RF/slr photography

Hi Joe, did you take your OM with the 28mm lens out for some street shooting? How would you compare that to working with the Ikon?
 
I guess I'm sort of in the middle of all this disucssion. I've got a couple of Nikon DSLRs that I used with fast long lenses for high school sports work photography last fall, and a Nikon SLR that I used on a job the year before--forensic job in support of security at a UAW strike. Lately I shoot all my personal stuff with a G2 which is pretty much a melding of RF and SLR shooting. I just got the 35-70 vario Sonnar and although it is a short zoom range it helps avoid the digging in the camera bag for another length lens. To my aging eyes it is as sharp and Zeiss contrasty as the primes and fast enough for the daylight stuff I usually shoot. It's such a shame the system is now an orphan child because this whole mechanism just begs to be a 10 MP digital crossover camera.
 
Thanks Joe,

I recently saw some wonderful street work with the OM and 28mm lens, so I was curious what your impression was vs. a "leica-rf-like" SLR. Have a look. I think he uses an OM with a 28mm exclusively.

I've really become a fan of the 28mm lately. It has a nice sense of drama and brings in the environment nicely. My DSLR can't do that focal length very well unless it's with a big zoom, ugh.

It sounds like you've kept a good kit for the OM.
 
Last edited:
The thing that I notice when I'm out and about is that most people are using the little digital point and shoots and viewing through the little lcd in the back. As a result everyone is holding the camera about 18 inches in front of their face in a very unsteady position. The lcds don't have great resolution and are hard to see in daylight. It doesn't seem very intimate and I think it makes for some sloppy picture taking. Cell phone cameras and digital video cameras are all doing this too.

I don't have any great conclusions about this, but I do think that the technology has changed people's relationship to the camera.
 
The whole issue comes down to the differences in viewfinder and focusing, for me. My SLR gear is no more electronic than my RF stuff, no zooms or motor drives, and indeed my only (film) cameras with autofocus have direct viewfinders. 🙂

For a lot of things, my mainly manual RF and SLR cameras are fairly interchangeable, about equally usable.

Of course there's a real difference with the always full-frame SLR view that can be tunnel-like... This seems preferable with lenses 85mm and up. For normal and wider lenses, and especially for people pictures, this seems objectionable. Feels more like that "poking a camera in their face" remoteness. The RF makes environmental portraits and street type shots so much more "approachable," close-in with wider lenses. There's an easier, more direct connection with the human subject using the optical viewfinder.

The SLR encourages me to use of its lack of parallax error to arrange things at different distances, and make more compositional use of the edges of the viewfinder.
 
The camera you use changes the way in which you are perceived by the photographed persons:

- with an SLR you (the photog) become a camera, the camera takes place where you've been before. I think this is because the camera replaces your face in the view of the subjects. They feel being the subject of a photograph;

- with a TLR you disconnect from the environment (kind of like taking a telephone call) and play around with some gadget. A bit like you have left the room - your face is turned away from the subject;

- with an RF you still remain there in the discussion or whatever but put something in front of one eye (like looking through a color filter). Might be a bit disturbing in the first moment but the subjects quickly get used to it.

My 2c..
 
Pherdinand said:
But no, you don't get immediate feedback. It's exactly what I tried to say above.

When you focus (manually or AF) a SLR, you focus an image on a ground glass in the viewfinder (with AF sensors or with focus aids). This image has to be properly aligned to the same distance as the film plane when the mirror is up, otherwise you focus , you are happy with the result you see in the viewfinder, and the image will be out of focus. [...]
Click to expand...
Ah, I guess we mean the same thing. Of course, if your optical system is misaligned, any visual feedback you get with a SLR is rather worthless, but that's not what I meant. If we want to compare cameras, of course we have to assume that the optical system is in alignment, since neither rangefinders nor SLRs will give particularly convincing results if it isn't 🙂

What I meant is that when you work with a very fast lens on a rangefinder, such as a 90/f2, you are likely to lose some shots simply to focusing inaccuracy - we had a whole thread here recently where some people would start blaming inaccuracies of their camera bodies, when in reality effective base length appears to be the problem. Working with an 85/f1.8 or a 135/f2 on an SLR, assuming the optical system is in alignment, if your focusing is off and you've got a good focusing screen with microprisms or a split-image finder, you get immediate visual feedback on focusing accuracy through the lens before you take the shot, so you are far less likely to lose shots in the liminal areas of EBL accuracy.
 
