Can A Kontax Become A Fast Street Shooter ?

[brachal]

You tell me what DOF you have in a sunlit day, using Iso 200, at the shadow side to the street. I am very curious. My experience tells me f/4 at 1/250. So where is the DOF of a 35mm lens at f/4 ?

Cheers,
Ruben

I would probably not be using 200 for that sort of thing. Most likely 400, which would be f/5.6 at 1/250 so why not f/11 at 1/60? Even 800 iso would sunny 16 to f/16 and 1/1000 in bright light. f/11 and 1/125 in the scenario you're describing. Plenty of room there to work the shade. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this technique is perfect for everything, but I find it to be very handy under certain circumstances, especially when I don't have time to focus.

 

[brachal]

Yet Bill, I have to admit I use the standard focal length rather than 35mm. BTW nice pics - do you remember the speed you used ?

Ruben,

I almost never write that down, but I did for those shots. 200 speed kodak. I don't recall the exposures, though. It was a very bright day. And thank you for your kind words.

 

[ruben]

I would probably not be using 200 for that sort of thing. Most likely 400, which would be f/5.6 at 1/250 so why not f/11 at 1/60? Even 800 iso would sunny 16 to f/16 and 1/1000 in bright light. f/11 and 1/125 in the scenario you're describing. Plenty of room there to work the shade. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this technique is perfect for everything, but I find it to be very handy under certain circumstances, especially when I don't have time to focus.

Why not ISO 400 ? Here it is an issue of personal preferences and choices.

If we are talking about sun daylight, Iso 200 leaves you the option of f/5.6 with 1/1000 and here I am not looking for the fast speed but for shallow depht of field that I may want sometimes. Using 400 my smallest depht of field will be limited at sunlight to f/8 which is rather high for my scale of preferences.

Cheers,
Ruben

 

[Jocko]

Hey ruben, we don't all shoot with 25iso !!

But it might help if we did occasionally!

It really is instructive to load up with Pan F or similar - a film with a speed akin to those in general use in the 1930s and 40s. These are the films for which our cameras were designed, and using them in this way can be a revelation. We are often too cautious, dependent on DOF and high speeds, both of which are essentially passive, when really the active involvement of a thoughtful photographer is what ensures good pictures.

Cheers, Ian

 

[dee]

I love the thread !
The irony is that my Kiev 4m literally returned to me the ability not to be slave to the meter , and , even with the 50mm , to set an approx distance , though I can't quite work out how to define depth of field / aperture ... i also am returning to waist level shots which I used to do on my old SLRs ...

As for speed - it's practise and practise until it's as automatic as my Minolta SRt !

Dee

 

[le vrai rdu]

Hi jocko, there's alot of truth in what you say. I used to be a big fan of pan f many years ago. Maybe i'll try some again soon. Do agfa still make a 25 ? I might have heard they stopped it.

rollei bought the recipe 😀

bergger as recently created a 15 isos film in 120, maybe in 135mm too

 

[brachal]

Brachal and Ruben, you've both lost me. I surely can't be that dark on a sunny day at the latitude of Israel, even on the shadow side of the street. If I was planning a trip to Israel I'd probably pack some 100 film.

I was using Ruben's figures for the sake of discussion. My instinct for that sort of shot with 200 would be f/8 and 1/250, but that's just my gut feeling. I'm not experienced enough to judge without a meter.

 

[brachal]

Why not ISO 400 ? Here it is an issue of personal preferences and choices.

If we are talking about sun daylight, Iso 200 leaves you the option of f/5.6 with 1/1000 and here I am not looking for the fast speed but for shallow depht of field that I may want sometimes. Using 400 my smallest depht of field will be limited at sunlight to f/8 which is rather high for my scale of options.

Cheers,
Ruben

This is what I envy most about my wife's Nikon D200. The ability to change ISO rating on a whim, to suit whatever situation is at hand. I got so tired of missing shots because I didn't have fast enough or slow enough film loaded that I carried two cameras most of the time on our recent trip to Mexico. One with 100 or 200, and one with 1600.

