…As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now, witness the firepower of this FULLY ARMED AND OPERATIONAL BATTLE STATION!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamwithcam/2214313819/

(Link courtesy of my good friend, Brandon Perron from the [b] school…)

=Matt=

Over the years, zoom lenses have evolved into certain “useful” focal lengths. 28-80, 35-70, 28-70, 24-70, 28-105, 24-120…

Basically the theory is, it’s GOOD to have a mid-range lens that can cover both wide angles AND telephoto at the same time.

This may be great for photojournalism, and I’m sure that many pros are totally happy with their 24-70 2.8… (At least Nikon pros are LOVING theirs. Resolves perfectly even on 24 megapixels, unlike a certain “L” 24-70…)

But I digress. Most generic event photographers like that focal range; that’s my point.

However, I shoot some pretty odd-ball types of photography, and let me tell you- sometimes, especially when you’re shooting from a fixed distance and can’t get any closer OR back up, …you just wish you could have different focal ranges. So I’m going to theorize…

(Just for simplicity’s sake, we’ll talk ONLY about pro-grade, f/2.8 zooms)

Instead of the progression on the wide end of mid-range zooms, what if we went back to 35mm and worked on the telephoto end? Would you buy a 35-120mm 2.8? It could go perfectly with a 17-35 2.8…

Or how about breaking away from the current telephoto standard of 70-200mm… Would you buy a (full-frame) 50-150 2.8? And then, moving backwards from there, what if you could buy a 20-50 2.8?

SO, different people have different shooting styles. Not to mention the different shooting conditions! Oh, and throw in different sensor sizes too, while you’re at it. This is largely what prompted me to wonder what it would be like to have these different range lenses- I work with DX, so I have an abundance of lenses to chose from in both camps- I can use the 17-55 if I want a 25-80mm equivalent, or I can use a 24-70 on DX and get about 35-105…

…And a lot of the time, yeah, I just love the “standard” focal ranges. But every now and then, both when shooting events AND portraits, …I find myself changing lenses way too often, wishing I had a mythical 35-120 2.8, or a 50-150… (in full-frame, that is…)

…O well. Just an idle ponder. I know that Nikon has FAR more work to do in their lens department before they even dream of doing something this crazy!

=Matt=

Canon just rocked the prime world again. Not only have they announced two new prime lenses, a 17mm TSE and a 24mm TSE mk2, …but they have also re-designed the lens construction to allow tilting and shifting to be rotated independently of each other.

Meaning, unlike any other lens for 35mm use, you can now tilt / shift in “opposite” directions.

The sad thing is- Nikon JUST RECENTLY announced an entire new line of TS lenses, 24mm, 45mm and 85mm, and on ALL of these lenses if you want to switch the directions of tilting and shifting (with respect to each other) you literally have to take the lens apart with a screwdriver and rotate the lens mecahnics / elements yourself.

Did I mention that one of the new Canons is a SEVENTEEN MILLIMETER???

Sorry Nikon. You just got owned… I’m not even going to bother mentioning the new 35mm AFS f/1.8 DX now. Not until you come out with a REAL lens for PMA…

=Matt=

[EDIT] Wow. These lenses look nuts. Here’s a forum post showing the 17 and 24 TSE lenses’ MTF charts ROCKING the 17-40 L and 24-70 L’s MTF charts. Now keep in mind that MTF charts are made wide open, and the TSE charts are probably not made with any movements involved. But either way, that is SHAAAAARRRRRRPPPPPP!!!!

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1029&message=31040134

Well, I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s beginning to happen in earnest.

Cameras are starting to look like iPhones / TV remotes… Generic, shiny, mass-produced electronic devices…

Check out a couple of Fuji’s new P&S cameras just announced… Notice the visual design, the new style of buttons, etc…

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0902/09021703fujifilmz30.asp

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0902/09021705fujifilmz33.asp

Like I said, I dunno if this is good or bad. They sure look cool. And in reality, you can’t complain about trends, because they will ALWAYS change, that’s the nature of a trend.

