Fast Glass (11/16/08), anyone who's known me for more than four years knows I've always been a Nikon guy (Nikon FTn, 1971, too many to count since then). There are places I can turn up with my Canons and earn doubletakes. The point being that I have decades worth of good glass that hasn't seen a lot of duty lately. This is about to change. Here's why:

I got out of line for a 5DII in part because the 50D was way cheaper and offered many of the advantages I wanted. What I expect to want most from an eventual upgrade is another significant step forward in terms of long-exposure and high-iso noise performance (those two are not the same thing, but they're related). So I wanted to see whether my cabinet of old, fast glass could give me a stop or two advantage the old-fashioned, pre-digital way: put more light on the sensor instead of pushing quantum physics into places no mortal has ever been. Also, it will be good to see if the Nikkors work really well or only sorta well when I use them more on the Canon bods, because it will be much less onerous to trade up to a full-frame kit if I know I can buy appropriate Canon glass over time rather than all at once (buy the 24-105, for example, and count on my 15mm F5.6 Nikkor to fill in the short range for the time being...). So my motivations are multiple. What else is new?

First impression: with a handful of $15 adapters, these lenses work just fine on my AP-S sized EOS. I expect that they'll work just fine when I eventually go to a full-frame Canon (or back to Nikon, for that matter). I've had these adapters for a while and used them rarely. The telephotos didn't see much use until Live View and a high-fidelity LCD came along to help focus them, and the 24mm never saw much use because the 17-85mm and 10-22mm Canon EF-S zooms covered much of its capability (except handheld or with moving subjects in the dim). The extended range of practical ISOs on the 50D has renewed my interest in shooting with the lights down low (extended compared to my 20D -- the difference seems stark in practice and I am puzzled by the fact that objective noise measurements do not bear out this impression; there's more at work here than meets the metric).

All these lenses benefit from the small, AP-S sized sensors in Canon's midrange cameras: the telephotos see only a center-cut filet of what was already impressive performance, and the 24mm vignettes less at full aperture than it did on my 35's.

The lenses:

24mm F2.0 "Back in the day" this was my walkin' around lens. I bought it used at the Kingsport Camera Shop for about 30 cents on the dollar compared to new (that's about the bargain ratio of all my fast glass, except that the others came from eBay; KCS became a Ritz years ago). From the day I bought it, this lens lived on each of my Nikons. I had to have a damn good reason to take it off. Today I've been "walkin' around" in a darkened house being amazed at what high-ISO life is like at F2.0. The jury is still out on its real-world performance on the EOS. It was never a razor sharp lens wide open, but it was fast and it was sharp enough. It was not pristine when I got it, and it's been banged around a lot over the years. Wide-angle AF zooms were too easy to leave in place especially when Image Stabilization makes up for some of the optical speed difference. With moving subjects, ultrasonic automatic sensor cleaning to make lens-swapping more palatable, and a high-res CMOS detector begging for low-light projects, I'm anxious to see what this old soldier can do.

135mm F2.0 It's razor sharp, but it was damned hard to focus on the earlier EOS's. The very slightly larger viewfinder in the 50D makes a significant difference with this lens, and Live View makes it easy to get its best performance. I suspect it has found a new home as a handheld lens ready to capture charming details in selective focus at dimly lit events.

