If Victor Frankenstein had a camera, it would probably be put together like this. The camera is a Sony Alpha 3000. The lens is German and more than seventy years old (probably; old Pa Pitt is not sure about its date). It’s a Wirgin Telepar 105mm lens, which makes it the full-frame equivalent of 157½mm on the Sony with its APS-C sensor.
Wirgin Telepar lens mounted on a Sony Alpha 3000 camera
Father Pitt picked the Sony because its image quality was said to be excellent (and it is), but also because its E-mount, with inexpensive adapters, could accept a wide variety of ancient lenses that he happens to have sitting around. The Telepar is a 42mm screwmount lens, and the number of lenses made for that mount is staggering. Father Pitt has half a dozen of them from the days when he used a Praktiflex and a Zenit.
Now, what is the point of using a lens like this when there are modern lenses that are better and more adaptable? Well, for one thing, every lens sees the world differently. You won’t get the same picture from this lens and from a modern lens at the equivalent focal length. You might get a better picture from this lens. You might get a worse picture. But you’ll definitely get a different picture.
Second, attaching a manual lens to a modern camera wrests control of the camera from the electronics. The camera doesn’t know there’s a lens at all: it has to be told to fire the shutter whether it sees a lens or not. The photographer has to set the aperture on the lens itself, and he has to focus by hand and by eyeball (and with the assistance of focus peaking, which he does not disdain).
Third, a prime lens—one that has only one focal length—makes one think about composition differently. Old Pa Pitt makes full use of zoom lenses when he has them. But that laziness comes at the price of some second-rate compositions. When the only way to change the composition is with one’s legs, one puts more thought into the composition.
Father Pitt spent an hour in the Union Dale Cemetery with this camera and lens, and he was pleased with the results. Here are a few of them:
The Telepar will get more use. When it is not in use, it will continue to live in the tube in which it came to Father Pitt: a tube labeled “CLOSTRIDIUM HEMOLYTICUM BACTERIN… For Use by Qualified Veterinarians.” It fits the lens perfectly.
A small sensor means a big lens range on Father Pitt’s Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
Everyone knows that big sensors are better. All other things being equal (and all other things never are equal, but we’re doing our best to make a fair comparison), a larger sensor will create less noise and better pictures. It will also give the clever photographer more control over depth of field, so that the photographer can go to photography fora on the Internet and talk about bokeh with other people who appreciate a good bokeh and like to use the word bokeh in casual conversation.
Not many photographers talk about the advantages of little sensors, though, and since old Pa Pitt has a contrarian streak, he will step into the void.
Aside from the cost, there are three important advantages to small sensors.
The first is the size of the lenses. Father Pitt’s Fuji superzoom has a lens whose focal length would range from 24mm to 720mm—if it were on a full-frame camera. (“Full frame” in digital cameras means having a sensor the size of a negative or slide from a 35mm film camera.) Now, a 720mm lens on a full-frame camera would be awfully heavy. It would want its own seat on the streetcar. It would not slip neatly into Father Pitt’s little plaid camera bag with room for two other cameras.
Top of the Cathedral of Learning. It would take a whole lot of lens to stand on the ground and get this picture of the second-tallest Gothic building in the world on a full-frame sensor.
The second big advantage is depth of field. Photographers love to talk about bokeh, because knowing the word bokeh is one of the main things that set them apart as real photographers. It just means “blur” in Japanese, but “blur” doesn’t sound technical at all. And it is certainly true that how the out-of-focus parts of an image look is an important part of the aesthetic impression it makes, and good blur can be used to emphasize the things that are sharply in focus.
Look! Bokeh! The flower (Verbascum blattaria) is in focus; the background is blurred.
But deep focus is also valuable—having everything in focus throughout the image, even at widely disparate distances from the lens. Father Pitt will not go into the technical details of how sensor size and aperture interact to affect depth of field. The important thing for our discussion is that, whereas larger sensors allow more distinction in focus, smaller sensors have the opposite virtue: they allow more indiscriminate focus, making it easier to have everything in the image in focus at once. This can also be a desirable quality. In the history of art, as far as old Pa Pitt knows, it never occurred to a painter to blur the background to emphasize the foreground, until photographic images had made us aware of that possibility. We do not naturally perceive the world as partly focused and partly blurred. As soon as we think of an object in a scene, our eyes focus on that object. It takes an unnatural effort to focus on one object while being aware of the part of our vision that is out of focus. The popularity of the buzzword bokeh, Father Pitt thinks, has caused photographers to suppose that images are attractive only when they have proper blur. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, blur is a special effect to be used sparingly and with intent.
Arcade under the Bell Telephone Building along Strawberry Way. Old Pa Pitt likes this picture, and it depends for its effect on fairly sharp focus from front to back. The Fuji camera above took this picture, and the small sensor made it easy.