But as a die-hard camera geek, there is a soft spot in me for THIS…

Maybe this means I’m officially over the hill as a camera geek, but I love me my switches, dials, and strong defining lines of design…

I look at all the electronic devices that are out on the market today and they just look so generic. Mass-produced. I much prefer the terms “distinct” and “hand-crafted”…

I guess I can’t complain. Nobody’s going to come and confiscate my FM2. And the Nikon D300, D700 and hopeful D700X are solid, “dials-and-switches” enough for me to be happy…

And it seems like we’re leveling off with P&S cameras at about 10 megapixels. Even though that’s still at least 5 megapixels too many, at least we’ve shown signs of slowing. And more and more P&S cameras are coming out with lenses that go wider than the equivalent of 35mm. There are quite a few 28mm and 24mm P&S cameras on the market now; that’s what I complained about last year. And of course, we now have the Panasonic LX3, the first P&S camera to ever include the words “24mm” “f/2.0″ and “useable ISO 1600″ in it’s description…

Alright I’m done. WPPI is here, PMA is coming soon, so big things could be announced any day now. I’ve got a couple other things to blog about, including a new Nikon 35mm f/1.8 DX. (Huh? What the…? Yeah, stay tuned!)

=Matt=

I just had a stroke of genius! Seriously! However, it’s going to take a bit of background tech-talk to explain…

Okay, first of all, let’s simply state facts:

Nikon SB800′s and SB900′s have a “Guide Number” mode, when pointed straight forward, in which you can simply dial in the subject’s distance and bang, a perfect exposure. Pretty nifty! (Well, for those few who like to shoot manually with their hotshoe flash pointed straight forward all the time…)

Similarly, in fully manual mode you still get distance calculations, except this time you’re not dialing the distance, you’re dialing the flash power and the distance reads out automatically…

…Now, when you use a flash off-camera and command it wirelessly via CLS, the commander will communicate to the remote through an IR signal that tells the flash how the camera is doing exposure-wise…

The commander can “ask” remotes to be automatic or fully manual.

You can dial +/- compensation into a remote that is in TTL mode, so the IR signal must be pretty high-tech…

I don’t know how this works exactly, but I know that at least the camera, if not also the wireless flash remote, knows which aperture, shutter speed and ISO is used.

The SB800 is at least capable of understanding aperture and ISO, because it uses them to calculate a guide number / flash distance…

WHAT IF, and this is a huge what if, …you could remotely command a flash distance?

Here’s how it would work. You’d set up your remote flash however you like, and take note of its distance from the subject.

Then you go onto the back of your on-camera commander, and input that distance for the correct remote group…

The IR signal from the commander says “expose for 10 feet at ISO 200 & f/4, please”

The IR remote thinks “okay, with my flash zoom head set to 50mm, that will be 1/8 power considering that I am an SB800 and my default GN is 125…” *pop*

Seriously, that would take a LOT of the guess-work out of my off-camera flash use.

TTL just doesn’t cut it when I’m doing an elaborate environmental portrait with intentional dark shadows and off-center subjects.

So, I use manual power a lot of the time. And when you’re shooting manual off-camera flash, it’s really a shot in the dark, pun intented. You know that you’re not going to be at full power because TTL was probably blowing things out as usual, so you start guessing at maybe 1/4 power. But if that is also blown out, there is no immediate solution apparent. Is it 2 stops blown out? Is it 3 stops? 4? 5? I have no idea. So I dial it down in one stop increments, until I get a proper exposure. Then the next time, I get fed up wasting time so I guess in 2-stop increments to begin with, and blow past the correct exposure, have to go back, and end up taking just as long. This doesn’t actually take TOO long and is easier than shooting film and calculating a GN by hand, but it’s still annoying.

AND, geeky solutions turn me on.

I know it might be a complicated IR signal to send. But the camera itself should be able to do most of the work, since it knows the aperture and ISO already. It can already spit out a flash distance if I input full manual 1/1 power, and I can already wirelessly command a manual flash power. So we’re at least VERY close to achieving this.

So, Nikon, why not?

Alright, maybe I just gave a way a brilliant concept that I should have quietly gone to a patent attorney for. Most likely though, this has already been contemplated many times over, and is either impossible to implement or is already on the way…

Either way it was exciting to conceptualize, and yet I’ll live without it. I’m just gonna work harder on being able to calculate a GN in my head. What’s that dang formula again? F stop = GN x ISO / distance… GN = F stop x distance / ISO… Eww…

=Matt=