Long ago in a lifetime far away, I discovered photography. I loved it. I mean, I really, really loved it. Not just learning how to make photographs. I loved learning how the camera and lenses made those photographs. I loved learning about the major and minor differences various lenses had. I spent every free moment using equipment and learning about our craft. I spent almost every free dollar buying more equipment.
In a burst of insanity I decided the best thing a gearhead photographer like me could do was to start a photography rental company. I’d have to buy everything because now it would be ‘stock’ and ‘assets’. Brilliant!! Like people say, it’s not work when you’re doing what you love. (I will mention, for those considering a similar path, that when you are working 14 hours weekdays, 8 hours Saturday and Sunday, and losing money, you should not mention how much fun it is to your wife.)
Lensrentals was more successful than I’d ever dreamed it could be. What I found out, though, was that I wasn’t running my personal photography toy store. I was leasing office space, negotiating shipping rates, filling out two gazillion governmental forms, learning how to regain stolen equipment, obtaining lines of credit, hiring people, managing employee benefits, trying to figure out what would rent well, and various other things that did not fit my definition of really fun stuff. Not to mention trying to learn about those business –type things like return-on-investment, depreciation, profitability, market share, corporate tax structure, and a bunch of other terms I still can’t understand. (Maybe unwilling to understand is more accurate, but whatever.)
The bigger the business got, the less time I spent with the equipment I loved and the more time I spent being a businessman. I learned several things in a fairly short time: 1) I’m not a good businessman, 2) I don’t want to become a good businessman, and 3) I want to play with the toys and lots of business responsibility keeps you from playing with the toys. For those of you thinking I should add “I refuse to grow up” to that list, I had figured that out way before Lensrentals started.
During the last several years Drew, Tyler, and Kristin, who actually have business sense and training, have taken over the day-to-day operation of Lensrentals. They not only do it a lot better than I did, they like doing all that stuff I hate to do. Even stranger, they’ve never expressed the slightest interest in taking lenses apart. Go figure. They all came here when the company was still small, leaving secure corporate jobs and taking significant risks (and pay cuts) to do so. They’ve had as much to do with the growth and success of Lensrentals as I have.
So it makes sense, and is with real enthusiasm, that I’ve accepted an offer from the current management team to buy a majority interest in Lensrentals. I will remain owner of a significant portion of the company’s stock, but am now “one of the owners” not “the owner”. I’m totally comfortable that the company I started will continue to be run the way I wanted it run, because the people buying it are the ones who’ve been running it that way for several years.
The best part is they basically told me “you can do whatever you want to do as long as you remain an active part of Lensrentals.” So going forward, I will continue to head our quality assurance, repair, and research efforts. In other words I will spend my days taking stuff apart, figuring out how it works, testing it, repairing it, and writing about it. I’m in gearhead heaven once again.
What will you notice that’s different? Nothing. The only thing changing is that I’ll have more time to do the stuff that leads to most of these blog posts.
I generally don’t write separate reviews on items. I put a ‘take’ up on most items we rent, letting people know what I think about it. That lets me be neutral because it doesn’t make me any difference what people rent as long as they’re happy with it: the return on a $10,000 lens and a $200 lens is the same to us. So if I think a product isn’t good I’ll suggest something else.
Every once in a while, though, I’ll evaluate a piece of equipment as a possible rental item and really be impressed with it. Impressed enough to write something about it even though we don’t even stock it for rent (yet). That happened today. We received a Nanoha Ultra Macro lens for mirrorless cameras that I’d ordered to evaluate as a possible rental item. Let me start by saying my expectations were low. The lens is made from a microscope objective so it has a maximum f/11 aperture. It has some LED lights on the front which I usually think of as something cheap and ineffective. If you Google Nanoha you get 42 pages about a female Anime character. But they had some nice images on their site, and I thought it might, might be worth a look.
I was a bit more impressed when I opened it up: the LED lights are powered by a small self-contained unit with two AA batteries, and the LEDs were really pretty bright. Everything was well built and the instructions were clear. The focusing and aperture rings were smooth and solid. It comes with 5 little holders to put stuff in at just the right distance in front of the lens to focus on it (shooting range is a rather close 8 to 11 millimiters), which I thought was a nice touch.
Nanoha 5X mounted to an NEX 7
You can shoot without the holders (which we did). A nice tripod with a focusing rail is not a must, but it’s near to a must. So it’s a really limited, one-trick pony lens that shoots things at 4x to 5x Macro. Like, say, the Canon MP-E 65 5x Macro lens. Not something most people would use everyday, but really just an absolute blast to play with. How much of a blast? Enough that the entire inspection department got yelled at and told to get back to work after I led them on a scavenger hunt for more little stuff we could take pictures of. All work ceased for an hour while 7 of us were fighting over who got to play with it next.
Since we had such a good time with it, I thought I’d share some of the images Tim made with it. I’ll post a Nanaho Macro shot, followed by a standard shot of the same object. See if you know what the Macro showed before looking at the item in a standard image.
Ribbon cable with chips and fuses
Microfiber lens cloth
Piece of packing foam
Toothbrush
leaf
And a few more images that I didn’t have regular shots of. In two of the three cases because we ate or drank the photographic subject before we could do regular shots. In the third case, well, he (or she) escaped.
First, some freshly ground coffee.
Ground coffee (Brazillian Monte Carmelo for those who are into it as much as we are).
A piece of bread (whole wheat, I believe)
And what would a Macro post be without the obligatory spider? I mean it’s the macro lens equivalent of the pet dog shot we all take with a new portrait lens, right?
Obviously we like this little lens. There was a fight over who got to take it home tonight, and there’s another brewing over who gets it for the weekend. We’ve ordered a couple of copies for rental items, but if you’re a m4/3 or NEX shooter who’s into this kind of thing I’d buy one. At $480 it’s reasonably priced, especially when you consider it comes with a built in light.
Remember, though, the working distance is 8 to 11 MILLIMITERS. You’ll either want to take pictures of things you can put in the little plastic holder, or you’ll want some macro photography aids like a focusing rail and things to hold your subjects in position. But if you’ve always thought “I wish there was a microcsope type macro lens for 4/3 or NEX format, well, now there is.
A lot of Sony users liked seeing some Imatest results for NEX lenses, and some micro 4/3 users asked us to do the same thing. That’s a more complicated undertaking for several reasons. First, there is a much wider selection of native lenses for micro 4/3. Second because there are a lot of different micro 4/3 cameras. But we wanted to tackle the project because, quite honestly, we’d never done any lab testing on m4/3 lenses. We wanted to know, too.
You may have noticed things look a little bit different around here. Welcome!
As always, it is our goal to be the best rental company in the business. As part of that, we want to have the easiest to use and all-around best website of any rental company. So, over the past two years since our last iteration of our site went live, we’ve gathered feedback from all of our customers about what they liked and what they didn’t like about our site. For the past six months, we’ve put a lot of work in redesigning our site from the ground up, to fix the things that people don’t like, and to make the well received features of our site even better.
We got our first “new” Canon 5D Mk III cameras today, the ones with the light leak fixed. You know me, I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to take one apart and see what was different. I had photos from the ‘prefixed’ 5D IIIs from a previous post, so comparison would be easy.
Let me say it here first: I knew this was going to be the fix since the first time I took one apart: Canon has this very cool black tape they used to cover circuit boards (I’m assuming either water resistance or electrical shielding or both) and I figured they’d just slap another piece over (or under, depending on your point of view) the top LCD light. Which is exactly what they did. Yes, I’m making fun, but it’s a perfectly good solution and it works flawlessly.
Top assembly from original shipment of 5DIII
Top assembly from new shipment 5D III
And because I know you have enquiring minds: I did power the camera up with the shell off in a dark room. There is no more leak.
Addendum: for those who notice there is a black plastic piece over the shutter button that was removed in the first photo, but not this one.
Read This Please!!!
Sometimes I forget that other people don’t spend most of their days looking in cameras and lenses. Some people seem to think tape is bad or cheap fix. It’s not. Actually, I can’t think of any SLR camera that doesn’t have a bunch of tape inside. Nor can I remember any high quality zoom lens that doesn’t have tape inside (some of the cheaper consumer grade lenses don’t). This stuff lasts for the life of the camera and then some. Trust me, I’ve taken some water soaked equipment apart where the only thing still working was the tape.
In a previous post, I praised the broad sheets of the same tape used to cover all of the circuit boards: it obviously provides added protection. This solution seems silly, but it’s logical and effective.
For the last 3 years now, I’ve been running my mouth, basically saying something like ‘I think the NEX series is a camera that could give great resolution if there were any decent lenses for it’. When the NEX-7 came out there was now an even better resolving sensor, and for the first time at least a few supposedly good lenses to put in front of it (if you can get them). A lot of people preferred high quality Zeiss or Leica M mount lenses on an adapter, and Sony was smart enough to put nice peaking filters and other manual focus aids in the camera.
But some of us (myself included) like to shoot native-mount lenses, or can’t afford the price of Leica glass to put in front of the camera. The NEX-7 is physically set up in a way that allows us to mount it to our Imatest set up, and we happened to have most of the new lenses in stock one day, so I thought I’d take advantage of the situation to do some resolution testing. (Because I know someone will ask, we can’t test many of the small cameras because mounting to our tripod system blocks the memory card door. It takes 10 to 20 test shots to align the test setup. But if you have to unmount from the tripod mount, you have to start over. So it’s not possible for us to test some camera systems.)
