Step Up Adapters For The Nisi Filter System

Original Image Source: Click here.

While viewing the posts from photographer / blogger Mattias Burling in April, I stumbled upon one about two favorite accessories for his Ricoh GR III, a compact camera similar in size and performance to the Fuji X100. The post convinced me (no great effort) to purchase the Light Pix Q20. In addition, I bought the NiSi Filter System which was also available for the Fuji X100 series of cameras. It is basically a filter holder that can hold any two (or one) of the four glass filters supplied in the Pro Package: A 3-stop ND filter, a Graduated ND filter, a polarizer, and the cooling filter for taming incandescent light sources when shooting night scenes. All of this filtration goodness was packed in a convenient protective case.

Mr. Burling's description of the polarizer really got to me. This shot that I made in 2021 was my wake-up call on blue sky reflections on water. In this lucky accident, I managed to grab this photo where the sky's reflection added some visual interest to the image. Subsequently, I started to think about how I might better control reflections when they were part of the final composition. 

I took the filter kit and my X100S out for a test drive but couldn't find any suitable reflections, even though I was standing in front of the koi pond in San Mateo's Central Park. Since it was designed for the X100, it was easily threaded onto the camera once the protective bezel ring was removed. Unfortunately, no suitable photograph was produced.

Adaptations For Other Lenses: Since I now own a fleet of compact, manually focused lenses, it seems logical that I have adapters for all of them. For the moment, I am imagining a lightweight walk-about system consisting of three prime lenses with the filter kit and an appropriate collection of adapters. I chose these three because the their aperture and focusing rings are similarly positioned on the lens body, and the directions of rotation are the same.

• TTartisans 17mm F 1.4: 39mm filter threads
• TTartisans 35mm F 1.4: 40.5mm filter threads
• 7Artisans  55mm F 1.4: 49mm filter threads

Step Up Adapters: In an earlier post I explained that a special adapter, a male male 49mm adapter to be exact, would be needed.  This would convert the 49mm female Nisi filter holder to a conventional 49mm male thread. With that done, I purchased some Step Up Adapters to allow the lenses to mount a larger accessory. For these three lenses I would need both a 39 to 49, and a 40.5 to 49  step up adapter. In addition, I bought a 43mm and a 46mm for use with my other lenses. Now I can potentially use any of the four kit filters with any of my manual primes, since none accepts a filter larger than 49mm. 

By adding these simple adapter rings, I added a lot of filtering potential to my manually focusing lenses. So little space, so much potential. Now all I need is some time to test the system out.

The Rise of the Selfie 0.5

Shucks. After spending so much time trying to minimize the inherent distortion created by wide angle lenses, a whole new genre of selfie photography is on the rise. Dubbed the ".5 Selfie", it derives its name from the .5 magnification option available on smart phones. 

Just this morning I read an article* by Kalley Huang, a technology reporting fellow for the New York Times. She writes:

"...Unlike a traditional selfie, which people can endlessly prepare and pose for, the 0.5 selfie — so named because users tap 0.5x on a smartphone camera to toggle to ultra-wide mode — has become popular because it is far from curated. Since the ultra-wide-angle lens is built into the back cameras of phones, people can’t watch themselves take a 0.5 selfie, creating random images that convey the whimsy of distortion.

“You really don’t know how it’s going to turn out, so you just have to trust the process and hope something good comes out of it,” said Callie Booth, 19, from Rustburg, Va., who added that a good 0.5 selfie was the “antithesis” of a good front-facing one.

In their best 0.5 selfies, Ms. Booth said, she and her friends are blurry and straight-faced. “It’s not the traditional perfect picture,” she said. “It makes it funnier to look back on.”

The problem is that taking a 0.5 selfie is hard. Because of the back camera, angling and physical maneuvering are a must. If selfie-takers want to fit everybody into a frame, they have to stretch their arms as far out and up as possible. If they want to maximize how much a face distorts, they have to perch their phone perpendicular to their forehead and right at their hairline.

On top of those acrobatics, because the phone is flipped around, 0.5 selfie aficionados have to press its volume button to snap the picture, taking care not to mistake it for the power button. Sometimes 0.5 selfies with large groups require using a self timer as well. Nothing is visible until the selfie is taken, which is half the fun..."

This seems that making my fisheye selfie, albeit one that minimizes perspective distortion, is the totally hip thing to do, if "hip" is still a thing.

