the last word

Like Bo Diddley said, “You can’t judge a book…” The little Leica 24mm Elmar looks like it would be a perfect match for the half-pint Sony a7R, but it has dark corners, corner color shifts, and corner smearing. The hulking Zeiss 21mm f/2.8 Distagon ZF.2 looks comical on the Sony body. The lens is so… [Read More]

I few posts ago, the results for the Leica 24mm f/3.8 Elmar were degraded because the Novaflex adapter I was using was a little too thin, so that when I focused the lens on infinity with the scale engraved on the lens, I was actually focusing beyond infinity. Beyond infinity, let that roll around in… [Read More]

I went for a walk this  morning, and I decided to play with sun stars — that’s the effect you get when you get the sun, or part of the sun, in the image at a small aperture. The sun’s rays striking the diaphragm leaves cause radial spikes of light. If you’re going for part… [Read More]

Here’s a post about what Mike Collette of Betterlight calls “intentional misuse”. I had a Sony/Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 E mount lens sitting around on an NEX-7, where it had been comfortably idle since I got the RX-1 about a year ago. I wondered what would happen if I put it on the a7R, and told the… [Read More]

I’ll get right back to it, but something came up today that’s taking time away from testing the a7R. First, some background. I entered the Center for Photographic Art’s 2014 Juried Exhibition a few months ago. I’m not usually one for entering these kinds of contests, but I find it easy to make an exception… [Read More]