 

[le vrai rdu]

That REALLY interests me. Could you share any more info, who, where, what etc?

ps Qu'est que ca veut dire "rdu" ?

too bad, only in 120 :/

http://www.bergger.com/fr/film.html

http://www.bergger.com/fr/brf15.html

heard about it in Reponse Photo of september or october maybe 😉

You just have to buy a mamiya 7 to use it with a RF 😀

rdu= réducteur de débit unidirectionnel, suite à un moment de solitude en cours d'hydraulique

Someone could give me a link explaining how to make a gallery ?

 

[ruben]

Ruben,I think your'e being very pessimistic for shutter speeds.
As a child, the family camera was a box brownie with a speed of about 1/60.
Niether my mother or father took blurry pictures of my brothers and I.

I think that if you seat with another fellow around a table you may succeed in portraiture at amazing slower speeds.

But when I walk in the streets for hunting images, I walk like over a mine field, very very slow, scanning all the time what is around, trying to be ready for a surprise at any moment. Surprises come and go quite fast and sometimes get you with your underpaints down. Then you try to make the best at the fastest speed you can to organize yourself and the picture. This is not for me a kind of situation I want to walk into at 1/60, nor even at 1/125.

Within buses at night, I am limited to 1/30, using Neopan 1600, and I have to act accordingly. But seated people at buses don't move too much.

At malls and the like, using Neopan 1600 leaves you some margin, wider than at buses at night, and my choice is always to favour the speed.

BTW, regarding buses at night, their light here is quite lower than within undergrounds everywhere.

Cheers,
Ruben

 

[le vrai rdu]

okay 🙂

Efke also make low iso films

Rollei R3 is a film that can be proceed from 6 iso to 3200 isos with rollei chemistery

 

[ruben]

This is what I envy most about my wife's Nikon D200. The ability to change ISO rating on a whim, to suit whatever situation is at hand. I got so tired of missing shots because I didn't have fast enough or slow enough film loaded that I carried two cameras most of the time on our recent trip to Mexico. One with 100 or 200, and one with 1600.

That's my normal daily deployment. Ok, plus some extras to open more options.
Cheers,
Ruben

 

[VinceC]

>>Constantly focusing to try and keep the subject at maximum sharpness will guarantee missing pictures. <<

As with other aspects of photography, you can practice and train yourself to follow-focus accurately using a rangefinder or manual SLR. I prefer wide open lenses, so being able to focus swiftly is important.

The long throw of the Kiev/Contax/NikonRF focus mount gives you more accuracy. There aren't many scenarios where you would be wildly winding the lens around 180 degrees ... more often you're fine-tuning, and the lens mount lets you see very wide DOF markings to make judgment calls on how important it is to get precise focus.

 

[manfromh]

For speed, forget your lightmeter at home. With a little practice, sunny 16 will give you perfect exposures at daytime and outside. With a little more practice you will get good exposures in every light. I dont know what the standard is for fast street focusing. I mostly shoot in slower situations. But I'm guessing that if you keep your lens on infinity between shots and when the subject is in place, turn the lens quickly and click away. Dont fine tune the focus, unless you are shooting wide open.

 

[ruben]

...............
The long throw of the Kiev/Contax/NikonRF focus mount gives you more accuracy. There aren't many scenarios where you would be wildly winding the lens around 180 degrees ... more often you're fine-tuning, and the lens mount lets you see very wide DOF markings to make judgment calls on how important it is to get precise focus.

Hi Vince,
This last commentary about "wildly winding the lens around 180 degrees" is unclear to me. Perhaps I may be missing something obvious to you.

The rotational range of the Kontax is 270 degress from infinity to 0.9 meter. If you divide it by 3 sectors of 90 degrees each, then 180 can be the transition from infinity to 1,5 meter. Such a transition sounds me quite normal for a street photographer. Therefore you are kindly invited to further explain.

Yet, the 270 rotational range, can be a problem in causing disorientation to the user at the moment of focusing ("where is the yellow patch !"). It happens to me sometimes.

But upon your commentary this morning I came out with a promising idea: to preset the focusing wheel at 3 meters. I am speaking about a preset to start focusing in both directions.

Notice several things about this 3m start. First you have to turn the lens exactly by 90 degrees. With another 90 degrees each direction you achieve everything between 3m and infinity, as well as 3m and 1,5m. So this seems to be the most versatile starting point.

