wide angles ‘r us

As I’ve managed to sell my Voigtländer Super Wide-Heliar 15mm-f/4.5 lens (thanks, Landrew!), I need something good and wide for digital. How nice that Henry’s are now listing the Sigma 10-20mm 4-5.6 EX DC HSM lens for $700.

Panamatic

Panamatic, mounted on a Manfrotto 709 tabletop tripod

I bought a Panamatic on Saturday at Henry’s. It’s a very simple panorama mount, with a large level, and fixed 30° click stops.

It works extremely well, and is quick to set up. The image below (larger image if you follow the link) was taken with my Cybershot P100, and stitched with hugin:

Kennedy and Eglinton on a Quiet Saturday afternoon

I’ve highlighted the overlap between the images with a bright blue background, and only cropped the image for width. The Panamatic gives very even and level results.

There are a couple of downsides: you can’t correct for lens nodal point location (thus giving woozy effects if you used it for an animated cylindrical panorama), and the click stops are fixed at 30°, so you had better use a near standard lens. Apart from that, it seems pretty well made, and easily worth $40 for hassle-reduction alone.

p100 sensor size

so I don’t forget: the crop factor for the Sony Cybershot DSC-P100 is 4.786. All will become clear soon …

selling stuff on ebay

stewart_russell is selling:

Voigtländer Super Wide-Heliar lens, Bessa-L body, and Kaidan panoramic tripod mount.

* Voigtländer Super Wide-Heliar 15mm-f/4.5 lens, Leica screw fit, silver. Clean optics, slight rub on lens cap. Complete with cap, finder, manual, and box (but no rear cap). A very rewarding super-wide optic.
* Voigtländer Bessa-L camera body, Leica screw mount. Bought last year, never had a film through it, essentially unused. Complete with manual, strap, body cap and box. A simple, metered manual body for wide-angle lenses.
* Kaidan KiWi VL panoramic tripod mount for Bessa-L. Allows for complete 360° cylindrical panoramas. Used once, as new. Complete with extra click-stop plates for different lenses, manual (on CD) and box.

Westmark Industries Raytex PL39 pinhole lens, Leica screw fit

Westmark Industries Raytex PL39 pinhole lens for Leica screw mount. A well-made, precision machined pinhole lens. As it’s bright aluminium, I’ve blacked out the back to cut down reflections, and an written exposure/f-stop reminder on rear flange. Lightly used. Complete with manual, instruction sheet, and box.
Nippon Camera Bessa World magazine/book (in Japanese)

Published in 2001, Nippon Camera “Bessa World” mook (magazine/book). Produced to support the then newly-released Cosina-Voigtländer Bessa rangefinder cameras. Now out of print, this is quite hard to find. 128 pages, 210×280mm, good condition.

Please note, this publication is written in Japanese. If you don’t read Japanese, it’s still an interesting picture book about the Voigtländer Bessa cameras.

pictures here.

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blue camera

I was half-thinking of trading in my Nikon Coolpix 2500 compact digicam, as 2 megapixels don’t make it any more. So I braved the Boxing Day sales, and came back with rather more camera than I bargained for.

Henry’s have a special on this week; $299 for the 5 megapixel Sony Cybershot P100. Any colour, as long as it’s blue. The other colours are $500. Go figure.

It’s small, feels solid, handles well, and has a Zeiss lens (ah, how I miss my Yashica T5). The downsides are that it uses Sony’s weird, expensive Memory Sticks, and it doesn’t record sensor size for field-of-view information (ignorable if you’re not a panorama nerd). It doesn’t seem to want to connect to my Gentoo box as a USB storage device, but that could be a config problem on my part.

I also got the quite ridiculous Sandisk 12-in-1 card reader, despite its crappy packaging. It seems to work nicely as both a CF and Memory Stick reader on the Gentoo machine.