FWIW manual SLRs focus more reliably than RF cameras;
the only moving part is the lens.
I have purchased numerous RF cameras with broken, invisible or
misaligned rangefinders.
Except one SLR I bought with a bad prism, I have never had
a focus failure with an SLR.

Chris
 
Last edited:
A certain amount of the apeal for me is that using film and RF cameras are both contrarian. I've never been at my best as part of the crowd.
On the other hand, sometimes the crowd has the right idea and I don't fight it as reflexively as I used to.
I went to a horse show yesterday with my 300D and EF135L lens. I think I would have been hard pressed to replicate my shots with my RF.
On the other hand, I felt like a "guy with a camera," instead of someone making pictures.
 
For the last four years I've been shooting nearly 100% of my wedding and personal work with rangefinders. Hexar RF's and Leica M6TTL's. I enjoyed using them because of the bright viewfinders with floating framelines, the quietness and the compact size. But they're simply not as versatile as an SLR, and the much-touted superior image quality of the lenses is not enough to compensate for that.

Personally, I find RF bodies are best suited for lenses in the 35-50mm range. The 28mm framelines in the finder don't accurately show the 28mm perspective, and clip-on finders add an extra step to the shooting process and rob you of your hot shoe, to boot. And again, personally, I find RF's nearly useless for portrait work when compared to an SLR. I owned two Summicron 90's and borrowed a Summilux 75, and twisting their lens barrels thru 180 degrees of travel is an exercise in ergonomic futility compared to riding the shutter button on an SLR, plus, at those focal lengths, the viewfinder of an SLR has the advantage over an RF.

The sweetest combo, in my experience, was an M body with the pre-asph 50 summilux mounted. The ergonomics were perfect on that combo. Bright, beautiful floating framelines, and a lens that focused by merely dragging your finger lightly along the barrel. Sweet.

FWIW, anyone looking for a quiet SLR should check out the Canon Elan 7. It might well be the quietest SLR ever made. It's certainly quieter than the Hexar RF, Contax G, etc..

I plan on getting another Leica M body, but this time it will keep its place in my bag as a 'specialty' camera, and not the all-around work horse. A nice, clean M2 or M4 should do nicely. 🙂
 
Here's an experience i had and amazed me:
Take an el-cheapo minolta x-370 manual slr camera. Put a fifty mm lens on it 50/1.7 is always very cheap.
The whole kit can cost you maybe 40 or 50$ nowadays.
Lift it up to your eye. Look through the "tunnel" viewfinder.

You will see a huge image with 1:1 magnification competing with the brightness of my leica M2. No, seriously.

Until i can afford a DSLR with such a viewfinder, i am not very interested in dslr's.

EDIT: Philipp, that's indeed what I mean as well🙂
 
Last edited:
Amen to that! I'll shoot with a disposable P & S or even a cellphone cam when I have to --- any camera is better than no camera at all! I agree that photography with a rangefinder can make one a better photographer, and go one further and say that making and trying to make photographs with any type of camera will make one a better photographer, maybe even (dare I say it) a better artist.😱


Pherdinand said:
Here's an experience i had and amazed me:
Take an el-cheapo minolta x-370 manual slr camera. Put a fifty mm lens on it 50/1.7 is always very cheap.
The whole kit can cost you maybe 40 or 50$ nowadays.
Lift it up to your eye. Look through the "tunnel" viewfinder.

You will see a huge image with 1:1 magnification competing with the brightness of my leica M2. No, seriously.

Until i can afford a DSLR with such a viewfinder, i am not very interested in dslr's.

EDIT: Philipp, that's indeed what I mean as well🙂
Click to expand...
 