The third big advantage of small sensors is in macrophotography. It takes special lenses or extension tubes to focus very close with a full-frame sensor. Many relatively inexpensive digital cameras, though, can focus down to half an inch without breaking a sweat. Moreover, the depth-of-field advantage of a small sensor makes it possible to get a reasonable picture of a tiny object in reasonable focus. Photographers often resort to making “focus stacks” of thirty or more images to get one in-focus picture of a tiny thing, but in many cases the same effect could be yours just by using a much cheaper camera.
Spotted Henbit (Lamium maculatum). In this very close picture of a tiny flower, there is enough depth of field to keep the details of the whole flower and the adjacent leaves in acceptably sharp focus—which would be more difficult to achieve with a larger sensor. Photographed with the Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.
So is old Pa Pitt recommending that you dump your expensive SLR and pick up a cheap superzoom instead? No, but he is recommending that you pick up a superzoom in addition. A big sensor gives you a huge advantage in image quality, as well as the ability to play with bokeh until you’re absolutely sick of hearing the word bokeh. But there are many times when a small sensor is a big advantage. Having the right camera for those occasions will make it much easier to get the picture you want.
The Kodak EasyShare Z981 was made toward the end of Kodak’s production of digital cameras (the Kodak cameras you can buy today are made by a different company that licenses the trademark), and it is one of the worst and one of the best superzooms Father Pitt has ever used. It’s poorly made, slow, and buggy, but old Pa Pitt keeps picking it up anyway.
Kodak tried to appeal to the enthusiast market with its high-end Z series, but compromises made this camera less appealing to photographers, while complexity made it less appealing to casual picture-takers.
The construction is appallingly cheap, and bits of plastic are likely to break—the battery-door hinge is broken on this one, for example, though to be fair battery doors are the most common physical point of failure in cameras that take AA batteries. A rubber band keeps the camera working.
If you save raw files, the camera is so slow that one reviewer suggested you put the kettle on between shots. (But, on the other hand, it does save raw files, so it earns points for that.)
At speeds of ISO 400 or above, the noise in raw files is pretty bad, and the in-camera JPEGs are smeary with noise reduction.
As with every Kodak Z-series camera Father Pitt has used, autofocus is fiddly, and in some modes simply doesn’t work at the long end of the zoom.
But at ISO 64, this camera produces gorgeous pictures. The Schneider lens deserves a much better camera behind it. There is very little distortion for such a long lens, although the wide-end barrel distortion is noticeable because the camera does no correction—it has to be corrected in software later. The camera itself allows a high degree of manual control over most things, and the electronic viewfinder is good enough to make manual focusing possible.
The pictures are the main reason old Pa Pitt keeps picking up this camera again. Under the right conditions, the pictures are clear and sharp. Father Pitt always saves the pictures in raw format, in spite of the wait between shots. Even at the base ISO of 64 they can use a little noise reduction, but they respond well to it.
The camera has plenty of quirks. Autofocus is, as we said, fiddly. Set on “Multi-Zone,” it often fails to focus at all at the far end of the zoom range. We have much better luck with it set to “Center-Zone.”
The auto ISO selection is not smart enough to account for the zoom lens, and the image stabilization is not impressive. Even in bright light, it’s a good idea to set the ISO to 200 or 400 for long-telephoto pictures. At 400 ISO, the noise will look dire in raw pictures, but it can be tamed in editing later. Father Pitt leaves the camera set to ISO 64 for most pictures and raises the ISO as needed.
The controls are not bad. A wheel on top of the camera changes the most frequently used settings. Menus are simple and fairly comprehensive. Dedicated buttons for flash mode, macro mode, and self-timer are on the top. The big useless “Share” button on the back can be ignored, since all the Kodak software it interacted with is long extinct. A switch on top activates the second shutter button, supposedly for portrait-format pictures; this is a useless extravagance on a camera otherwise made as cheaply as possible, and for some reason the switch deactivates the main shutter button, so you can use only one or the other. Fortunately the software is clever enough to tell you what’s wrong if you try to use the shutter button when it’s deactivated, but it could have been even cleverer and just realized that you probably want to take a picture.
The macro capability should be singled out for praise. The camera will focus at one centimeter, which is not uncommon in superzoom cameras but still very good. This camera, however, focuses at one centimeter with the zoom lens at the full-frame equivalent of 60 millimeters; most other superzooms that focus at one centimeter will do it only at the widest zoom setting. In effect, the Kodak focuses more than twice as close as most of the rest.
The worst thing about the camera is the build quality. It feels cheap, because it is cheap. In addition to the broken battery door, the little plastic loop that attaches the lens cap to its leash is broken. That is probably an improvement, since dangling lens caps are always in the way.
Old Pa Pitt will probably keep using this camera until it dies. It has produced enough good pictures that he feels as though he knows how to get what he wants out of it. But after it dies, he probably will not replace it. There is one big advantage to a camera one feels that way about: it can go anywhere, and one never worries about dropping it or losing it. For that reason alone, this camera gets a lot of use.
Some representative pictures from the Kodak EasyShare Z981:
The Yards at Three Crossings, Strip District.Montour Trail, Moon Township.Snow-on-the-Mountain (Euphorbia marginata).Sixth Street Bridge.
