New lens : who is your first victim ?

[yanidel]

Monday is back, let's have a little not too serious thread.
You just got your new lens in the mail, who are you going to bug to test it ?

 

[maddoc]

My wife 🙂 So I accumulated a nice collection of portraits, most of them wrong exposed and / or blurred because being so concentrated on framing and focusing with the new toy I always forget about setting correct aperture and time 😀

 

[payasam]

None of the available options. Last month a friend's daughter brought me from the US a lens for my digital SLR. The first picture I took with it was of her, which was part of the agreement. The picture was surprisingly good. Three days ago I acquired the LTM Apo Lanthar of an old friend visiting India from the US. The first picture I took through it was of him -- the idea being to make him look at it and suffer for having foisted a lemon on me.

 

[Dave Wilkinson]

Sorry to be a ' wet blanket'....but none of these, - every lens I've bought in recent years has worked well, so I just throw it in the bag, and do my usual things. 😱

 

[Roger Hicks]

My wife. It's almost a ritual.

Almost always a bad snap, but that doesn't matter. I'll take better pictures of her with it later.

Cheers,

R.

 

[pggunn]

I'm with Roger on this one, with a single exception being the CV 75 mm Heliar acquired last month which produced a decent shot right out of the box. Hey, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then! It's in the People gallery.

For the record I should state that I'm not calling my wife an acorn! She will tell you that I'm the nut!

 

[peter_n]

Last week it was the back yard. Needed to catch the fall foliage before it disappeared...

 

[sanmich]

A ruler at 45 degrees and a piece of paper on the wall 🙂

 

[ruby.monkey]

Either my son, or - because I often have parcels delivered to my workplace - my colleagues.

 

[ruby.monkey]

(My co-workers are less likely to try to lick the lens, but it's a close-run thing)

 

[SolaresLarrave]

I marked cat, but it's actually two. And usually, packages arrive or are open when my wife isn't home, so... it just goes without saying.

However, she's the first human being to be photographed with the lens. 🙂

 

[James (DC)]

One of the statues outside my office.

 

[BTMarcais]

It's usually been my wife up until now... now with a 3wk old son, he got the first shot with the 135 hektor I picked up this week.
He didn't try to lick the lens yet.
I'm sure he'll get around to it though. 🙄

I think my wife is glad I'm pointing the camera at someone else now anyway...

 

[Bob Michaels]

Sorry to be a ' wet blanket'....but none of these, - every lens I've bought in recent years has worked well, so I just throw it in the bag, and do my usual things. 😱

I could not have said it better.

I hope that when someone sees one of my photos, they will not think about what lens I used but what the photo is all about.

 

[Roger Hicks]

. . . I hope that when someone sees one of my photos, they will not think about what lens I used but what the photo is all about.

Dear Bob,

Well, yes. That wasn't the question.

You mean you really don't put a new (or new-to-you) lens on a camera, see how the focusing movement feels, check the smoothness of the diaphragm, and take a snap or two with it?

Because if you don't -- if you just throw it in the bag, assuming it will work when you need it -- then sooner or later, you are going to get a NASTY surprise.

Cheers,

Roger

 

[hawkeye]

Whenever I get new gear I drag test cat out from under his favorite piece of furniture, park him on the windowsill and blast away until he leaps over my desk and gives me the old cat butt salute-which I then get a shot of that.
I compare this shot with others in a file of cat butt shots carefully categorized by date and lens type.
Blowing up these shots in Photoshop I compare them at 100% to get a sense of the lens quality.

After all in the real world you run into many subjects far less charming then my old test cat's butt.

Hawkeye

 

[Roger Hicks]

Whenever I get new gear I drag test cat out from under his favorite piece of furniture, park him on the windowsill and blast away until he leaps over my desk and gives me the old cat butt salute-which I then get a shot of that.
I compare this shot with others in a file of cat butt shots carefully categorized by date and lens type.
Blowing up these shots in Photoshop I compare them at 100% to get a sense of the lens quality.

After all in the real world you run into many subjects far less charming then my old test cat's butt.

Hawkeye

Dear Hawkeye,

Arse Gratia Artis, as Metro Goldwyn Meyer almost said?

Cheers,

R.

 

[historicist]

I voted for a plant but it's almost always a cup of coffee...

 

[Bob Michaels]

Roger: I won't process a roll of film of happy snaps of a cat, dog, or trees just to see that a new lens actually focuses or stops down. I actually do assume that a new lens works. I only have 20 lenses total for six different systems. 19 of them were purchased used and they all have done what they are supposed to do.

Now I am not a lens connoisseur and have no focal lens duplicates because they draw differently. I only choose them for their field of view. I do use what many consider rather boring lenses because they don't get in the way of the photograph. That is just me.

Sometimes I do ask myself why I continue to visit, and occasionally post, on a forum that seems dedicated to equipment rather than photographs.

Bob

Dear Bob,

Well, yes. That wasn't the question.

You mean you really don't put a new (or new-to-you) lens on a camera, see how the focusing movement feels, check the smoothness of the diaphragm, and take a snap or two with it?

Because if you don't -- if you just throw it in the bag, assuming it will work when you need it -- then sooner or later, you are going to get a NASTY surprise.

Cheers,

Roger

 

[Roger Hicks]

Roger: I won't process a roll of film of happy snaps of a cat, dog, or trees just to see that a new lens actually focuses or stops down. I actually do assume that a new lens works. I only have 20 lenses total for six different systems. 19 of them were purchased used and they all have done what they are supposed to do.

Now I am not a lens connoisseur and have no focal lens duplicates because they draw differently. I only choose them for their field of view. I do use what many consider rather boring lenses because they don't get in the way of the photograph. That is just me.

Sometimes I do ask myself why I continue to visit, and occasionally post, on a forum that seems dedicated to equipment rather than photographs.

Bob

Dear Bob,

Well, as I say, you'll get a nasty surprise one day. No failures in 20 lenses does not strike me as especially unusual, but sooner or later...

I don't know how many lenses I've bought or borrowed over the last 40+ years -- consider what I do for a living -- but I do know that some of them have had faults: a mis-spaced 300/9, a 105/2.5 Nikkor where the auto-diaphragm was sticky, a 35/1.4 Summilux where the focusing mount jammed, a 90/4 Elmar that had been badly repaired and was just plain soft, a 35/2.8 Summaron where the spectacles were misaligned, etc. If Leica seems over-represented, consider that I have been using Leicas for almost 40 years.

Then there was a friend who took a 5-lens Olympus outfit, new on loan for Olympus, on a glamour shoot and found that only one of the lenses was what he would call sharp. And so forth.

If I were you, I wouldn't get too snooty about 'photographs vs equipment'. Yes, it can get wearing with people showing pictures of common cameras all the time, but unless the equipment I use delivers photographs, I don't eat. Besides, if you really don't care that much about equipment, how come you have six different systems?

Cheers,

Roger