FrankS said:
It must have something to do with the process, because the end result - the pictures, are just as acheivable with an slr. (Yes, RFs are better in low light, but slrs are better at other things like macro and tele.)
Click to expand...

well, Frank, it is something in our brain ... you just gave me one answer, why do I love RF's so much ... I don't care abot tele & macro photography -
I love to take photos of people & their enviroment in low light.
now I have some problems:
- I need parralax corrected body + 2 speed lenses - 50mm & 35mm( I still like my Kiev 4 ), maybe sheap Oly or Yashica RF with 40mm speed fixed lenses
- there is no film or film is too expensive for me ( I have just wached ,,Pecker'' - I would like to use 10 rolls of film like this movie hero )
- I would like to stop thiking about equipment & start thinking about photography 100%

RF's are freedom to see the motive, to catch the motive with little camera on your wrist.
 
I have owned probably 10 slr's, about 10 rf's, and about 6 or 7 digitals. I can not tell you which takes better pictures. I think at one time or another I have gotten superb pictures on all of them (Well, I could never get the autofocus to work right on that Minolta 9000) and I just plain enjoy the RF more. The CV R3M, looks good and keeps me involved in the "process". I am happiest when I have a 3 or 4 roll day with it.
 
jlw said:
For me, it's very much the "vision thing." RF cameras and SLR cameras have a literal, concretely technical difference in the way you see: you look into an SLR and see an image, while you look through an RF camera and see what's in front of you.
Click to expand...

And here is one of the main point and main difference SLR and RF.
You, as a photographer still in process all time and you have to build image in yours head.
=in SLR you can see an image= - incorrect!!!, SLR is a big liar, image within film frame or on sensor will be another.
RF is not lia to you, beacause you and only you have to make a decision =What image in what moment I want=
.
We can discuss a lot about differences in optical schemas for SLR and RF cameras, about sounds and lags of shutters. But its nothing to do with difference of a process of understanding yours final image.
 
Last edited:
shg005 said:
=in SLR you can see an image= - incorrect!!!, SLR is a big liar, image within film frame or on sensor will be another.
RF is not lia to you, beacause you and only you have to make a decision =What image in what moment I want=
Click to expand...
I'd say the SLR isn't more of a "liar" than the rangefinder in this respect. I would concede that with some SLR models you have a few extra percent of picture on the final frame because the finder only shows 96% or so, but then we're comparing with rangefinders that are optimised to show 85% or so of the frame at three meters, and with lenses whose physical focal lengths can be off by another several percent from the value for which the framelines are calculated. In this respect the rangefinder is the bigger liar, if we want to call it lying. SLR viewfinders are almost always more accurate.

Shutter lag might be slightly longer on an SLR because of the mirror movement, but I'd hazard a guess that some of the slower rangefinders are beaten by faster SLRs as well, so we'd have to compare between individual models. And we're talking about differences on the order of a couple of microseconds. Some rangefinders, such as Leicas, might have lower shutter lag than an SLR that has to get the mirror out of the way, but then the shutter takes twenty to thirty microseconds to travel from one side to the other where better SLRs take four.

The reason I like rangefinder viewfinders better for focal lengths shorter than 50mm is that I can see outside the frame. That's about it. I wish DSLR manufacturers would make bigger viewing screens with a mask for the crop area.

Philipp
 
Some days I like RF's more, and some days I prefer SLR's. I guess that's why I have several of each. I like RF's for city shooting and low-light interiors. I'd rather use an SLR for outdoors/nature work which often entails macro and tele ranges. I use primes most of the time, even on my DSLR.

If I've been using an RF camera for awhile, I find an SLR an nice change of pace, and vice versa. I enjoy variety.

Gene
 
rxmd said:
I'd say the SLR isn't more of a "liar" than the rangefinder in this respect.
Philipp
Click to expand...
When I did say =liar= I said not about 85% or 95%. I'd say about structure of image.
One of the primary comcept for SLR cameras - You will get as you see. for example: If you change lens from 28mm to 85mm in SLR you will see absolutly different prorortions of objects, absolutly different DOF and so on.
For RF camera you wil see the same AREA of image, but not image itself.
.
And here is liar. Your image on film frame or sensom will be another that you saw when pressed to button. But psychologically you will wait what you had seen.
- another contrast, colors... another picture!
.
RF isn't liar at all. Because it say to you =You will get as you think ONLY, but not as you see=.
Its a big difference.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom