The curse of expensive equipment?

[YYV_146]

I doubt being 'noble' has much to do with it, but I'd rather have $9k worth of traveling than a Noctilux.

That's just me of course.

I do find it hard to believe that anyone has purchased one for practical reasons though. However I also believe that buying one simply because you want one is reason enough.

But where is the line between "practical" and "not practical" drawn? I'm sure many people see all things Leica (and most things Zeiss) as impractical. These days you can spend relatively little money (Sigma and Tameron lenses, used, last-gen Canikon bodies) and achieve pretty respectable results. And of course people may see SLRs as being impractical, since they can do amazing work with a P&S or even a phone...

 

[YYV_146]

Maybe a Nocti is an investment, too. I stretched and got one around 1999 for USD 1600 brand new grey market. I like it, couldn't replace it if it went missing. I still shoot film though , because I don't see digital cameras as long term investments.

Depending on how much you shoot, digital is either more expensive or cheaper.

For example, I was one of the early users of the Canon 7d in 2009, which I paid ~$1600 for. I sold it in 2013 for $700, so I paid about $250 a year to use it - a bit more than $20 a month. If you shoot a decent amount of film, especially good film, the costs can easily exceed $20 a month.

 

[YYV_146]

You will not have a problem, at least not in any of the club med countries. They get boatloads of PRC tourists every year. What I know you cannot do is hop around, i.e. visit Greece, then Italy, then Spain, then France. They will be viewing this with extreme suspicion.

Other categories may suffer... times are funny at the moment in Europe.

Yes, but mostly older folks with a good stash of savings and nothing else to do. Travel visa needs a statement of assets to make sure you're rich enough to not want to try illegal immigration, and I think I need to physically apply from within China - they don't allow these things to go through an embassy. I may be mistaken, though, since I haven't looked into the issue lately.

 

[YYV_146]

Victor! Don't let the haters bog you down with numbers and charts and justifications and all that nonsense. You own a freakin' Noctilux man! Get out there and suck every ounce of light out of the night. Right there in Durham. If you need any inspiration pick up a copy of Roy de Carava's " The Sound I saw". And oh by the way congratulations!

Thanks - I'm an admirer of DeCarava's work. Being in the south, you get to experience a lot of jazz culture even if you're not a fan of the genre.

 

[YYV_146]

Please stop labelling people who have a different opinion from you as "haters". We're talking about cameras and lenses for Pete's sake. The OP actually invited opinions and I'm sure he [can] take any dissenting voices in his stride.

I can assure you, no offense taken. IMO some of the language I have seen elsewhere borders on "hater-esq" (pointless BS), which is why I wanted to ask about the issue here, where discussions stay civilized.

 

[Sparrow]

You'll find the Greeks will very welcoming if you're heading for the tourist bits with money to spend, they've just about turned their economy round and are heading back from what I see.

As for the rest, I'm sure some people buy expensive stuff to take photos, some for bragging rights and some for a mixture of the two ... I always do as I please, the only time I get miffed is when people want me do as they please, and be impressed by their choices

It would like to see some photos to support the various contention, or just brighten the thread up a bit

Greece at night

 

[Michael Markey]

Its clear that some people derive pleasure from being frugal and can`t comprehend why others are willing to spend what they see as unnecessary money for often marginal gains.

I haven`t spent a lot on camera gear in over fifty years but I buy what I want.

If I think its worth it to me then it is and I don`t see why anyone else should be concerned.

If they are then its their problem not mine.

 

[nongfuspring]

I am a PRC citizen with resident status in Hong Kong (but no Hong Kong citizenship), so I will need a EU travel visa, which (knowing from the last time I was in the EU, France to be exact) is a pain to get. There is definitely some kind of proof of affordability (bank statement up to $50k) involved just in case you want to be an illegal immigrant, and people as young as me usually don't have that much spare money lying around.

In the US I have a work visa - which itself is enough hassle for any person to live with.

That does sound a pain. Out of curiosity does your 户口 province make a difference to any of that?

To answer your original post, I think there is something inherently noble in travel, not just sightseeing but real, involved travel. The sort of trips that go on for months in strange countries where you're forced to deal with totally foreign cultures in languages you don't understand and deal with other peoples on their own terms, you know, Hemmingway kind of stuff. I value travel because it provides diversity of experience and forces you into becoming a more capable person. So yes, I think it more noble to have a cheap P&S and travel hard than to have a noctilux.

Having said that though, I also realise there are probably many people (maybe you included) who have far more money than days off in which case travel isn't really a possibility, but buying expensive gear is. It's not like lenses depreciate like a yacht or something, so it's really not such a crazy thing to do, so no judgement from here.

 

[YYV_146]

That does sound a pain. Out of curiosity does your 户口 province make a difference to any of that?

To answer your original post, I think there is something inherently noble in travel, not just sightseeing but real, involved travel. The sort of trips that go on for months in strange countries where you're forced to deal with totally foreign cultures in languages you don't understand and deal with other peoples on their own terms, you know, Hemmingway kind of stuff. I value travel because it provides diversity of experience and forces you into becoming a more capable person. So yes, I think it more noble to have a cheap P&S and travel hard than to have a noctilux.

Having said that though, I also realise there are probably many people (maybe you included) who have far more money than days off in which case travel isn't really a possibility, but buying expensive gear is. It's not like lenses depreciate like a yacht or something, so it's really not such a crazy thing to do, so no judgement from here.

But how would that compare to, say, dealing with unfamiliar views and ideas in a single place? You can experience a lot of different things in a single city, as long as it is not too small. And I fancy myself a person of academia - so dealing with unfamiliar, even uncomfortable views is part of my job. Of course, there will be people who say you can't understand a country without being there yourself, and there will be people who say the exact opposite...

To answer your question, it's not my Hukou that matters but my ethnicity - if I were an ethnic minority then things can become much worse. Not impossible though, I have Tibetan and Uighur colleagues, but I sympathize with how much red tape they deal with.

And no, I'm not rich. I sold quite a bit of gear to fund the Noct (my 90 cron is still up in the classifieds, and some other things need to go as well), and it's only because of my generally thrifty lifestyle for the past 6-7 years that I can afford any decent camera equipment. I don't smoke, drink or even eat in restaurants too often, wear cheap cloths when I think I can get away with it, and try to travel as cheaply and lightly as possible. I've always figured that the joy of exploring in photography outweighs the costs, and with Leica I have the luxury of selling at close or even higher than the price I pay.

 

[hepcat]

I suppose it could be done - I see excellent work made with M cameras and very fast lenses, some that are probably even harder to focus than the Noct. Maybe I'm just not a very good rangefinder user - I don't own any Leica RFs, and only occasionally shoot with a Bessa. But more light is always good; less noise, more processing latitude, and with EVFs the refresh rate doesn't tank so easily.

It absolutely can be done, and has been done for decades with rangefinder bodies. Having been "raised" using them, they're quite natural to me, and I find whatever shortcomings others may think they have not to be limiting at all. EVFs are the devil's spawn. I dislike them for a number of reasons. Large aperture lenses were introduced for low-light shooting... shallow DOF and "bokeh" were part of the deal. Shallow DOF was talked about, not in terms of selective focus to draw attention, but in terms of focusing accuracy and what you needed to be in focus and how to shoot to line up your shot so that the important parts ARE in focus.

The discussion of bokeh and "selective focus" as pictorial elements are a fairly recent phenomenon. I don't recall ever hearing them before the Internet age. They may have been discussed, but not in the circles in which I traveled. They were noticed, of course, and selective focus was used, mostly of necessity.