And the great news is that at this preset you have in sight the secondary image both for infinity and 1.5m

Consequently I have felt marked the 3m line in my mount.

Cheers,
Ruben

 

[VinceC]

Using 3m is an interesting idea. I've never tried that. I usually keep the camera at infinity and then rotate the lens with my fingers to bring it into focus.
Yes, it's a long way 'round -- 270 degrees -- to reach .9 meter minimum focus. But when I'm doing that, I nearly always know in advance that I want a very close subject and that it will be three or four fast twists of the lens barrel. I'm usually twisting it in close as I'm walking close to the subject, so it's not necessarily lost time.

For most fast-moving situations, there is a single 90-degree twist between 2.5 meters (8-9 feet) and infinity. If you're working with a 50mm, 85mm or 105mm lens in an inpredictable situation, that really is about as close as you're likely to need to go. ... Getting in closer than 7 feet, and I think it's nice to have such a far travel to fine-tune focus.

I'll confess that I tend to set the approximate distance using the lens scale, then bring the camera to my eye to fine-tune focus ... I consider this to be akin to taking an incident reading and then setting the camera shutter and aperture. You do it once at the start of the scene, then fine tune. My comment about 180 degrees was aimed in this direction ... There are a lot of shutter speeds between 15 and 1000, but you usually decide entering the situation what your working range will be. Same for aperture ... you can choose from 8 to 10 apreture settings on most lenses, but entering the scene, you usually decide your working range. I do the same thing with focus ... decide my probable working range and take it from there. RF-era war photographers like Capa and David Douglas Duncan tended to shoot at f/11 to f/16 in order to not worry about the focus issue.

An advantage of this lens mount is that the barrel rotation is the same regardless of focal length. 28mm lens is 270 degrees from 3 feet to infinity -- 135mm lens is 270 degrees from 3 feet to infinity. Once you get the knack for focusing, it is always the same distance/ same amount of turn for any lens. That makes it easy to interchange lenses.

Remember, with SLRs, lots of us spend a lot of time "rocking back and forth" in and out of focus to ensure that the scene is precisely focused. You don't have that problem with RF ... the coincidence of images as as certain as the green confirmation light in modern SLR viewfinders.

 

[ruben]

Hi Pitxu,
Once you get your Kiev, dedicate a while to study the logics of the camera helical (lens mount). And then try the 3m idea. Until we get used better it is a nice starting point to always have the primary and secondary images in sight.

You should not be afraid of the 270 degrees, since a third of them, 90 degrees goes for 0,9m to 1,5m - quite rare to use. And in compensation you get a very big yellow patch, as contrasty as the day it was born. The circular yellow patch in my Fed 2 is by comparizon rather poor.

Vince idea of prefocusing with his mind and then fine tuning eye on yellow patch is great too. But perhaps it is for second year students, while I am still in the first.

I say so because prefocusing is another "pre" requiring you more control of the other "pre"s. Once we dominate better the exposure we may add the "pre" metering and fine tuning.

Nevertheless Vince, it has been extremely usefull for me to hear your idea. Who knows how much waistd time it had taken me to catch it.

Cheers,
Ruben

 

[le vrai rdu]

I personaly preset everything (speed aperture and focus) before putting my kiev in front of my eye. One thing I often do is to focus quickly focus to the minimal distance and come back quietly. Focusing quickly from infinite to minimal distance allow you to "feel " in your hand the range of the focus ring (270°) and know where is the good position.

I always keep my finger on the little stuff that lock the lense at the infinite even when I hold my camera , it helps saving time

 

[le vrai rdu]

Can somebody tell me what is the "focal" of the viewfinder of the kiev? I mean do I see like I would with a 50 mm on a SLR or is it a bit wider?

 

[Dogman]

Can somebody tell me what is the "focal" of the viewfinder of the kiev? I mean do I see like I would with a 50 mm on a SLR or is it a bit wider?

If you are referring to the magnification of the viewfinder, it's pretty close to that of my Leica M6 which is .72. It might be a bit less magnification. What you see through the finder is somewhat more than the 50mm lens sees. It doesn't have a brightline finder with parallax correction so you only have an decent approximation of the real view of the lens. It's close enough.