200mm F2.0 Even when I used this lens on my 35mm Nikons (think bright, full-sized viewfinders with split-image prisms), I rigged up a micrometer to help find best focus. Nothing I did in the APS world (including putting a split-image prism in my EOS) made it practical -- why haul what feels like 25 pounds of glass just to shoot fuzzy pictures at very fast shutter speeds? When it's exactly focused, it's unholy sharp, but it practically never is. Until now. Put it on a tripod (of course you're going to put it on a tripod; just look at this thing!), and gross focus with the focus ring. Crank up Live View. Zoom in to 10x, tweak with the micrometer and Kazango! Every time. It's not for action with that kind of meticulous manual focus required, but given a subject that stays put (birds in trees, cats on mats, brides at altars) you are not going to get a sharper, brighter image from anything. Put a 2x extender on it, and you have the 35mm equivalent of a 640mm F4. In that configuration, it's just as easy to focus as the 200mm F2.0 (a sentiment which until the 50D and Live Vew was a cruel joke). << The photo at left is an average of 11, 45-second exposures of M45, the Pleiades, rising above pines near Rutherford College, NC. Nikkor 200mm ED F2.0 at F2.8, ISO 1600, aligned and averaged in Maxim DL, finished in Photoshop CS4, tracked (unguided) on a Losmandy G11 mount. As usual, star tests quickly reveal problems which earthly uses forgive. The cheap-jack Nikon to EOS adapters do not hold the Canon body tight and exactly square. The crop from a photo of M31 below shows much fatter stars at the top of the frame than at the bottom. Something needs shimming or spring-loading for this application. (On Earth as it is not in heaven: in the terrestrial sphere, I expect to be using the lens for selective focus, so 99% of the time it matters not at all if lovely, defocused light and color fill part of the frame.) M31, same tech specs as M45, except only 3 frames totalling just 135s exposure. Among other issues, this subject needs a far longer exposure to clean up noise made evident by my leaning on this image way too hard: What works for a telephoto works on a telescope: the next night, I used a 5-inch F6 Astro-Physics refractor and exposed for a total of just 7.5 minutes (10 x 45-seconds @ iso 1600). This frame, too, has been aggressively processed. The 50D is promising. (The original image has hundreds of times more info than the thumbnail below. Just stay tuned.)

55mm F1.2  Mine is not the 58mm Noctilux version of Nikon's fast fifty, and it's just not sharp anywhere near wide open. Never was. It's always been a disappointment because I had big hopes for it. Close it down to F4 or F5.6 and it's fine, but who cares? That's not what that lens is for. I hoped for a miracle when I adapted it to a small-sensor EOS, but I did not get one. I took it to a wedding rehearsal dinner for one last chance. It delivered wonderfully fast exposures, great tones, but useless, unpredictably fuzzy images. Not soft-focus, which can be nice, but simply, uselessly out-of-focus. I bought a new 50mm F1.8 Canon AF for a fraction of the Nikkor's used price and am much happier with that; the stop or so disadvantage is made up many times over by the sharpness and convenience of the modern lens.

Ticknock @ night, 8mm Peleng, F3.5, 30s, iso 3200

8mm Peleng Fisheye. It's not fast glass, but it gets a paragraph here anyway because I wouldn't have tried it out if I weren't on this old-lens jag. I had to make an adapter for it since it wouldn't reach focus with a Canon lens mount that came with it. Why? Who knows. All it took was a spacer (the world's shortest extension tube) interposed between the stock EOS adapter and the lens body. I turned one from a big hardware store washer using an antique lathe. I shaved it thinner and thinner and repeatedly inspected the image in live view; iterate until the lens actually focused where it said it focused. The photo above is a test under the stars. (I could've done this conversion by inspecting captures in Photoshop but the fact is that I'd never bothered. The 50D's live view and honest-to-goodness useful viewing screen made the project much more attractive.) The required extension turned out to be 0.020 inches. Using this lens is great sport. It is not without issues. But, hey, it's mostly a toy... except under the right, very special circumstances, and then nothing else will do.

55mm F3.5 Micro-Nikkor This is not fast glass either, but it's going to be fun to put this legendary glass back to work. I should've been using this all along, since nothing has changed to make it less useful today than it was yesterday. Detail from a US nickel, reverse:

[Addendum, 11/18/08: But... at the end of the day, rather than mess with the 135mm F2 and the 200mm F2, would I rather just buy a 70-200mm F2.8 IS Canon zoom? That's the way I'm leaning after another day of walking around irritating the cats by clicking at them while they sleep, bathe, walk, fight, play, and otherwise provide lens-testing fodder. Day before yesterday was all about fast, fixed, manual-focus lenses -- he-man Magnum Life Black Star straight-shifting muscle-car photojournalist glass -- and today I've been using the 70-200mm F4 plain jane Canon for comparison. And you know what? Crank the ISO to 2000 and let autofocus take care of sharpness, breathe carefully, shoot straight... and the results are usually just about as good or better. So I'm thinking a good investment would be the faster, image stabilized version of that lens. IS to stop my shake; a stop faster to help stop subject motion.... is this a case of taking back in the footnotes most of what's been said in the text? We'll see.]

:: back to the slow blog ::