One of the things I've found interesting about the Internet age is the incredible air time given to minutia. In the '70s, the two biggies were in-body metering accuracy and multi-coating of lenses to help prevent flare and internal reflection. Those were huge advancements. There might be a comment here and there about one lens having a tendency to be "softer" than another, but many pros used Softar filters for portraits anyway then, and soft, portrait-specific lenses like the Thambar were produced dating back to the 1930s. I was taught that when photographing a woman over 30 to use a #1 soft filter, and for a woman over 40 to use a #2. I still subscribe to that philosophy. (but then I still shoot film too. 😉 ) "Sharpness" isn't everything. There were, of course, comparisons of lenses using test patterns for resolution that was part and parcel of the early advertising pieces, but it's only been since the growth of the Internet that people seem preoccupied with lenses in terms of sharpness, charts and graphs.

What I find interesting today is that discussions of cost, sharpness, and the meaing of charts and graphs seem to have equal, if not greater importance to consumers than the images they make. Sorry, but I don't "get" it.

If you can make use of an F/1 lens, and you can find one you can afford (how ever much that is) that's great... and go make images with it. Unless you're a collector, Images are, after all, what photography is all about, not test charts and lab comparisons. There's not enough difference among the fast glass out there that anyone can look at an image and tell me what lens it was made with. Even the old Canon f/0.95, as soft as it could be, makes some pretty amazing images, and the charts and graphs be d*mned.

 

[hepcat]

It's not like lenses depreciate like a yacht or something, so it's really not such a crazy thing to do, so no judgement from here.

Apparently you haven't priced a used yacht recently. 😉

 

[YYV_146]

It absolutely can be done, and has been done for decades with rangefinder bodies. Having been "raised" using them, they're quite natural to me, and I find whatever shortcomings others may think they have not to be limiting at all. EVFs are the devil's spawn. I dislike them for a number of reasons. Large aperture lenses were introduced for low-light shooting... shallow DOF and "bokeh" were part of the deal. Shallow DOF was talked about, not in terms of selective focus to draw attention, but in terms of focusing accuracy and what you needed to be in focus and how to shoot to line up your shot so that the important parts ARE in focus.

I guess it depends on what cameras were part of one's childhood. I had a Sony EVF camera back in 2003 (before it was cool?) and used it for 6 years. I'd be very surprised if more than a handful of people here have used worse EVFs than I have - by today's standards the R1 has an ungodly awful viewfinder.

The discussion of bokeh and "selective focus" as pictorial elements are a fairly recent phenomenon. I don't recall ever hearing them before the Internet age. They may have been discussed, but not in the circles in which I traveled. They were noticed, of course, and selective focus was used, mostly of necessity.

One of the things I've found interesting about the Internet age is the incredible air time given to minutia. In the '70s, the two biggies were in-body metering accuracy and multi-coating of lenses to help prevent flare and internal reflection. Those were huge advancements. There might be a comment here and there about one lens having a tendency to be "softer" than another, but many pros used Softar filters for portraits anyway then, and portrait-specific lenses like the Thambar were being produced. There were, of course, comparisons of lenses using test patterns for resolution that was part and parcel of the early advertising pieces, but it's only been since the growth of the Internet that people seem preoccupied with lenses in terms of sharpness, charts and graphs.

As far as I know Minolta and Nikon were bragging hard about Bokeh in the later 80s...This was also when they made their respective bokeh control lenses, the Nikon 135/105 DCs and the Minolta 135mm STF. Those were lenses that were designed with one thing in mind, which was superior bokeh. I think Canon also had a soft focus lens in the 80s, but I haven't seen one in action.

And I agree that there are far too many pixel peepers out there. There is precious little that's interesting to discuss in the digital world - people who have extensive experience with post-processing usually have their own sacred workflows, and digital printing is most outsourced to a studio...so I guess it's natural to bicker about what can be bickered, which inevitably involves bokeh, MTF charts and so on.

But I do think with digital rot and the complexity of modern cameras, it is important to at least intimately understand your own equipment, and have as much information as you can before dropping money on anything. So I'm always up for a good equipment discussion that I may learn something from.

