt those lenses as well as a ring flash and a LED ring light as well. So, since the Olympus lens IS 55mm threads on the small end, I decided to see what it would do with images. So, without further ado, the results, Nikon images first:
Below, and if you are tired of reading this, imagine how tired I am of typing it, are the same shots made with the Fujifilm camera and the same lens added to it:
It must be around 35mm equivalent on a 35mm camera. Now with the added 0.8X lens:
Still no where nearly as wide as the Nikon's 18mm lens. But that's OK. The Fuji has done me very well for MANY years. Whew! OK, now I'm done. Thanks for your patience!
Thanks for looking,
Scott
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