*Huang, K. (2022, June 24). The Rise of the 0.5 Selfie. The New York Times

The Pergear Lens Goeth (Outside)

We'll I've managed to experiment a tiny bit with the Pergear fisheye lens, and it's been fun. It's actually has a close focusing distance of 0.3 meter, so by using a precision guess, I simply hold the camera about one foot from my eyeball and can be assured of a reasonably sharp image by "toy lens" standards. That fixed F 8.0 aperture gives me quite a bit of leeway, but can cause some problems when trying to establish proper exposure. 

As you can see I mounted the lens on a simple Fuji X-E1 body and mounted a powerful Flashpoint manually controlled speedlight in the hotshoe. To determine a workable exposure solution, I had to access the fixed and variable settings I had to work with.

• Aperture: F 8.0
• Exposure Time: 1/125 second minimum for a clean edge to edge flash exposure.

The variables I could control included:

• ISO Setting (100)
• Flash Output (full)
• Flash Distance (whatever gives the best results)

Background Exposure: With my physical settings of F 8.0 and 1/125 of a second, my only option was to decrease the ISO setting to its lowest setting, which was 100. Based on the "Sunny Sixteen Rule", the sunlit background should be overexposed by one and two thirds of an F-stop, but judging from my selfie, the background exposure appears spot-on.

Foreground Exposure: Since flash automation isn't available with these fully manual lenses, the exposure had to be regulated using flash-to-subject distance to increase or decrease the exposure. I rotated the flash head so that I could bounce the light off of a convenient white wall, and set it to full power. To regulate the exposure, I moved the camera closer or farther from the wall depending on the effect I was trying to achieve. This is more of a trial-and-error approach because the Inverse Square Law doesn't fully apply to bounce flash. Trust me when I say that reducing the output is much easier than increasing it, which is why I started with Full Power and slowly decreased the output by moving the flash/camera farther from my bounce-wall.

The resulting photo shows some of the shortcomings of using this lens for anything serious, but there are some take-aways:

• If the lens is centered on the subject, curvature can be kept to a minimum so long as straight lines are kept away from the far edges of the frame.
• Facial features are subject to some distortion due to the ultra-short (one-foot) working distance.
• Light fall-off from the bounce flash can be significant, as demonstrated by my hand. At this distance, small changes can have a huge impact.
• Cropping to a square format eliminates most of the troublesome edge curvature.
• If I wanted to lighten the background, I could have increased the ISO setting to 200 and decreased the flash output by one-half, or chosen a Fuji body with a 1/250 flash synchronization speed.

In the end, this lens did exactly what I had hoped it would, It's close focusing distance makes it more versatile than the Fuji pancake. I look forward to a long morning walk with my new Muse Of The Day.

Postscript: The underexposure of my right hand was probably due to the small size of the bounce surface when the flash/camera was held so close to the wall. Had I held my glasses closer to my face, the exposure would have been more even.

The Pergear Lens Cometh

Sunday, June 19, 4:04 am:

Package being processed at carrier facility.

San Francisco Ca Distribution C,

I

Photo Credit Peargear

t’s been sixteen days since I placed my order for this flat fisheye lens. Like a spirited long-distance romance, I wondered to myself, “Will the magic still be there? Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” Hard to say at this point. 

With a focal length of 10mm, this will be the widest prime lens I have. I didn't buy it because it was a fisheye, but rather in spite of it. It's all about the size. The lens is so flat that it comes in a shallow plastic box, one that could easily be stowed in almost any pocket. I saw myself carrying this lens as an emergency wide angle when I needed to get more coverage. I actually carry the compact Fuji 27mm lens as a backup lens in case my primary short zoom lens conks out. The Pergear will serve the same purpose, hopefully with a little more "edge."

Photo by Kiev photographer Oleg. Click here.

My Pancake Lens Fever is starting to recede as the first blush fades after using some of my other lenses. Granted, this lens will be more compact than those classified as pancake, or very compact, lenses. This Peargear fisheye will be my first "body cap" lens, one that sits nearly flush to the front face of the camera body. In addition, it has a focusing lever which suggests a minimum focusing distance of 0.3 meters. That caught my attention.

Photo by Iurii Zvonar. Read his post here.

As you can see, this lens is really flat, almost flush to the body. An while it's a fisheye, it produces a full framed APS sized image. I have a 10-17mm Tokina fisheye I used with my APS Nikon DSLRs, and found the image curvature minimal if I was careful to keep straight vertical and horizontal lines a far from the frame edges as possible. Used with care, the curvature at the image edges doesn't shout, but instead  merely stage whispers to the astute viewer. It also occurred to me that if I were to switch to a square format, most of the distortion would be cropped away.

Hopefully the Pergear will arrive early next week. The next images you'll be seeing will be from the new lens. How many of them totally depends on whether it becomes my new muse, or spends the  rest of its life on the Island of Misfit Toys.

Hillsborough Memorial Day Music Festival

At the last Pre- Pandemic Memorial Day Celebration, I made photos of the annual Hillsborough Parade, and I manage to capture a golf cart carrying the honored Veteran Of The Day while on route to the Music Festival. That photo was a nice contrast to the one of some youngsters planting flags at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno two days earlier. Those two photos ran as a pair on the front page, and summed up the spirits of both remembrance and celebration.

Now any photo that includes an army vehicle, a child, and a flag will always be a safe photo to submit. The top photo was one of the first I made at the festival itself, and it combined all of the key components, plus the tiniest hint of a smile on my young subject's face as he accepts the small flag. The shot is overexposed, but otherwise reasonably composed. 

With that shot "in the can", I decided to try to make a photo that emphasized some of the other activities enjoyed by the guests. I went looking for something different, and found that one of the local high schools had a robotics club, and they sent along their creations for a "show and tell".

My young friend can be seen controlling a small robotic rover using the smart pad he's holding. It's a fun shot, but in retrospect, doesn't have any Memorial Day context to help the shot along. I actually thought that this photo would be selected by my editor to run as the Parade Photo. It was ultimately rejected. Incidentally, the small rover is small enough to fit in the palm of an adult's hand.

The robotics club also brought out a rover that could scoop up two balls that were rolled to it, and would then randomly launch them in the direction of the crowd. I put the camera in burst mode, and was able to capture a sequence of shots of the ball (or balls) being caught.

If the photo was printed large, there would be lots of recognizable subjects that could potentially please a lot of families. This photo was the second rejected photo, most likely because it failed to bring the Memorial Day theme forward. Fun yes, relevance no. For the record these two photos were forwarded to the Robotics Club for their use, a good tactic for getting cooperation from those people who could actually do things to  help the process along.

I'm glad the first shot was made, as it gave me a "money shot" that I could always submit if nothing better came along. I still wince a bit at the exposure, but the photo told the Memorial Day story, loud and clear.

Too Old To Play With Toys?

My camera was also red. Photo Source: click here.

New Lens Fever: Playing with my "Muse Of The Minute" Fuji 24mm F 8.0 lens was the most fun I had since playing with my last new lens a few weeks ago. I made 30 exposures in an hour's time, which is a pretty good take for one morning. The Fuji lens gave me the same burst of enthusiasm I had when I took my (then) new Sabre 620 roll film camera to the Fleishhacker Zoo on an elementary school field trip in 1959. When I carried it, I was now a Big Boy, just like my photographer father. The camera was loaded with a twelve-exposure roll of black and white Kodak Verichrome film, so I was careful to pace my picture taking so I wouldn't "run dry" too early in the day. If memory serves me, I was the only kid who brought a camera, which made the event very special.

Finally my roll of film was developed. When I examined the negatives, I recognized one shot: a photo made while looking down into the sea lion enclosure. I imagined the animal would be much larger, but due to the distance, it was too small to be significant. I was as disappointed as any ten-year old had a right to be, but it taught me a valuable lesson about distance and image size. It had never occurred to me that the image might not even be in focus. 

The Relevance: That Sabre's lens had something in common with the Fuji's: It was set so that everything from six feet to infinity would be in focus. Also, the aperture was sufficiently small to insure "sharp" focus within that range. The Sabre had an undocumented exposure time, probably around 1/100 of  second. Verichrome was very forgiving when it came to overexposure. Based on the Sunny Sixteen rule, the brightest possible daylight exposure would be just right for the Sabre's fixed exposure time and aperture setting. On the other hand, the Fuji can take advantage of Aperture Priority exposure automation to precisely determine the proper exposure time. Coupled with the Fuji body's ability to select the ISO sensitivity, you can fine tune the brightness of the final digital image when necessary.

Photo Source: click here.

The fun factor that is factory infused into the Fuji lens started me thinking about similarly sized body cap lenses. While I'm not retiring my Fuji body cap lens any time soon, the idea of these super-compact lenses started me thinking about others that might be available. Fickle is my middle name.

My newest lens is a Pergear 10mm F 8.0 Fisheye lens. At about $80.00, it costs about as much as the Fuji 24mm F 8.0 did when I bought it before the pandemic. It has the same compact form factor as the Fuji lens, but is significantly wider (10mm vs. 24mm) and has a unique lever that allows "focusing" as close as 0.3 meters, or about one foot. It's also an APS sensor fisheye lens, so the images will be full frame, not round, and will render the typical curved straight lines at the edges of the frame. Now this will be my third super-wide manual focused Fuji X-mount lens, so I already have a feel for working at close distances.

Rockstar 10mm F8 II Fisheye, Gizmon Wtulens 17 mm F16 Wide Angle,7artisans 18mm F 6.3 mm UFO Lens, Funleader 18mm F8 Full Frame Pancake Lens

An Embarrassment Of Riches: There are four other body cap lens available from Chinese manufacturers that are similar in size to the Pergear. All can be had for less than $100.00 if you shop around. It seems that EBay is the sales platform of choice, as they represent too small a market for most major retailers to carry in inventory. All of these lenses indicated they would be shipped directly from China. I ordered my lens from Amazon, and the delivery was promised delivery in 5 working days.

Meanwhile...

Fuji 24mm F 8.0 has a minimum practical subject distance of 2 meters.

Minimum Subject Distance: For what it's worth, the Fuji 24mm F 8.0 appears to have a minimum practical subject distance of 2 meters. This image demonstrates that closeup photos aren't an option. Hopefully the focusing lever on the new Pergear, which has a .5 meter minimum distance setting, is accurate.

Cross Stars: On June 7, I caught a bit of sunlight filtering through the clouds, and grabbed a quick shot using the Cross Star option on the Fuji. The sun is just outside of the frame.

More will follow when the Peargear lens arrives.

Tribute To Lomography

I had a chance encounter with a broken Holga camera during my morning walk. This camera, along with the Diana, had something of a cult following owing to their simple meniscus lens design which made the quality of the images produced pleasantly inconsistent. To quote Wikipedia, the Holga “often yields pictures that display vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions.” Even if this Holga was fully functional, I doubt that I would have taken it, seeing how expensive film is, and that I no longer have the processing equipment to develop it, let alone make prints from the negatives. The whole movement of using a "toy" camera to create photographic art was given its own name: Lomography.

Full Description Here.

Fujifilm XM-FL 24mm f/8: I wanted to experiment with this lomographic effect, so I bought this lens from a dealer in Japan some years back. I paid less than $80.00 for it. I recently found one for sale on eBay for $200.00. I bought the silver version because it was $5.00 less than the black version. Also, it appears to be quite rare on this side of the Pacific because Fuji USA never saw fit to import this novelty lens.

Lenses like this are often called Body Cap lenses due to their ultra compact size. In fact, it's easy to miss the tiny lens opening during a casual observation. It  has a fixed aperture setting of F 8.0 and has three different filters setting identified by notches on a rotating filter wheel: Single Notch places a protective filter over the lens to fend off dirt and scratches, Double Notch produces cross stars for some additional sparkle, and Triple Notch provides a soft focus effect.

Today's photos were made with the Single Notch setting, which basically means no special effects. On casual examination, the images are reasonably sharp.

See Trials: My first excursion with the lens was made during a heavily overcast morning, which made the lens' lack of contrast pretty obvious. This image was given the "Smartfix Preset" in post production, which didn't help matters much.

I made no White Balance adjustments to compensate for the cool early morning light. For the most part, these images are Right Out Of Camera (ROOC). I need to pay more attention to my cropping.

The lens has been set so that everything from 1 meter to infinity would be "sorta" in focus.

Since I was working in the dawn's early light, I set my ISO to 3200 to insure a reasonable exposure time. This shot was made at 1/170 of a second.

This was an appropriate photo for a toy lens.

No doubt about the address here.

A car makes a left turn onto Cole Street.

Brewery sign as seen from the parking lot in the Inner Sunset.

Sometimes yellow becomes the new red.

A splendid idea: Spend a day making sidewalk art with chalk.

Here's the date and the time.

Chalk of choice.

 Good advice. Image adjusted in post production.

A discarded robe collecting wayward leaves. Image adjusted in post production.

I enjoyed using this "toy" lens. Let's do it again, but with some strong sunlight. It certainly challenges the notion of "sharp" versus "focused" images.

So far, it seems sharp enough for the web.