 

[hepcat]

I guess it depends on what cameras were part of one's childhood. I had a Sony EVF camera back in 2003 (before it was cool?) and used it for 6 years. I'd be very surprised if more than a handful of people here have used worse EVFs than I have - by today's standards the R1 has an ungodly awful viewfinder.

I think your statement here is accurate. For me, judging exposure using ambient light through the viefinder is important as I don't rely on the camera's meter much at all. I can't trust them to be metering on what I want it to. Basically I "think and see" in manual focus and exposure.

EVFs, by their nature, amplify light and don't give a true view of "ambient." That causes you to have to trust what the camera is doing and you lose control. Or if you keep control, you have to adjust the camera to see the way you want it to see, and then, you can adjust your exposure/focus... which takes more time. They're just a nuisance to me. Now if that was the way I was "raised" I'm sure it'd be no problem at all. I'm just old enough tho, that I wasn't, and my "process" is very different from that an EVF requires. Don't misunderstand, I have a Panny GX-1 for a point and shoot, and it's great; but for serious work, I fall back to my M9P or M4P, or my Hassys.

As far as I know Minolta and Nikon were bragging hard about Bokeh in the later 80s...This was also when they made their respective bokeh control lenses, the Nikon 135/105 DCs and the Minolta 135mm STF. Those were lenses that were designed with one thing in mind, which was superior bokeh. I think Canon also had a soft focus lens in the 80s, but I haven't seen one in action.

You're absolutely right... but considering photography had been around a hundred years already by that time, that is a fairly recent discussion. And it hadn't really gained a lot of ground until the Internet made the term (and consequently the idea) popular.

But I do think with digital rot and the complexity of modern cameras, it is important to at least intimately understand your own equipment...

Y'know... I can appreciate a camera like the Panny GX1 as a consumer box. It has enough dials and widgets to keep the most die-hard widget lover happy, but the program modes make it easy for the non-pro, non-avid-hobbyist public to use. But for a camera aimed at the "pro" market? Why all the complexity? Why should it be so complex? When it gets down to it, the three settings are shutter speed, ISO, and aperture. If a "pro" or "advanced amateur" has mastered the basics of photography, basic controls are really all that's necessary, and everything else they build in gets in the way of making images. Frankly, that's what brought me back to the M9. I look at the top of the line equipment from CaNikOly and wonder who they're really marketing them to.

Perhaps I sound like a grumpy old-timer, and I've talked about this before, but past sensor improvements, I think that much of what we see in new cameras is more gimmick to sell new equipment to people who already have serviceable gear than it is actual innovation.

 

[nongfuspring]

But how would that compare to, say, dealing with unfamiliar views and ideas in a single place? You can experience a lot of different things in a single city, as long as it is not too small. And I fancy myself a person of academia - so dealing with unfamiliar, even uncomfortable views is part of my job. Of course, there will be people who say you can't understand a country without being there yourself, and there will be people who say the exact opposite...

To answer your question, it's not my Hukou that matters but my ethnicity - if I were an ethnic minority then things can become much worse. Not impossible though, I have Tibetan and Uighur colleagues, but I sympathize with how much red tape they deal with.

This is true, you mentioned Kant before who was a bit of an intellectual adventurer without (at least from what I remember) making any significant travels. But, I'd argue (and I say this as a Ph.D candidate in critical theory) that while there are some attributes you can develop in an armchair, there are others that only ever come about through lived experience.

About photography more directly, I think it's possible (though not ideal) to be a great philosopher from home, but I think it much harder to be a good photographer without significant first hand experiences. I think one of the most important things about photography is that it mediates the world and its specifics, where in philosophy everyone is more or less trying to come up with theories that can be generalised.

That's interesting about ethnicity, I will have to look into it a bit more. I have some Uighur neighbours at the moment, I'll probably go interrogate them.

Anyway, enjoy the lens, and look forward to seeing some pictures!