The usual “don’t read this stuff and go insane” cautions apply: this is a test of lens and sensor resolution done at a distance of 10 to 30 feet, depending on focal length. The results might be different at 4 feet or 400 feet. Focus is done manually and bracketed so it’s not a test of a camera’s autofocus ability. The tests use a controlled-lighting test-target with a hardware mounted camera and Imatest software at ISO 400, so photos taken in the dark of night or hand-held for 12 second exposures will give slightly different results. It doesn’t measure autofocus speed, lens size, manual focus feel, bokeh, color rendition or anything like that.
The Tamron is not quite the range of the Canon on the long end, clearly a few mm shorter than Canon (which is clearly a couple of mm short of 70mm). For anyone who doesn’t know, manufacturers “round” up or down to give the numbers they actually put on the zoom. I can’t see where being a bit shorter is going to affect anyone very much.
Autofocus is reasonably fast, although the Canon may be a bit quicker. Nothing dramatic like the Tamron 70-300 (which was horribly slow), though. Again, I can’t see this making a ton of difference to anyone.
Imatest results were clearly in favor of the Tamron, though, at both the long and short ends. I was able to run 3 copies of the Tamron on 2 cameras and results were as consistent as we’d like them to be.
These are MTF 50 results (3 copies of each lens tested, best results of each copy averaged, variation +/- 2.5%) measured in line pairs / Image height on 5D Mk II test cameras from unsharpened raw files. Ctr = the Center Point, Avg = a weighted average at 13 points on the lens (center, 4 mid 1/3, 4 corners, top and bottom) The Tamron is clearly better on the wide end, particularly in the average number across the entire lens. At 70mm the centers are about the same (you couldn’t see that difference, even in reasonably sized prints), but the average across the lens is again better with the Tammie
It’s been a while since I wrote a history article and two or three people seemed to like them. Since I’m one of those two or three people, and it’s my blog, I figured it was about time to do another one. I’ve pretty much covered the development of early cameras and lenses so it’s time to consider the way we recorded those images so other people could see them. No, I’m not talking about Facebook. I’m talking about film. Actually, I’m talking about even before film, mostly, but I really wanted to work that ‘development of film’ bit into the title. Pretty great, isn’t it? OK, maybe not.
The First Images
The very first cameras, of course, were Daguerrotypes and the images they made were positives on silver plates coated with Iodine and developed using fumes from Mercury. You can probably already tell this had a few drawbacks. Positive images can’t be reproduced so one picture was one picture — if you wanted a copy for Aunt Bessie you had to take another picture. Silver is silver, so each picture was rather pricey (up to a month’s pay for a working man). I guess inhaling mercury fumes in the darkroom all day didn’t exactly lead to a lot of healthy old photographers walking around either.
Almost since the day we launched the current version of our website, we’ve been working on its replacement. We are very excited to announce that we will be launching our new website very soon. While our website has been rebuilt from the ground up, you won’t find the changes confusing. We’ve worked hard to build a site that lets you find the gear you need and the information you need, faster. It will be cleaner, simpler, and more organized than ever before. So if you come to our site some day soon and everything looks different, it’s still us, we’ve just gotten a facelift.
New Carrier
In conjunction with our website launch, we are excited to announce we are changing our default shipping carrier to FedEx. Being located in Memphis, we are just across town from the FedEx SuperHub. We hope this will give us even more reliability in our shipments, because we know how critical an on-time arrival is to all of our customers. Another advantage of using FedEx is that we will be able to have our packages picked up at a later time in the evening, which we hope translates into pushing back our order cut-off from 4:00 CT to a later time of day.
We know not everyone prefers FedEx, so we are not doing away with UPS shipping. We’ve designed our new website to allow you to change to UPS shipping with a simple click of the mouse.
To avoid any confusion, we won’t be modifying the shipping methods for any orders that are reserved before our new site rolls out. So simply, if our website, and your order confirmation email says your order is shipping via UPS, then your order will still ship via UPS, even after we make the change to FedEx as our default carrier.
The best worst thing happened today: a nearly new Canon 5D Mk III came back from rental with a loose screw rattling around inside. We had to decide if it went back to Canon or if we should go looking for the screw ourselves. That’s a tough decision. So we thought about it for a while. Until Tyler and Drew went to lunch. Then we decided it had to be handled in-house. Since we had to open it up to find the screw (there really was a loose screw, we swear) it seemed a good idea to take a few pictures along the way. In case we needed documentation to help with the reassembly. Yeah, that’s it. We were being extra careful to make sure we could get it back together. We weren’t doing this just to take a look inside at all.
But not being total idiots, we didn’t completely take it apart like we did with the NEX or D7000 camera. So this is only a strip-tease, not a strip down. But it’s still fun (and educational too!!!). One thing that is readily apparent: I made the comment when the camera first came out that this could well have been named the 6D, it was really different than the 5DII. Nobody else seems to think so, but looking inside confirms what I thought: inside this camera is largely redesigned and it’s one of those where I want to compliment the engineers. This camera is beautiful inside, logically laid out and well built.