 

[Livesteamer]

I am no expert but might be able to add a little from my own experience. Thanks to the generosity of my parents, I got a new Leica M6 with the .85 finder when they first came out. Shortly after I was able to get a good used Noctilux for $1,500 back in 2001 when prices were better. The .85 finder is much better for such a fast lens. I get a high success rate of precise focus wide open and my M6 .72 does not do as well.

The .85 finder works for me do what is best for you. Enjoy. Joe

PS about the only time I get the Noctilux out is when I really need f1.0 .

 

[YYV_146]

This is true, you mentioned Kant before who was a bit of an intellectual adventurer without (at least from what I remember) making any significant travels. But, I'd argue (and I say this as a Ph.D candidate in critical theory) that while there are some attributes you can develop in an armchair, there are others that only ever come about through lived experience.

About photography more directly, I think it's possible (though not ideal) to be a great philosopher from home, but I think it much harder to be a good photographer without significant first hand experiences. I think one of the most important things about photography is that it mediates the world and its specifics, where in philosophy everyone is more or less trying to come up with theories that can be generalised.

That's interesting about ethnicity, I will have to look into it a bit more. I have some Uighur neighbours at the moment, I'll probably go interrogate them.

Anyway, enjoy the lens, and look forward to seeing some pictures!

Kant's life was concentrated in about 7 miles' radius from his birthplace, I think. But he was the exception, most Enlightenment philosophers were constantly moving around in Europe. Impressive considering all the wars going on back in the day.

I agree that photography is a different beast. First hand experience, however, comes with familiarity of a type or work or a location. The first time you go to a city or scenic location the best you can do is little more than snapshots; you stay longer, visit a few more times, and eventually you know it well enough to have an unique perspective. I don't shoot as much street as I'd like to, but it seems that good street work mandates a basic understanding of the culture, history and customs of the location. Those can only come with time.

Thanks. I have some snaps around the neighborhood on 500px - It has been raining and sometimes extremely hot, so I haven't had many chances to use the lens outdoors yet.

 

[BLKRCAT]

I was reading a very fine article on using the Noctilux ASPH as a B&W lens when I noticed some comments beneath, calling the Noct a piece of "pointless bull****" and stating that the author was "simply trying to justify his needless purchase". Other comments noted that "nothing this lens can do a $800 Voigtlander can't do" and suggested to "sell the glass and go traveling" and "stop creating bokehy mess and make real pictures".

**** em.

10 characters.

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

Forums are international, intergenerational and intercultural in nature. We should all stop and think about what our words will mean to others. I got pulled up this week by a moderator for one of my postings, which was, I'm afraid, misunderstood. However, the moderator was correct to point out the error of my ways and I hope that one of the moderators will take the time to deal with these postings.

My own ultrafast experience was with the Rikenon f1.2 50mm, which I acquired, almost by accident, for rather less than 1% of the price of a Noctilux. All I can say is that the image quality was adequate but the weight seldom seemed worth lugging around. I managed to do a direct comparison with a colleague's Nikkor 50/1.2 and we agreed that there was pretty well no difference between them. Unless the Noctilux is a lot better than the Nikkor, then, it seems to me it would be something of a waste.

Someone else, with different criteria, might find it invaluable.

 

[BLKRCAT]

These sort of statements really don't strike me as helpful in any way but rather as an example of "childish snide remarks they feel compelled to make".

Forums are international, intergenerational and intercultural in nature...

I said my opinion. I'm not looking for any confrontation, so I'll just walk away.

 

[David Hughes]

Its clear that some people derive pleasure from being frugal and can`t comprehend why others are willing to spend what they see as unnecessary money for often marginal gains.

I haven`t spent a lot on camera gear in over fifty years but I buy what I want.

If I think its worth it to me then it is and I don`t see why anyone else should be concerned.

If they are then its their problem not mine.

I'll second that, even though I only buy what I can afford...

Regards, David